Reducing the Cost of Innovation

Enterprises face considerable challenges when they want to expand their networks and increase innovation. Generally, these challenges all relate to complexity and the cost of managing it. The Cisco Service-Oriented Network Architecture (SONA) framework provides enterprises with a standard paradigm for:

• Designing current and next-generation networks
• Linking network services with business applications
• Adding these capabilities without excessive expense

Cisco SONA helps enterprises simplify the addition of new features by:

• Enabling rapid adoption and deployment of new application services
• Coordinating application and network events with business processes
• Enforcing business policies in the application and network infrastructure
• Aligning network resources with applications to meet business objectives
• Reducing application maintenance and upgrade expenses
• Shortening the application development timeline
• Enhancing performance of the implemented applications and services

It does this by taking advantage of three capabilities that contribute to expanded profit margin, direct cost savings, and revenue growth:

• Network service and infrastructure standardization provides consistency and uniformity across the enterprise that strengthens security, simplifies rollout of services and infrastructure, improves business resilience, and streamlines network management and operations
• Ubiquitous network services, including collaboration, compute, storage, mobility, and identity services give workers access to the same network resources irrespective of location.
• Network resource resource virtualization delivers infrastructure from a pool of shared resources, including mobility, security, identity, storage, and application (messaging) networking; improves network resource utilization, efficiency, and agility; and reduces total cost of ownerhip (TCO) and maximizes return on capital investments

Standardized and Consolidated Infrastructure

Standardizing and consolidating IT infrastructure is a proven way to reduce TCO for enterprises. For instance, a study of large enterprises by the Hackett Group showed that companies that have implemented standards for vendors, technologies, networks, applications, and data have 23 percent lower operations costs than other companies. These savings come from elimination of multiple and overlapping overhead, administrative, operations, engineering, and applications development activities, including:

• Systems administration
• Engineering and equipment installation
• Servicecontracts
• Training
• Purchasing
• Inventory
• Planning and systems engineering
• Network management
• Testing and qualification
• Applications interfaces

The use of service-oriented design principles also helps reduce long-term costs of application development and maintenance.

Centralized IT Services

Cisco SONA also keeps costs down by providing network-based IT services to multiple locations, including data centers, branch offices, and home offices. This helps to:

• Reduce TCO for integrated voice, video, and data services across all these locations
• Reduce deployment costs by standardizing approaches to rolling out technology and services in new offices
• Reduce virus attacks by standardizing security services across the enterprise
• Improve employee productivity and mobility because services are uniform across all locations, reducing training time and simplifying service use

The data center operation benefits through:

• Decreased expenses for operations, real estate, and environmental costs derived from data center consolidation
• Improved server load balancing through application-aware intelligence in the network
• Improved resilience through IP-based virtualized services that are no longer site specific
• Improved WAN and application performance

Integrated Hardware

In small branch offices, standard SONA services can be provided with a Cisco Integrated Services Router (ISR), a single device that handles voice, routing, switching, video, security, and wireless. If separate products are used to implement these services, the cost is 5 to 30 percent greater.

Standard, Central Mobility Services

Increasing numbers of employees are working from home. Many IT departments spend up to 2 hours per user helping home users set up and configure complex VPN, intranet, and VoIP systems. Cisco SONA allows employees to access the same consistent set of services from home offices as they would from a campus or branch office. The savings can be significant: a company with 1000 home workers would save $150,000 assuming technician support at $75 per hour. Clearly, as the trend for full-time or part-time work at home accelerates, the ROI for this solution will continue to grow.

By taking a Cisco SONA approach leveraging widespread network services, and virtualization, enterprises can begin to save money on their IT infrastructure. They can also increase revenues thanks to their ability to deploy innovations faster and with less complexity.