How much does a SD-WAN implementation save you? A practical example from our own office
Fusion Broadband South Africa
Our proprietary Antares & Illuminate portal transforms SD-WAN site deployment, management & support.
Fusion Broadband South Africa has an office in Northriding. The office park has fibre from Bitco which is the only provider. We added an excellent fixed wireless solution from Comsol which is able to match the fibre and aggregate the bandwidth. As an additional measure we use a fixed wireless product from Vodacom that is a last resort failover. This is seamlessly managed by a SD-WAN product. The SD-WAN allows you to use any and multiple ISPs. You can also determine you Internet breakout point.
Without SD-WAN the office would have been for 4 hours and 35 minutes during the past week. The office experienced 43 outages. These outages vary from a few seconds to a couple of hours.
During the past month the downtime prevented by the SD-WAN was 13 hours and 42 minutes. A total of 246 outages occurred. The reason why the SD-WAN is able to save all this downtime is that unlike a lollipop router, it is a hub and spoke design that has the instantaneous ability to mitigate an outage. No matter how clever your scripts are on a common garden fresh router, you will never be able to come close.
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So what? If you business is totally reliant on the cloud and the Internet connection fails, you need to close your doors. That means you are unable to service customers, which means the incoming revenue is choked. The salary bill for these outages is wasted. If your salary bill was R91 per hour then the cost of the SD-WAN would have been paid for which excludes the soft cost of keeping your reputation intact. When viewed in this manner SD-WAN is cheap as chips.
Let us assume there are 8 people in your company and they are billing clients at R1500 per hour. This isn't an unreasonable scenario. These outages would have cost you R165000. SD-WAN will save your business and not implementing it does not make commercial sense. Many takeaway meals are more than R91 per person, so cost isn't a consideration when it comes to skimping on your broadband connectivity. Heck, the budget for the fancy pants coffee machine in the office kitchen is higher.
At our homes we also use SD-WAN. At one home we an Openserve link with two ISPs namely, Cool Ideas and Afrihost. The later is a on a prepaid fibre data account in fail-over mod. The SD-WAN there saved 10 hours and 51 minutes over a total of 29 outages.
Director of Companies | Advisor | Entrepreneur | Shareholder
2 年Businesses have been lead to believe that fusing a fibre and business wireless connections is complex but in reality it is easy with Fusion automated SD-WAN which is zero touch requiring no human intervention.
Chief Commercial Officer (CCO)
2 年A great article and what I’d label as a very conservative estimate!! Fusion Broadband South Africa It’s quite easy to quantify the hard costs, but we must also always consider our Customer and Employee experience!! My daughter had a voucher to spend at a retailer targeting teens and when we tried to redeem it, they said they couldn’t find it on their system….. I got a bit grumpy with them and it turned out they had a link failure and their backup was a mobile service that had run out of airtime!!! (Hope it wasn’t a Vodacom lost sale….) Very short sighted decision by the business and their IT manager / CTO for a couple of hundred rand a month ??♂?