Network transformation comes at a cost and it is an item that appears on CIO’s budgets every three or four years as they strive to reduce their operating costs associated with fully managed LAN and WAN network provision.
The price (and quality) of transformation varies of course, but for a well-run, ‘no drama’ WAN transformation we estimate the cost to range from £3,000 to £11,000 per site.
The lower end may be for a retail outlet with a simple requirement to migrate from legacy E1 or xDSL to Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) or similar. The higher end would be for an enterprise office or data centre with greater requirements including resilience and diversity.
The following items would typically be covered in these costs:
- Project management and governance
- Network design and architecture
- One-off costs associated with provision of new circuits
- Network engineering setting up configuration and making changes
- Service design, service readiness and transition
- Third party costs such as way-leaves and coordination of change at their sites
- Monitoring and management tooling
- Out of hours working.
Other factors that may influence the cost of network transformation include termination clauses of existing contracts, business tolerance to downtime, and desire to scale bandwidth to support business growth.
Common Complaints
But what are you transforming to?
We hear from CIOs all the time how unhappy they are with their network provider’s ‘fully’ managed service, and our experience suggests that problems aren’t resolved with a change of network provider, which can just take on a different flavour with the following typical complaints persisting:
- Over-priced/poor value
- Poor and unresponsive service and account management
- Slow to react and lack of agility to requests for change
- Complicated contracts tied up with penalties and performance clauses
- Limited or no validation of billing and providers not calling out where circuits are no longer in use
- Utilisation of expensive monitoring and management solutions with costs passed to customer
- Wedded to expensive vendors
- Lack of desire to change to emerging better value solutions like SD-WAN.
Transform to Something Different
At IT Naturally we will transform your WAN and LAN services using our experienced transformation team then provide a flexible, good-value, honest and uncomplicated fully managed network service using circuits from our carefully selected and trusted network suppliers combined with our expert network and service management.
Using our optimised processes, highly skilled and focused team and high levels of automation we have seen network operating costs reduced by up to 50% for our customers.
