Slow network performance has a major impact on user experience and daily business. Video conferences between directors at international business locations and customers can be interrupted. Also, network slowdown can lead to painfully slow file transfers of large media files such as CAD or video material.

Netflix-like
performance at work?

How can a modern digital organization improve performance for the end-user, so that a “Netflix” experience is also created in the office, the home workplace or perhaps an R&D department?

Investing money in the problem, or …

For the WAN, investing money in more capacity or more expensive network equipment is not always the right answer. Packet loss and latency are the main causes of delay and these two challenges are better addressed in other ways.

These five technology tips will help you to improve network performance and achieve a Netflix experience:

Tip 1: Improve the performance of long-distance data transport

MPLS, reliable but inflexible and expensive. Due to the increase in cloud and mobile users, efficiency decreases significantly due to, among other things, backhauling of internet traffic via a central Internet breakout. Companies alternatively choose an Internet VPN solution, resulting in an increase in latency and packet loss. The public internet often presents problems here, for example because of congestion on international IP peerings between parties.

Utilizing a powerful international backbone, such as that of Cato Networks or Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN, safeguards performance over longer distances as transport between international nodes is covered through an SLA.

Tip 2: Optimize cloud connectivity and ensure flexibility

With the increasing use of cloud services, the importance of fast and reliable network connectivity towards the Cloud is growing. Expensive premium connectivity solutions, such as Azure Express Route or AWS Direct Connect, are a possible solution to optimize cloud connectivity. The idea is simple: a dedicated connection to the public cloud data center overcomes the network challenges related to accessing the Cloud. But is that really true?

The premium connectivity solutions are static and upgrading or failover may be an issue. Also they are not available for all cloud applications. A solution that incorporates cloud optimization into the underlying network infrastructure is preferred, as is the independence of a partner to orchestrate this.

Tip 3: Avoid package loss, deal with it!

Packet loss has a negative impact on the performance of applications such as ERP and collaboration tools. This can be the difference between a productive business conversation or a disjointed meeting with loose ends. There are various underlying causes. A solution that mitigates the impact of packet loss can prevent many performance issues.

Tip 4: Reduce TCP Connection Delays

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connections add more overhead than their User Datagram Protocol (UDP) counterparts as latency increases, for example on international connections. This is leading to scenarios in which TCP connections are significantly slower than necessary. Our solution, OneWAN, helps address this problem by making TCP connections between customers and servers “think” they are closer together and prioritize important traffic. This results in significantly faster data transfer.

Tip 5: Aggregate WAN connections

Blackouts and brownouts, the loss or deterioration of a WAN connection respectively, remain one of the most difficult network performance challenges. The so-called “last mile” link connecting a site can differ greatly in quality all over the world. For example, do you know exactly what the quality of a fiber optic or copper line is in China or South America? The majority of network failures are usually in this ‘last mile’. By actively combining multiple types of internet lines (fiber, copper, 4G / 5G, beam, cable, etc.), you can quickly achieve higher availability with better network performance than MPLS.

Network performance with a Netflix experience?

IPknowledge offers solutions that deliver the reliability of MPLS over a private backbone while providing optimized connectivity for cloud and mobile. The result is a reliable, efficient international connection without sacrificing the flexibility of SD-WAN.

We connect your company to global cloud data centers in minutes. In addition, the converged approach simplifies the security and visibility of the network. This is because a full network security stack is built into the cloud-native infrastructure.