ROI Comparison: SSL VPNs or IPSec for Remote Access

ssl vpn vs ipsec:

Today's distributed workforce demands more secure access, to more resources, from more remote locations. Recent Gartner data suggests that by 2008, SSL VPNs will be the primary access method for more than two-thirds of business employees who work remotely. Now is the time to evaluate the increased ROI and other benefits you could receive by replacing your existing IPSec VPN vs. SSL VPN solution.

This white paper provides a working methodology to help you determine your annual return on investment (ROI) from implementing Aventail SSL VPNs as a replacement solution for your existing IPSec VPN. It also demonstrates this ROI in two real-world scenarios, one deploying Aventail's SSL VPN to mobile employees, the other expanding deployment to your business partners over an extranet.

You can easily determine custom ROI findings based on your own specific needs by using Aventail's complementary SSL VPN ROI Calculator.

ssl vpn vs ipsec return on investment is your annual benefit divided by your investment amount.2 By replacing your IPSec VPN with SSL VPN, you will see bottom-line benefits in the areas of operations (including both help desk support and provisioning), security, productivity, and business partner collaboration.

As detailed in our real-world scenarios below, by upgrading only 1,000 IPSec VPN users to SSL VPN, over three years you could expect operational benefits of $115,200 and productivity benefits of $3,600,000, for total of $3,715,200. By extending SSL VPN to 1,000 of your business partners over an extranet, you could also add additional collaborative benefits of $300,000, resulting in cumulative benefits of $4,015,200.

Finally, the more IPSec VPN users you upgrade to Aventail SSL VPN, the less you spend per user license. By increasing deployed replacement from those 1,000 users to 5,000 users, for instance, you could see cumulative savings of over $200,000. While not covered here, your analysis will also want to consider qualitative benefits, such as increased user satisfaction.

Scenario One: Replacing your IPSec VPN with SSL VPN for mobile employees
There are significant costs in rolling out IPSec to home computers and other devices not directly managed by IT. SSL VPN is dramatically easier and less expensive to roll out to remote users. It's also important to factor in increased productivity. With the SSL VPN, your employees can now gain access from everywhere?such as from home computers, hotel or airport kiosks?so they will have even more access than with the IPSec VPN. In this example, the SSL VPN ensures that your employees are significantly more productive from all environments.

Operational benefits (ipsec vs ssl vpn)
The operational benefits you receive from implementing SSL VPN include reduced costs for help desk and provisioning. These scenarios estimate .3 hours for help desk support, and .5 hours for provisioning for each IPSec user per year, at $60 per hour, for an ongoing cost of $48,000. However, with SSL VPN, these help desk and provisioning times are reduced by 80%, because all that is required is setting up clientless access through a portal. This cost reduction saves $38,400 per year, or $115,200 over three years.

Productivity benefits (ipsec VPN VS. ssl VPN)
By replacing your IPSec VPN with an SSL VPN, you increase productivity by allowing users easier access to more corporate resources from more locations and devices, without interaction with IT. These users could be comprised of executive, sales, technical, consulting, and healthcare professional staff, where even incremental increases in productivity will result in significant benefits. For these scenarios, we conservatively estimate an increased productivity benefit of twelve hours per user at $100/ hour, or $1,200,000 per year, totaling $3,600,000 over three years. Other ancillary may benefits include faster time-to-market, increased responsiveness to customers, enhanced reputation, and reduced attrition of internal staff.

Security benefits (ipsec VS. ssl)
While less quantifiable, you should also consider the added security benefits of an SSL VPN. IPSec either allows access to your network or denies it. The open IPSec tunnel poses a risk because all users can potentially access sensitive resources. Exploited, that vulnerability could result in system downtime, financial or information theft, and possible negative publicity and damage to corporate reputation. SSL VPNs eliminate that vulnerability with granular access controls.