Outsourced VPN worth it?

September 15, 2005 4:54 PM

Are 'managed' VPN services worth it?

As one of his first acts, the new MIS director at my job wants to replace the the WAN setup we have now with Sprint's managed VPN solution. Currently we have one main and 24 remote sites.. The main site has T-1 connectivity and the remotes sites are running DSL. Each remote site has a WRT54G that acts as the VPN client into the 'home base'. IMHO, it works well..

My question is.. is anyone running a VPN network that is managed by a 3rd party.. and does it seem to work better and have you saved any money?

I tried to go through Sprint's website to get pricing but you need to talk to someone.. which I don't want to do.

posted by cowmix to technology (3 comments total)

Depends on how critical the links are.
If your DSL links go down, you are really out of luck until the telco gets around to fixing it.

If your managed VPN goes down, and you have a negotiated contract, the money clock start ticking and the telco is properly motivated to fix it.

Managed VPN will likely cost a bit more than your current setup, but if you lose money every time they go down, it's worth the overhead.
posted by madajb at 5:45 PM on September 15, 2005

The company I work for (indirectly) uses a couple of managed VPN services; one of them apparently costs about $50 per month per user. Personally, I don't see the value of it over other free solutions (SSH tunnelling anyone?), but then I don't have that kind of cash to front on such a service.

The benefit, if anything, is that it's someone else's problem to maintain (as madajb points out above).
posted by lowlife at 6:07 PM on September 15, 2005

Interesting question. We have a private VPN setup from a great company called Cybera. They provide dedicated circuits that don't touch the internet, but you can of course, get internet access to your sites. The QoS and relative inexpensiveness of the solution was a no-brainer. Contact me from my profile (I'm new here so bear with me) and I can get you in touch with them if you like.
posted by toastchee at 7:05 AM on September 16, 2005