Cisco DNA ROI Calculator

We now live in a “disrupt or be disrupted” world where no industry is immune.

From caring for the sick or the homesick to manufacturing the next spinners or the next genius, your business and the network that drives your business will need to change.

We all know why. An explosive growth of network use is underway and with that growth, an ever-expanding threat – and that is no hype. But as networks grow so too does the complexity and the cost to operate grow.

The Operations Challenge
Most enterprise networks are complex, error-prone, hard to customize and change, and slow to provision and maintain. Why? Because today we live in a CLI-driven world where over 90% of all IT activities are manual. This often means your IT staff has little time to do more than simply keeping the lights on.

What if you could give time back to IT? What if you could close the IT-skills gap created by cloud, virtualization and IoT? What if you could provide network access in minutes for any user or device to any application? What if you could trouble-shoot problems in half the time?

Simplify and Automate
Do more in less time. With Cisco DNA Center and Software-Defined Access (SD-Access), Catalyst 9000 switches can operate as part of one fabric, for faster, more secure networking. No more constant cutting, pasting and tweaking switch by switch. Set up your network once, apply network-wide using cross-domain policy enforcement and automation. Automate your mundane day-to-day provisioning and maintenance operations. You can reduce errors, improve network uptime, and dramatically reduce your operational costs. Now you and your IT staff can focus on training, creativity and design.

Return on Investment
There is always an expense to transitioning to the latest technology, so we know that the real measure of success of SD-Access is when your operational savings exceeds the expense of time and investment. Return on investment, or ROI, is a very popular metric because it can used as a gauge of an investment’s profitability. ROI can help guide you as you make decisions about the future. While ROI can be very easy to calculate and to interpret for a wide variety of investments, it can be a little more complex when applied to investments in technology. We have created the Cisco DNA ROI Calculator to help you understand the value of automation and the tremendous time and cost savings that you could reap by taking the next step in the evolution in networking.

The Mechanics of ROI
For any ROI calculation, the basic formula is a comparison of the net gain to the cost (ROI = net gain/cost). So if you are deploying a new switching architecture that costs $200,000 but saves you $300,000 over the first 3 years in labor costs, the ROI is 50% à (300,000-200,000)/200,000.

But of course the devil is in the details. The Cisco DNA ROI Calculator takes into account a large variety of factors to develop a cost model. It includes the time to provision and maintain the network, from network hardware and user and IoT devices, to designing and setting QoS, and setting access and security policies. To simplify the analysis, the DNA ROI Calculator models eight examples to provide you with a broad view of differing sizes of deployments in differing environments. While the underlying model has over a hundred inputs, we have exposed a few of the most important inputs to allow you to customize the analysis to better match your network. The result, an in-depth report based on the unique aspects of your network showcasing how much your business can save.

Sometimes you may not be able to show a positive ROI depending on the size or complexity of your network. But we have found that on average the design, provisioning and maintenance time for IT staff can be reduced by over 67% with a payback period of under three years, and with downtime reduced by over 80%. And that’s pretty significant.

Our Catalyst 9000 switches constantly adapt to help you solve new challenges. Their integrated security helps you to address ever-changing threats. They simplify and automate the management of your evolving mobility, Internet-of-Things (IoT), and multi-cloud networks. They could even save you money.

See how an intent-based network built on Cisco DNA and the Catalyst 9000 switches can take your network beyond the hype.