Bigleaf Product – How it Works
Reduce Network Latency
Reliable connectivity for every cloud, SaaS, and internet technology
Built from scratch for today's technology landscape
Bigleaf was designed to help IT leaders like you finally deliver the same reliable user experience for cloud and internet-based technologies that you always have for technologies in your server closet and datacenter.
Our new kind of networking platform was built from the ground up to provide resilient connectivity, instant adaptability, and actionable insight into your circuit performance so you can deliver the reliable internet connectivity your business needs.
Delivers optimized connectivity anywhere your traffic needs to go
For resilient connectivity you can rely on, your traffic needs multiple ways to and from any destination it needs to reach. However, dozens of path segments between the edge of your building and the traffic destination, plus miles of cable, dozens of routers and switches, and hundreds of devices create exponential opportunities for network performance issues to occur that will derail your user experience. These challenges are further magnified when different parties control these paths and how your traffic is routed
To provide the next-level network performance you need all across your LAN, WAN, and the public internet, Bigleaf had to architect a new kind of networking platform that we fully own and operate. It’s built specifically so we can deliver end-to-end visibility and control without being subjected to the compromises in network architecture and management required of other networks. This limitless control of the path allows us to optimize it in ways others can’t, so you can deliver the reliable and predictable performance you need.
On-site equipment
Bigleaf’s edge router connects your business to our backbone network over one to four internet circuits. It installs quickly and transparently to your network on the WAN side of your firewall, allowing you to add Bigleaf to new or existing business locations without any changes to your existing security or network policies.
Your IP addresses in the cloud
As far as your network is concerned, Bigleaf becomes your new ISP. Your underlying internet circuits are abstracted away, so your network IP addresses don’t need to change, regardless of which carrier the traffic is sent over.
This works because before your traffic traverses the path between our gateway clusters and your building, we encapsulate each packet in a tunnel. This encapsulation enables us to provide you with static IP addresses that don’t change.
We use Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology to tunnel your traffic over multiple Internet connections between our gateway clusters and our on-site router in your building. From there, we provide you a single optimized and redundant handoff.
Bigleaf-issued IP blocks
As part of your Bigleaf service, you will be issued a public IP block that can be delivered over any ISP. These IPs stay the same regardless of the path your traffic has to travel, providing Same-IP Address Failover. So, when a circuit encounters issues, we can seamlessly move your traffic between your circuit connections without changing the IP address—meaning applications stay live, even during failover.
Dedicated backbone network
Bigleaf’s Cloud Access Network is a purpose-built IP network that we own and operate. Our carrier-grade routers and dedicated servers connect to multiple upstream transit circuits and diverse dedicated private backbone paths to create full redundancy. All of our points of presence (PoPs) are built into major internet peering centers, or “hubs”, to ensure reliable connectivity.
End-to-end network control
By owning and operating our Cloud Access Network, we have limitless control of your experience. We can directly address issues that come up anywhere on our network and continue to evolve it to serve the growing needs of the market.
Instantly adapts to circuit and technology needs, without policies
Trying to manage all of the random issues that can impact a user’s experience—packet loss, latency, jitter, micro-outages—multiplied by the number of different technologies your business uses can create a significant resource burden on your organization. With policy-based or manually-configured firewalls, or SD-WANs, it could take months to write and test the thousands of lines of policies to try to account for everything that might happen, and an endless continuation of work for updates and re-configurations. And this doesn’t even consider the risks for error you take every time a change is made.
When you plug into Bigleaf’s service, our AI-powered software will automatically detect and classify your traffic, monitor circuit conditions, and make routing and QoS changes in real time to prevent any disruptions before they impact your users, all without the need for any manual policies or configurations.
With circuit monitoring and intelligent load balancing, Bigleaf checks every available circuit 10 times per second for capacity, packet loss, latency, and jitter. Then it sends traffic over the circuit that will provide the best performance. For example, a VoIP call will get sent down the path with the least amount of packet loss, latency, and jitter at that moment in time. On the other hand, a patch download will be sent down the one with the most throughput.
Dynamic QoS uses traffic heuristics to instantly classify your traffic in real-time, to and from the traffic source, into one of six prioritization classes. Bigleaf’s QoS is designed to work out of the box, without any manual configuration and it will auto-detect any future applications that are spun up on your network, even if you’re not aware of them.
Circuit monitoring
Load Balancing
QoS
Provides actionable insight into your network performance
Bigleaf offers visibility over the entire internet path your traffic travels, including the last- and middle-mile. You’ll get an impartial view on what’s happening on every circuit on your network so you’ll know when things change, when things need attention, and what to do next to ensure reliable performance for every cloud application and technology. You’ll also have specific data you can use when troubleshooting issues with your ISPs and application vendors.
Bigleaf delivers visibility into your network performance with:
- A multi-tenant Web Dashboard that provides customers, IT consultants, and Bigleaf partners visibility needed to troubleshoot WAN or Internet issues, evaluate bandwidth/speed adjustments, and understand the impact of network performance on application experience. This data includes statistics, graphs, and events about the performance of Bigleaf services and ISP connections.
- Risk monitoring that goes beyond reporting on individual network events—like your latency spiking every few seconds. It takes the aggregate of your network health and performance metrics to isolate and inform you of critical events that pose a threat to your business and site’s continuity or uptime. Through email notifications and the Bigleaf web dashboard, you will receive contextualized and interpreted patterns or conditions about your network status, an explanation of the issue, and a path to resolution for your risks.
- Built-in troubleshooting tools you can run directly from your Bigleaf web dashboard, providing impartial and trustworthy insight into your last- and middle-mile. Through a simple interface, you can run ping tests, advanced traceroute tests (MTR), and a packet capture function, also known as TCPdump.
- Performance reports that provide a straightforward executive summary of the benefits of Bigleaf’s service and the performance of each ISP circuit at your business location(s). This data provides a clear view for business leaders, CIOs, and IT directors to understand the impact that Bigleaf has on your business uptime and productivity.
Your on-site connection to Bigleaf
Connect each of your locations to the Bigleaf service with on-premises edge routers that arrive pre-configured with your circuit details. The router plugs in easily on the WAN side of your existing firewall, so it can be installed by users who don’t have technical backgrounds. You may connect up to four ISPs to the Bigleaf router to maintain bi-directional control of all traffic on each circuit. After ordering, your router(s) will ship within 2 weeks.
The new public IP block you’ll be issued out of our gateway will look just like an ISP to your existing firewall so you won’t have to make any changes to your firewall settings or security policies. In many cases, you can connect your device to the Bigleaf service in as little as 90 seconds.
When you have routers at multiple locations, you’ll optimize connections to your VPN and data centers.
Bigleaf offers a high-availability option to provide increased redundancy for your deployment. This is an on-site router setup that includes redundant routers and switches to ensure that no single piece of equipment can cause a failure of your Bigleaf service.
