 Traditional
software or appliance solutions in the Web Security industry
typically comprise an annual fee for a perpetual user
license together with annual support or database update
costs. Other costs typically include servers to run the
software application and to provide redundancy as well as
updates and backups.
Most companies however omit the largest cost when
calculating the total cost of ownership of any software
application or hardware appliance – IT staff costs. The
time taken to plan, implement, manage and maintain the
application or appliance, deploy, maintain and support the
hardware and deal with unplanned downtime and disaster
recovery can be four times the cost per annum of the initial
license and third party support.
ScanSafe’s Web Security-as-a-Service does not require any
hardware purchase or deployment and can normally be
implemented by a simple rerouting of internet traffic within
30 minutes. ScanSafe takes the burden of the infrastructure,
support, maintenance, updates, training and security of the
services freeing up the IT department's time to focus on
more business critical issues.
However, accurately calculating the total cost of ownership
for organizations can prove difficult. In response, ScanSafe
has developed a Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) methodology
that is based on industry standards, to present an unbiased
view of the lifetime costs of Web Security-as-a-Service and
software/appliance solutions.
As well as including the initial purchase and license costs,
the TCO methodology includes hardware and software support,
policy management and reporting. The table below provides a
breakdown for each category, and a comparison between Web
Security-as-a-Service and a software/appliance solutions:
Internal Resources Table
To calculate the total cost of ownership of ScanSafe
versus your current software or appliance solution please
use our TCO tool.
This tool comes with industry estimates for the various
costs previously discussed already inserted. These, of
course, can be changed to your own calculations or
estimates. It also comes complete with graphs and a
ready-made report that change with your inputs.
Results
ScanSafe has utilized this TCO methodology with multiple
customers across industries. In the majority of cases, IT
departments have performed a detailed cost comparison of the
up-front costs of acquiring and installing a security
solution, but not fully accounted for ongoing costs.
On average, the purchase price of an appliance or
hardware solution for a 2,500 user organization forms just
20% of the TCO over a 3 year period.
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ScanSafe
Total Cost of Ownership
