Your own driveway to the cloud? Three tips for a faster workplace!

The shift to working in the cloud has offered companies a lot of flexibility. And for employees too, their idea of "the workplace" has changed considerably. Their own office desk is no longer sacred, but they now alternate between working from home and flexible workstations on location. The convenience of working from home goes without saying: no time lost in traffic jams, the possibility of helping out with household chores and there is always someone available to accept parcels. At the same time, there is a widely supported desire to work in the office on a regular basis. After all, this is still the place where it all happens: the hubs where you hear what your colleagues are doing and where successes are shared over coffee.

Working from home is just like working at the office

With cloud applications like Office 365, it no longer matters where you work. Working from home is just like working at the office. And vice versa. But at the same time, the underlying infrastructure must be able to handle this hybrid working, in order to offer a comparable user experience both at home and at the office. A robust business Internet platform is a requirement. Preferably redundantly configured. Fast fiber connections with high download and upload speeds. Scalable in case more bandwidth is suddenly needed. And things to keep it all secure. With support for failover protocols and measures against DDoS attacks, for example, so that work can keep going 24/7. We already wrote about this in our blog on a solid foundation for hybrid working.

It is obvious that there must be a solid foundation for hybrid working. But is that sufficient? There are, in fact, some other measures that can be taken that relate specifically to working in the cloud. An example could be that business service providers have multiple Office 365 environments open at the same time, which requires a lot of data traffic. Thanks to a redundant business Internet solution, this is now a thing of the past. Direct Peering with Microsoft makes that the delay on the line (latency) is reduced to a minimum.

Does your organization rely strongly on one or more major cloud platforms for your workplace? If so, we recommend you take a look at the following three things:

1. Dedicated access

One risk of working through the public cloud is that access to the Internet is 'contended' and therefore can become 'overbooked'. If many users want to connect at the same time, delays can occur. During an important video call via, for instance, Microsoft Teams or Google Meet, this is of course far from ideal. This is why we deliver Business Internet via dedicated fiber-optic access from the client's location (an office or data center) to the nearest Point of Presence (PoP) on the Eurofiber IP backbone. This dedicated access is 'uncontended' and therefore does not get overbooked. With dedicated access it is just like having your own private driveway to the public Internet highway: a good connection with high capacity and low latency to the public Internet.

2. Public peering

Through public peering, we connect to multiple national Internet Exchanges. We have established these connections in the Netherlands, Belgium and France, as well as through private peering with major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and cloud providers. These connections significantly increase the quality of Internet traffic. After all, they ensure shorter paths and therefore optimal response times to both national destinations and cloud networks.

3. Direct access to the cloud (private peering)

High reliability and minimal latency are basic requirements for effective hybrid working. No matter where users, applications and services are located. With private network connections (private peering), it is possible to improve connectivity, specifically to key cloud platforms. It is possible to establish private network connections - the private peerings - with major cloud parties. We do this with our Business Internet directly from our Eurofiber IP backbone. As a result, companies which work largely in the cloud can opt for direct access to major cloud providers, including Microsoft and Google. As a result, these connections do not go over the public internet and are therefore much faster and more reliable.

Want to know more about having your own driveway to the Internet, direct access to your main cloud provider or faster connections through public peering? Or just benefit by having a much better experience from any workstation, whether at home or in the office? Discover the benefits of our Business Internet solution.