Pricing

Use of the internet in corporate WANs is quickly growing. And for good reason.

Not only are internet services such as DIA and broadband cheaper than MPLS, many of the SaaS applications and cloud services that enterprises have adopted have been optimized to work over local internet connections rather than through central internet breakouts.

In addition, SD-WAN has emerged as a tool that allows WAN managers to incorporate these lower cost internet services into their network without sacrificing performance or security. But not every network site (or enterprise customer) is a good fit for an all internet WAN.

In our next two scenarios, we take an approach that we see many enterprises taking—designating network sites into tiers and assigning different network services to each tier. This allows companies to add in local internet breakouts at most offices, but keep some MPLS at higher priority sites that need service level assurances. 

To provide insight into how a complete SD-WAN overlay can impact total network spend, it’s useful to look at how various cost components apply to a specific network.

Looking at the total cost of the overlay and its impact on a network’s total cost of ownership (TCO) affords the most apples-to-apples comparison between service providers, particularly with a number of pricing models currently in the market.

To do this level of analysis, we created a hypothetical network based on our median WAN Cost Benchmark customer.