ScanSafe Total Cost of Ownership
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.
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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.
