This week we had an online discussion with the management a large international company. The challenge; The costs for the network connecting all sites continue as everyone works at home. It makes one wonder, there should be a better way? According to a recent article by Dutch news agency NOS, businesses have been catapulted into the digital age by COVID19, and from now on work is done in a different way.
2020 is already a turning point
In retrospect, one can point to certain turning points in our society in the way we live, cooperate and do business with each other. To identify such turning points when they are actually happening is more difficult, but it is obvious that something serious is happening now in the world. A new business challenge also presents itself: while factories and offices worldwide shut down temporarily or long-term, the IT infrastructure is still paid on the basis of workplaces at those sites. The turning point regarding working from home is that the ‘cold water fear’ has gone. Furthermore, revenue has dropped, so there is a need to cut costs. At the same time, you will also want to be prepared for when the economy picks up again. You may already have suffered consequences in terms of cost reductions for your team, or you are right in the middle of it. If you recognize this situation, read this article to find out where the profits can be found.
MPLS is not from the digital age, the organization needs something different.
The current MPLS network is ideal for communication within the “walls” of the company, but much less suitable for modern ways of collaboration such as with Teams, Zoom or Webex or other cloud business applications. And that is exactly where opportunities lie to save significant costs and to better facilitate employees in their daily work from any workplace.
Where are the high costs?
While you pay for IT infrastructure between offices, factories and the datacenter, your employees work from home and this network capacity is hardly used. In many cases, additional costs are incurred for good connections to those remote workplaces. In addition, while you investigate where IT costs can be saved, you may discover that, unfortunately, multi-year contracts have been agreed with a telecom provider without flexibility. Finally, we would like to point out the often significant invoices you receive monthly from additional suppliers that are needed to keep your IT infrastructure secure.
The solution
CIOs and IT managers currently are facing increasing pressure to cut costs, and better deploy existing resources, depending on the industry they are in. We offer this with our SD-WAN solution OneWAN. It is ‘Network-as-a-Service’ as an alternative to your MPLS network, Security infrastructure and VPN solutions for remote users.
10 ways to save costs
IPknowledge has achieved demonstrable cost savings of up to 50% on existing IT infrastructures. Here are ten areas where cost savings can be made:
- Use cheap consumer broadband lines to replace your MPLS.
- Expensive routers, firewalls, VPN concentrators, WAN accelerators and other complicated devices are no longer needed in your international network, because all connectivity now comes together in the Cloud.
- Network-as-a-Service means that you consume network connectivity in the same way as with cloud-compute and -storage. You only pay on the basis of actual capacity and have a fully scalable solution of 500 to 500,000 employees.
- Save on (over) capacity which is almost never used,
- Easily scale up when business grows or more employees work from the office.
- Because the safe delivery of all office applications to home workers is an integral part of your new WAN, expensive IT security contracts from various suppliers can be said goodbye.
- You are not dependent on long-term contracts without flexibility of telecom providers
- Save on monitoring, surveillance, updates, maintenance and repair because IPknowledge provides a complete all-inclusive solution.
- Your new WAN prevents unexpected damage from malware, ransomware and other hacks. Security is complete, worldwide, and always up-to-date, without ever executing a single ‘patch’! With central visibility and orchestration, you are in control at all times.
- Employees do not waste time because of slow connections.
Save cost by removing complexity!
Simplification is the key, as Gartner wrote. Remove your MPLS, remove firewalls and other static network resources and related maintenance contracts. Remove IT visibility and monitoring tooling and ancillary works, remove dedicated Cloud capacity such as Azure Express Route or AWS Direct Connect, remove VPN concentrators, remove integration costs of a multitude of network security components and point solutions.
Does your MPLS contract expire soon?
Then now is the time to calculate your cost savings together. Contact us here to investigate together -without obligation- how to spend your money smarter. Even when your employees return to the office, this is a cost-effective alternative to facilitate digital work nationally or internationally in any situation, good or bad.
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