Building an ROI to Identify Cost Savings
A really important exercise when looking at Cisco SD-WAN is to build a quantifiable return on investment (ROI). Oftentimes businesses investigating Cisco SD-WAN find that removing certain expensive links and leveraging high-speed commodity Internet links for transport not only lowers the overall cost of the WAN but also adds redundancy and resiliency. Typically, these benefits weren’t realized in the environment prior to moving to Cisco SD-WAN.
There are many companies that provide these ROI models at no cost to the customer and have proven to be an almost mandatory step in the Cisco SD-WAN journey. Some customers have seen enough cost savings and increases in overall bandwidth that the project was completed without any additional costs to the business. Figure 1-13 shows an example of an ROI calculation. Note the staggering details of a 64% cost savings from moving from a dual MPLS link design to a dual commodity Internet link design. At the very least, this proves the exercise is worthwhile to complete prior to getting started with implementation and deployment.
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FIGURE 1.13 Simple ROI Calculation Example
