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Not so long ago, a business planning a move to a certain location would ask how the schools were, or how the highways were, as important factors in deciding whether or not to set up in a certain town. Now, one of the most frequently asked questions is how the internet service is. Multi-tenant internet needs are changing as tenants look for high speeds. Building owners can benefit from high-end connectivity, and for some buildings out there, that includes fixed wireless service.

For anyone who's ever found themselves staring at a monitor, annoyed, while a page or a function tries to load, muttering blackly about system performance issues, you've just discovered first-hand why latency is a problem to be avoided as much as possible. Latency is not just a problem for gamers—though it is a problem for them too—and it's the kind of problem that can hurt a business in several directions.

The virtual private network (VPN) isn't exactly new; variants of this technology have been around for years. Thanks to recent events on the world stage, however, they're coming into particular vogue as a means to add security and protect data privacy. With increasing use of the VPN, some are wondering if these tools are putting more strain on internet connections, and just what kind of internet demands VPNs are incurring as a cost of doing business.

Network security is a topic on everyone's mind these days. Whether it's building tools for customer-facing applications or for internal use, keeping the information that's flowing on that network safe and available for use is top priority. Thankfully, new technologies like cloud-based systems and software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) are helping to keep the whole network protected in the face of new technologies such as the Internet of Things.

The proliferation of new technologies has led to a surge in the demand for bandwidth. For businesses to stay competitive, it's necessary to keep up with this demand. There are a few ways for companies to go about doing this.

Shopping for internet service can be one of the most thankless and exhausting of chores there is. With options limited by geography, such a project often becomes one of shopping for the best among what's actually possible, not what's actually best. Even with this massive issue afoot, there's an even bigger dilemma to come, and this time, the ISPs might be just as hard-hit as their customers. More specifically, it's SD-WAN's steady growth, and its ability to accommodate multiple service providers at once.

One of the biggest new developments in the business landscape of late is real-time communications. This is a technology that's offering up some opportunities for businesses to connect -- both within and without -- and carry on in ways that weren't possible just a few years ago. Even as these new opportunities have emerged, though, so too have new challenges cropped up. 

Your internet connection is one of the most vital business decisions you can make. There's just no two ways about it; from video conferences to emails to research to even a cute cat video break, you need the right kind of internet connection. Getting the most out of internet providers, therefore, becomes crucial to overall operations. But what should you be looking for?

The notion of a better network is different for most everybody, but some common facets emerge. Issues of speed and latency are naturally important, but so too is the issue of cloud adoption rates. These issues all go hand-in-hand to make a better network, and where one improves, the other two are likely to improve as well.

Software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) has fundamentally changed networking technology in a host of ways. It's changed so much, in fact, that some think WAN optimization itself is a dead art, lost forever against the greater efficiency of SD-WAN. That's not strictly true, but not too far off. There are still ways to optimize a WAN, thanks in large part to SD-WAN itself.