Why Should I Move My Organization to Gigabit Service?


If your bandwidth needs are pushing the limits of your current service, and if you—like most organizations—see waves of increased bandwidth demands on the horizon, it could be time to consider gigabit service. Service providers across the country are rolling out multi-gigabit services to meet this growing business need.

The RightScale 2019 State of the Cloud Report from Flexera reports that among its 786 IT professionals surveyed, public cloud adoption is at 91 percent and private cloud adoption is at 72 percent, with 69 percent of respondents using at least one public and one private cloud.

The advantages of going to the cloud are many, but you must be able to always and immediately access those cloud resources for your business to operate. Your internet link has to be foolproof.

But as we all know, all internet services suffer intermittent problems and sometimes fail completely. The pain that an internet slow-down—or worse, an outage—can cause for an organization relying on the cloud can be very costly.

The move to multi-gigabit services makes it possible to keep up with the constantly growing demand from cloud applications, remote workers, mobile, BYOD, video, UCaaS, e-Learning—the list goes on. Demand for bandwidth resources is intense. WAN budgets, however, are flattening and in some cases declining, with no corresponding tolerance for outages. Like everything else in life, there’s a need for connectivity to be bigger, better, faster and stronger, all while costing less.

That’s why a move to gigabit services may make sense. With the nationwide expansion of fiber optic services, high-speed access is more affordable and efficient than ever before.

Some Considerations

Cost

Until recently, the cost to lease gigabits of bandwidth had been out of reach of all but the largest organizations. Advancements in technology are bringing affordable access to more businesses at the same time that applications are moving to the cloud, thus making the decision to migrate to higher speeds practical for a range of organizations.

Quality of Service and Outage Avoidance

A consideration regardless of the speed of service deployed is quality of service and redundancy. Organizations can best utilize high-speed, affordable bandwidth and improve its quality by leveraging more than one provider link. Preferably those links come into a building from different directions and don’t run on the same backbone fiber. This way, if one link degrades or fails, the other link bears the additional load so business operations continue unimpeded. This is especially critical in the case of extended outages from a fiber optic cable being cut, as happens across the country for a variety of reasons. The vulnerability of fiber optic cables is well documented, and it is up to network administrators to prepare their networks against inevitable outages.

An intelligent SD-WAN device monitors all links and selects the best path on a millisecond basis. In addition to providing automatic failover in the event of an outage, it maximizes the best available service all the time, load balances and prioritize traffic. It can also add extra security. Leveraging an investment in multi-gigabit service with an intelligent SD-WAN controller is an IT best practice.

Get a Quote

Looking to hedge your bets and improve overall quality of service? Ask Ecessa about making the move to Gigabit service.