Sometimes it’s hard to quantify the value of automation. After all, you’re calculating something that didn’t take place. That’s never easy.
It’s also hard – speaking as a vendor – to quantify why an organization should invest in an enterprise-grade platform like ours versus those that are “free” (like Microsoft’s DNS, DHCP, and network management tools) and promise “me too” features. Too often, busy IT executives focus on vague check-box comparisons and not how a solution will actually be used in a real-world environment. But again, the challenge is often “free is good enough” when dealing with services like DNS, DHCP and IP address management (IPAM).
That’s why Infoblox commissioned the Tolly Group, a leading global provider of third-party validation tools, to conduct a total cost of ownership (TCO) evaluation for the Infoblox solution, estimated over three years, in comparison to what Microsoft offers. The key difference is when dealing with real-world scenarios, Microsoft alone doesn’t provide enough visibility and management, so additional steps, processes and workflows are needed to get similar information to do your job.
According to the report, Infoblox Authoritative IPAM provides:
- Accurate provisioning that avoids the user errors found in manual change processes.
- Scalable solutions that provide cost and efficiency benefits across a wide range of customer sizes.
- Significant TCO benefits versus other “free tools.”
For example, Tolly calculates an organization managing 25,000 IP address will save $284,063 in labor costs over three years. This number is a relatively conservative comparison, because it assumes Microsoft users have a trained network engineer at their side who is free at the exact same time. So the amount of time waiting and integrating the data isn’t included.
To find out more, you can view the entire report by clicking here.