VMware commissioned the study to help potential customers understand the business and technical decisions that other customers made, the costs, and the ensuing return on investment. To create the study, Forrester interviewed five decision-makers with experience using VMware SASE, then aggregated the interviewees’ experiences and combined the results into a single composite organization. This combined company is global, is becoming increasingly cloud-centric, and has $3 billion in revenue. It has 4,200 full-time employees, two data centers, and 100 existing sites, adding three offices each year. It wants to better secure its cloud technologies and move from MPLS to SD-WAN with zero-trust security.
“[VMware SASE] was the least complicated and most straightforward solution we evaluated, for both networking and security. It had the resiliency our network needed and the maturity to enable secure remote access.”
Director of network operations, financial services customer
Relieving pain points, saving costs
The customers interviewed by Forrester were experiencing similar pain points before they invested in VMware SASE, despite being in different industries. Their hub-and-spoke networks had to hairpin site traffic through a central data center, introducing latency. With increased use of cloud apps, that model became increasingly inefficient. MPLS costs were rising by as much as 10% annually, but MPLS could not help them increase bandwidth or access for employees who had to work remotely. Their legacy network and security environments were expensive to manage and hard to expand as the companies grew, outpacing their lean IT teams.
The composite company saw tangible financial and operational benefits from deploying VMware SASE. Forrester calculated that the composite VMware SASE customer enjoyed an ROI of 218% over three years, with a net present value (NPV) of $3.41 million and payback in less than 6 months. (See the full details in the downloadable study.)
Decommissioned $17,300 worth of expenses per site by getting rid of legacy equipment and connections. VMware Dynamic Multipath Optimization™ combines multiple links for performance and QoS substantially equivalent to MPLS. VMware Secure Access™ allowed companies to move away from VPNs and made it easier for remote employees to access corporate apps and data through VMware SASE PoPs.
Reduced costs for each new site by an average of $85,000 and reduced the time to establish a new site to as little as one day, making it easier to grow and hire.
Reduced time to manage network and security by 50%. Single-pane-of-glass, policy-based management increased visibility and the ability to update remotely.
Avoided 32 hours of downtime annually, avoiding the IT burden and multiple tickets of MPLS outages. This improved employee productivity and efficiency not only for IT, but for all employees who could stay connected to their work.
Reduced the risk of a material breach by 10% with better alerting and threat detection from VMware Cloud Web Security™. Companies had more visibility into what network users were doing, and overall protection of the company’s data and brand reputation.
“We’re now establishing new sites in a single day versus a week in our prior environment. That means we’re bringing on 1,000 to 2,000 clinicians a year faster than we could before.”
Chief enterprise architect, healthcare customer
The companies also experienced unquantified benefits from VMware SASE that are absolutely necessary for organizations that are embracing a cloud-centered model and a distributed workforce. These advantages included:
Performance and connectivity with reduced latency
Employee satisfaction, especially for IT, with better uptime and resilience
Compliance through zero trust
Scalability to meet business and staffing needs quickly
Future-proofing, by moving away from a multi-vendor, hardware-dependent approach to a single place to manage network and security through software
Working from home with better security and network access for remote users
“VMware SASE is very easy to use and the single pane of glass means it requires very little ongoing management. It also took very little training for my team to be able to support it.”
IT manager, industrial customer
To get Forrester’s complete insight into the economics of VMware SASE, download the study today.
