All-in-one boxes eliminate branch office hidden costs

The UTM / services gateway space is piquing the interest of IT decision-makers

Branch Office Best Practices Newsletter By Robin Gareiss, Network World, 02/14/06

Juniper last week jumped into to the intriguing market for all-in-one branch-office products with its Secure Services Gateway (SSG) 500 Series appliance. This product, like others in this space, combines security and routing functions in a single physical device—eliminating the need to install and manage multiple devices.

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Robin Gareiss is executive vice president and senior founding partner for Nemertes Research, where she develops and manages research projects and cost models, conducts strategic seminars, and advises key clients. She currently serves as CFO, as well. Contact her.

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The space, defined as unified threat management (UTM) or services gateway and preceded by multi-function routers, is piquing the interest of IT decision-makers. (For more details, click here)

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Why? Some key organizational and IT trends are forcing staffs to pay close attention to the branch office infrastructure. Roughly nine out of 10 employees works away from headquarters, and applications, servers, and networking gear is being consolidated in the data centers.

For a greenfield site, all-in-one devices make perfect sense. The cost, typically between $5,000 and $12,000, depending on size, is lower than the collective cost of buying each of the functions (routing, firewall, anti-virus, intrusion prevention, Web filtering) in a separate box.

But even for existing sites, in which multiple boxes already reside, the all-in-one boxes may make financial sense.

Where are the key costs and savings?

* Initial capital purchase. If it’s a greenfield site, the initial capital costs of an all-in-one box will be less than buying each function separately. With an existing site, the initial capital cost will be an extra cost, unless it’s time to replace some of the gear.

* Installation. We’ve found that implementing an all-in-one box typically takes six hours (including programming and testing). Stand-alone products typically take four hours each. So once you hit two boxes, you’ve typically gotten payback on the installation time. With an existing site, that six hours is an extra cost. At $40 an hour, the installation would cost $240, compared to $160 for a stand-alone product. Multiply that stand-alone product by six (the average number of networking/security devices at the branch), and the total climbs to $960 per location.

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