Q2 2021 Product & Service Updates

It's a year since we all got sent to work from home.
From the hSo product and services platform perspective, we must admit that Covid played a significant role in fast tracking many transformation projects, so here is a whistle-stop tour of some of what we were up to in the past 12 months…
 
As Covid hit us and we all started working from home, our network saw a significant increase in traffic levels both internally and to the Internet. To stay ahead of the game, our network team worked overtime to massively upgrade our core network. We rolled out an active DWDM platform on our west London ring and we added the massively scalable MX10k series routers from Juniper to a number of core sites for additional capacity. (BTW these are the industry leader in actual power consumption efficiency!!). In addition, we increased our external capacity by upgrading a number of private and public peering connections, including both LINX and LONAP.
 
In terms of services to customers, to support increased Internet usage, we added 10, 40 and 100G Internet service availability to additional sites across the network.
 
Our Cloud services portfolio had to be expanded and upgraded. We rolled out MS Teams Direct Routing to allow customers (in fact, we were the first customer of it) to link, or replace, their existing telephone systems with Microsoft Teams, including porting incoming DDIs. We also had to increase capacity on our Cloud Backup service – Veeam Cloud Connect as more people got rid of local backup systems.

Pictured: hSo Veeam Cloud Connect Solution
 
To improve our support capabilities, we have invested in and rolled out a new tiered Elastic Stack platform. Dealing with the increased amount of traffic logs and configuration changes, Elasticsearch gives us the platform to better deal with information security and automation in our DevOps using features such as APM (Application Platform Monitoring).
 
We are committed to continuing the automation of our processes and to the transparency and reporting capabilities of our services through our Customer Portal. To this end access to run network commands on CPE devices has already been added with further features, such as access to logs, in the pipeline.
 
Finally, we continued to recruit during Covid and have grown our software development and sales teams.