Episode 51: Understanding Internet Dependency with Roger Sands, CEO at Wyebot

Illuminate Higher Education talks a lot about educational technologies like learning management systems, student information systems, and customer relationship management systems. What goes without saying is that all of these products are connected by a fabric of networks and WiFi connections. Roger Sands, CEO of Wyebot, uses his company to keep WiFi systems up and running, automatically detecting WiFi issues, and providing AI-driven solutions.

On campuses, students live, breathe, and sleep WiFi. Sometimes it feels like we can live without water for six hours or food for 24 hours, but can't live without the internet for 15 minutes. How exactly did we become so dependent on internet connectivity?

It all comes down to having access to information. With the power of the internet, we're able to quickly get answers to the majority of questions we have about a near infinite amount of subjects, whether it's within higher education, studying, homework, or entertainment like Netflix or gaming. What has fundamentally changed is how we used to get access to information. 

If you go back in time, most of the students would go to libraries to do research, get together with their friends, do some gaming, and so on. But now the information is right at our fingertips. The power of having access to information at your fingertips at any time and any place when you need it has really driven the whole connection to the internet. 

The Need for Non-stop Access to Information

In many situations, a lot of customers Wyebot deals with will send in more complaints about network and WiFi connectivity than they will about plumbing and electricity — even when the electricity is out. They'll still be talking about the network and not being able to get access to information.

When Facebook was temporarily down, a lot of people from the United States did not realize that the businesses in India or China came to a screeching halt because they can't sell their goods, because they use WhatsApp for taking orders. They use Facebook to announce their menus and communicate updates to their customers, while most people in the United States primarily use Facebook for entertainment and communication purposes. Regardless, the internet is no longer a nice-to-have, it’s a must-have. This doesn't just apply to first world countries like the United States, but more in third world countries or developing nations as well. Consumers are relying more and more on technology, but the network infrastructure is still lacking in significant ways.

Expanding the spectrum of internet dependency from higher education and e-learning, you also have the healthcare industry with patient monitoring systems, the retail industry with Point of Sale systems, and the manufacturing industry with robots in warehouses. We're dependent on internet connectivity to have business continuity.

That internet connectivity has expanded into the cloud. When we talk about cloud services, we're talking about business critical applications. Data storage information is out in the cloud, and when it's in the cloud, it can be anywhere. Most people don't know where the cloud is physically located —it could be on the east coast of the United States, the west coast, or out of the country, so this dependency on cloud computing is fundamental. It allows for scaling, performance, and reliability, but at the same time, it opens up this paradigm to have major outages. When you have centralized cloud architecture supporting numerous applications and services, if there is any hiccup in the process, it has a ripple effect into third world countries and around the globe.

Dealing With Extra Demand

Since the pandemic, everyone has had an even higher reliance on internet connectivity, whether that's staying connected with family, doing distance learning, or streaming multimedia services. This significant shift has put extra demand on all of the networks and bandwidth. And a lot of universities and campuses aren't necessarily prepared for this extra demand. The networks weren't designed to support what has happened during the pandemic.

Even the smallest WiFi issue can become a massive headache for some of the most critical processes, especially if you lack visibility into the problem and can't tackle it quickly. When you consider the Facebook outage, we don't know exactly what happened, obviously. By the time they identified what the issue was, it took a whopping six hours to resolve it. For a large company, that's worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Now, when you consider a university that's much smaller in size, their network team might only be two people, or sometimes even one person. Not having visibility to the most important aspect of their campus, which is their networks, is one of their biggest problems.

Countless Components Working Around the Clock

Within networking, there are a lot of components that make up reliable end-to-end communication, from end user devices such as smartphones, tablets, laptops, gaming devices, all the way to those cloud services and the data that's out in the cloud. Now, in between, there are a lot of steps, and any one of those steps malfunctioning, whether it's unintentional or malicious like security attacks, can stop all productivity in a particular location. The way most IT staff support networks is still a highly manual operation. Since most IT departments aren't a huge staff, relying solely on manual activity is no longer sustainable. That's where Wyebot comes in.

Wyebot is focused on providing a solution that not only works around the clock, but uses AI technology to help IT organizations proactively identify performance issues that are happening around the network with DHCP server, DNS server, and the WiFi environment. The goal is finding those issues before they disrupt the end user and business continuity. Roger has put his company's focus on higher education because he recognizes higher education as being the foundation to our entire ecosystem. That's where everybody is learning and moving on to start companies, where the innovation happens. 

With Wyebot, IT departments can receive the aid they need while also saving them time. This technology can improve the learning experience for teachers and students in a dramatic way.

Connect with Roger Sands: https://www.linkedin.com/in/roger-sands-4142673/

Learn more about Wyebot and set up a free trial system at https://wyebot.com/

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This episode is brought to you by N2N’s Illuminate App, The iPaaS for Higher Education.

About N2N Services

Founded in 2010, N2N is committed to serving educational institutions and helping them figure out how to serve their students, faculty, and staff using the most innovative technologies and solutions available in the marketplace. Over the last decade, N2N has served over 300 academic institutions and enabled their student success journeys.

N2N Services Inc. is a leader in enterprise application integration and strategic advisory services for higher education, At N2N, we are committed to providing the highest quality solutions and collaboratively building student-centric solutions.

Learn more at https://illuminateapp.com/web/higher-education/

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