Our 2013 IT Impact Survey highlighted the importance of collaboration between business leaders and IT as trends like BYOD, data center consolidation and Cloud applications put more pressure on the network. Why collaborate? The survey highlighted that 34% of application roll outs over the prior 12 months were delayed because of not enough budget. You would think that if applications were a priority IT would be given sufficient budget to make sure the network was ready to handle the extra traffic. Unfortunately, according to Nemertes, most organizations' WAN budgets will remain flat or decline in 2015, meaning that adding bandwidth is often not an option for IT. So how can you do more with less?

One of the easiest things to do before asking for more budget is to look for opportunities for savings and branch sites are a good place to start especially since the more branches you have the greater savings opportunity. A common branch related cost that only appears to go up and rarely appears to come down is the WAN cost. One way to lower your WAN costs is to switch to lower cost transport like business class ethernet or DSL. The high reliability of business class ethernet and dsl and their low cost make them ideal alternatives to MPLS. Enterprises are embracing this lower costs transport and in many cases they are keeping their primary MPLS circuits and augmenting them with either business class ethernet or dsl as a backup. This new hybrid WAN architecture becomes even more compelling when using solutions like Cisco's Intelligent WAN that enables you to use both links simultaneously increasing total available bandwidth. So you've reduced costs and increased bandwidth -a win win.

What other areas are their opportunities for savings? If you want to learn more about how to lower your branch costs, then I encourage you to attend an upcoming webinar on Tuesday 16th December at 10am PST where we will discuss in detail 5 Ways to Lower Your Branch costs. This live 60-minute webcast, the second in our four-part series, will show you five ways you can reduce your branch costs using existing WAN infrastructure, enabling you to reinvest the savings in new branch solutions that will support your business growth. You will see how the Cisco Intelligent WAN (IWAN) solution enables you to easily implement your own hybrid WAN strategy so you can assure peak application performance for your branch users without adding bandwidth.

Register now to join our Cisco experts and bring your questions with you!