Calculating the cost of SD-WAN can be complicated, especially when it comes to CAPEX vs OPEX and ambiguous ROIs. With so many vendors promising massive savings over MPLS internet connections, SD-WAN is currently been touted as one of the hottest categories in networking today. Take a closer look at the costs, considerations, potential savings and leverage the SD-WAN calculator to estimate your organisations SD-WAN cost.
The many factors that go into a holistic WAN cost include the connectivity cost of bandwidth, security, firewalls, URL filtering, anti-malware, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), WAN optimization, and VPN.
When you start to stack up all these costs and make a comparison with MPLS the all-in cost of SD-WAN might surprise you. Many vendors are touting cost savings upward of 70, 80, even 90%. However we must be careful in interpreting this marketing, as it often fails to account for things like last-mile monitoring to ensure you get the bandwidth you pay for.
Some organisations might find they are paying for a 500Mbps internet connection and only getting 5Mbps for example. Link redundancy, as MPLS typically has a strict availability guarantee, it is recommended at least 2 internet links are provided from two seperate internet service providers to ensure availability in-line with that provided by former MPLS services.
As a general rule of thumb, it's possible to enable HQ and multiple branch locations for the same price as a single MPLS line with SD-WAN and comprehensive cloud based security. So yes, you can save costs, but it's just not a cost based argument, although the savings certainly do make a case for the CFO to review.
The most popular locations in Asia Pacific requiring SD-WAN connections include: Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Vietnam. ICG has local points of presence in each of these locations as well as across the United States and Europe to enable the best level of service for your SD-WAN.
Get an estimate of your SD-WAN costs, using the ICG SD-WAN cost calculator based on the SASE SD-WAN as a service model.
Face to face or over Zoom, we are here to help you.