Intellyx BrainBlog by Jason English for Silver Peak
‘Show me the ROI.’ This oft-repeated financial management mantra does little to excite the imagination about the strategic value of any particular IT investment.
Let’s say you could increase the speed of WAN file transports by 20 percent, reduce network outages and backup switching times by 10 minutes a week, or reduce shared application costs across a workforce by $50,000. You can run the numbers to calculate the ROI on such results, but considered in isolation they don’t stack into huge jumps in value.
Before taking a risk on any new IT investment, the business should expect a potential payback of between 5-to-10X, so we really need to seek out potential value wherever it exists to justify the investment into the future.
This means we need to transcend the conventional ROI figures of ‘speeds and feeds’ improvements and hard-dollar cost savings if we want our network investments to deliver real transformational value for an evolving business.
The business network as a money machine
Consider the IT complexity of operating any business with a network that extends beyond its own administrative HQ, into multiple facilities or branches, supporting local offices or remote workers that serve customers. That extended wide area network (WAN), and the application work, data and transactions flowing through it, is the lifeblood of the enterprise.
Virtually any mid-to-large sized company could have such a footprint, with service employees and associates connecting to hundreds of applications across the WAN from multiple store or branch locations, distribution centers and warehouses.
We’ve already placed significant investments at all of the company’s network edges. MPLS switching, some 4G wireless and direct Internet access backup circuits, and an array of hardware and virtual routers accumulate as the company expands to new locations.
The network is like a printing press in a US Mint. Any slowdown or interruption of network service means less money is being made from operations…
Read the entire story on the WAN-Speak Blog here: https://blog.silver-peak.com/the-multiplier-effect-of-transformative-investments-with-sd-wan
