ORLANDO, FL, MARCH 15, 2022 —Bigleaf Networks says it is seeing an uptick in health sector use of SD-WAN, spurred in large measure by continued struggles with Internet reliability as providers move more of their operations to the cloud. Healthcare companies are one of the top industries Bigleaf serves.

According to Bigleaf, businesses experience, on average, 31 hours per year of Internet downtime and 573 hours of unusable uptime a year. It is this unusable uptime — when a circuit isn’t completely down, but its performance is so bad that cloud and internet technologies are basically unusable — that is particularly challenging for healthcare providers because basic existing failover options don’t solve for these “brown outs” or poor performance.

“Many of our customers have locations in areas where their internet connection and ISP options are limited, so they struggle with the internet performance,” said Mike McCullough, vice president of customer success at Bigleaf. “This becomes a critical concern when the public Internet has basically become the core of their network and is the lifeline for the cloud apps and technologies they have heavily invested in and rely on. Also, many of our customers are IT lean where they don’t have onsite IT resources for each of these locations and need to focus their technology initiatives on other ways to improve their business operations and patient care.”

The adoption rate of SaaS-based applications has grown dramatically with the shift to the cloud. The average business uses 185 SaaS apps today. And the healthcare industry has seen SaaS grow 20% every year for the last 10 years. With healthcare clinics and offices modernizing their technology stacks to better serve their patients, internet uptime is critical to keep day-to-day operations running smoothly and without fail. This is especially important when critical health matters are on the line.

SD-WAN has become a cost-effective way for providers to optimize their internet connection to ensure their critical cloud-based apps work when they need them to. Bigleaf’s intelligent SD-WAN auto-detects a customer’s application needs and adapts in real-time to internet performance and connectivity issues before they impact a customer’s business — without technical complexity or need for technical staff. The company designed the Bigleaf SD-WAN to sit outside of the firewall, making Bigleaf a popular choice for companies that handle protected health information (PHI) and must comply with HIPAA regulations. 

To help companies across the healthcare industry deliver the internet performance and reliability their businesses now need, Bigleaf Networks designed an Internet Maturity Model which guides companies through the tradeoff between cost, reliability, and speed—allowing each business to find the balance that’s right for them. The guide is downloadable at https://resources.bigleaf.net/