The best Internet experience is not only achieved by purchasing a “business-grade” connection from an ISP. There is a common myth that business-grade Internet is achieved using an SLA that has a response metric.
This metric typically only delivers acknowledgement and assistance via a prioritized call centre. The repair, recover, and restore times are not typically provided.
Another method used to distinguish business-grade is to have claw backs on availability. However, in the terms and conditions this is often capped to a maximum value. That limitation in value is disproportionately lower than the loss associated with down time.
All the attributes used above do not provide any unique distinguishing features that make a service business-grade, but it is often how a business is coerced into procuring a connectivity service such as MPLS. Fusion Broadband believes that in determining a business-grade solution the business Internet experience is of greater importance than just the underlying connection.
SD-WAN has several attributes and the above infographic represents the most relevant ones. Fusion Broadband supplies SD-WAN that dramatically changes the experience a business has of the Internet by enhancing their current connection as well as supplementing it to improve reliability.
This is achieved by enabling the business to have visibility and transparency of the connectivity solution. The business is provided access to a platform where they can resolve and identify problems in the same manner as engineers from Fusion Broadband. No cloak and daggers, and no requirement to be on the phone to a call centre agent for hours on end or participate in an unstable conferencing session.
The magic sauce that drives this new experience is automation, which is hosted in the rock-solid environment of the IBM cloud. This is backed up by solid security. (Fusion won the 2020 IBM Beacon award for Outstanding Infrastructure Services Solution.)
Many of the current legacy solutions use dated versions of derivatives of the UNIX operating system. These systems are supplemented by coding libraries of a similar vintage.
Besides being responsible as the cause for multiple vulnerabilities that are often detected and exploited by advanced persistent threat players, especially in the associated firewall and VPN concentrator systems, they are detrimental to the experience a business has of connectivity. No one wants to wake up to a critical security vulnerability in their core networking equipment!
The modern Linux kernel
Geoff Huston, APNIC’s Chief Scientist, explained that the underlying networking kit is not the utopia as has often been marketed. This is supplemented by the work of David Taht who demonstrates how the modern Linux kernel has contributed to improving the experience of people using the Internet.
The modern Linux kernel has constantly improved and the latest has been pushed into GA by Linus Torvalds and his team of software plumbers. This is the base kernel used by Fusion in its award-winning secure SD-WAN solution which uniquely differentiates it from legacy solutions. Some of the legacy solutions still have libraries being used from 2002!
The Fusion solution has been designed to improve the experience a business has of the Internet by providing an overlay and interoperating with legacy solutions. It is an open eco-system that you can deploy with immediate benefits with a quick installation. This is totally different to closed ecosystems which by their proprietary nature force a specific vendor’s solution.
As an example, the Fusion solution can integrate into its service chain most 3rd party products which include firewalls from most of the major market players. The optimal deployment scenario is to use a combination of broadband from a fibre provider and a fixed wireless provider.
This combination dramatically improves reliability and combined with Fusion’s instantaneous failover and aggregation ability the business can be assured of availability figures for a location as high as 100%. Most businesses have acquired a plethora of hardware from different networking vendors be they routers, switches, wireless access points, microwave radios, and optical kit. Fusion plays nicely with them all.
We know what works
Fusion has been around for nearly a decade and during that time we have come to understand what works. The Fusion architecture, a high-level representation shown above, is based on using a hub and spoke topology to the edge.
This works to facilitate last-mile mitigations. A solution based on single-ended lollipop methods will never be able to achieve the same results. In the solution’s core the hubs maintain aggregation using a self-managed mesh. This allows Fusion to deliver a private wide area network (PWAN) solution to a business as an alternative to MPLS using more cost-effective broadband links.
The solution is as easy and as clicking on a slider in a portal to enable a site to be up and running in a couple of seconds. The kicker about the Fusion solution is that it is inherently secure as it uses the operating system that has built the cloud, namely Linux. It incorporates threat intelligence mitigates which include the inherent ability to drop 6 million unique IP address from bad players.
These packets never get to your business systems to even attempt a compromise. Additionally, Fusion uses the exact same chipsets and protocols that secure modern banking systems. It is that good.
Remote working
Fusion is one of the most relevant solutions for facilitating remote working, especially during the current pandemic. It is not a system designed to be expensive with hundreds of features and attributes in a monolithic networking stack.
It does the job based on a minimal set of attributes that automatically work, which is the philosophy of the late Steve Jobs of Apple! An alternative system that has attributes not used is still costed to the business based on those attributes. This is the fundamental issue with many of the current enterprise solutions which do not allow them to scale to smaller businesses.
Fusion’s commitment to delivering the best business Internet experience is what made start-up of the year Workshop 17 choose Fusion’s secure SD-WAN. The Fusion solution delivers business requirements and benefits which includes securing the environment. The Workshop 17 solution is hosted by the leading South African ISP Cool Ideas. The ISP was ranked the best during the current COVID-19 pandemic and provides excellent service and last-mile fibre solutions.
Climb onboard, like Workshop 17 and experience a business-grade solution with full rebate for the first 60 days of service. This offer is limited to the first 20 customers using the rebate code of MyBroadband. Please email sales@fusionbroadband.co.za.
