This Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) model uses the following assumptions:
•The base system is for a single site with 16 card readers and a requirement for ID badges, wireless locks, and video surveillance.
•The initial capital and installation costs for the IT hardware and software licenses have been included.
•Items common to all systems such as card readers, locks, wiring, cameras and recording devices have not been included.
•We have assumed that the customer purchases the software maintenance that allows them to remain on a supported version of the application and database for the entire five years.
•In the on-premise model, we have assumed a one-time refresh in the computing hardware and operating system.
•We have assumed a data center infrastructure cost of $75 per month for the on-premise solutions. This cost includes rack space for a 1U server along with a 2 Amp power budget and 5 Mbps bandwidth allocation.2
•We have used either the competitors’ hardware/software bundle or a direct quote from a prominent computer hardware provider based on the datasheet specifications to estimate the cost of computing hardware for the on-premise solutions.
•For the on-premise solutions, we have estimated IT management and database administration costs basis at $800 per year. This includes 16 hours of IT services for general administration, monitoring, patch management, system back-ups and database administration at $50 per hour.Many additional factors are often included in a complete TCO analysis, but we found that these vary so widely from organization to organization that they could not be included in a meaningful generic model. Thus, we excluded such considerations as:
•Organizational cost of server downtime, including lost productivity and explicit cost of IT and security staff time to remediate failed systems.
•Business risk cost of system unavailability, including lost revenues, liabilities due to service level agreements, and loss of good will.
•The costs for continuous threat monitoring, intrusion prevention, data security audits, and data privacy protections.1All systems were configured to be “feature equivalent”. For example, any required software options to support video integration, wireless locks and ID badging, were included but not the actual hardware. These figures are derived from actual quotes received from a co-location service in December of 2015. The Gartner IT Key Metrics Data study estimates the total cost of ownership for a physical WINTEL server is $8,260 per year.
We have found that for most classes of applications, the SaaS model for security management platforms is the clear operational and financial winner over on-premise, due primarily to the economies of scale introduced by hosted application services. It also provides significant availability and redundancy advantages over most server-based systems, which translates directly to increased business value . Figure 3 shows the conclusions of our study, which demonstrates that the Brivo Onair SaaS solution can be deployed for 34% less than a non-redundant and 74% less than a redundant on-premise solution. This is without factoring in the business impact and expense of server downtime, which can be considerable for many types of enterprises. Figure 3a shows the advantage of the Brivo SaaS solution against the best performing non-redundant and redundant competitive configuration.Figure 3: Five-yeartotal ownership cost and distribution for Brivo Onairand average results from competing solutions.Figure 3a: Five year TCO comparison of best performing non-redundant and redundant solutions.The following pages will examine the cost comparisons for the various solutions.Brivo OnairâTotal Cost Of Ownership (TCO)© 2018Brivo LLC. All rights reserved.8Benchmark ConfigurationA typical 16 door system was used as the benchmark for the purposes of this article. Figure 4 below depicts the SaaS configuration with cloud-hosted software. Figure 5 is a generic depiction of hardware and software required for the on-premise solution.Figure 4: Sixteen Door SaaS Based Figure 5: Sixteen Door Server Based The two charts below offer a comparison of the fully redundant and fault tolerant Brivo Onair cloud solution against a variety of non-redundant and redundant systems. For the on-premise solutions redundancy is achieved via back-up hardware and data synchronization software. As depicted below, the least expensive non-redundant option (the appliance) is considerably more expensive than the cloud solution, which incorporates redundancy and disaster recovery as an inherent component of the service. When provisions for redundancy are included, there is an enormous cost advantage for the Brivo cloud solution over the appliance and client/server-based configurations.Annual Cost Comparison With Non-Redundant On-Premise Solutions Brivo Onair Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO)
Annual Cost Comparison With Redundant On-Premise Solutions As should be expected, the charts below depict a wide variation in the distribution of costs between the various solutions. The majority of the expenses (54%) for the Brivo cloud solution are associated with the monthly subscriptions. These subscriptions incorporate the software and hardware expenses as well as operational costs for the overall platform. By comparison, 78% of the cost for the on-premise solution is tied up in on-premise and IT infrastructure. The total expenses over five years for the 16 door systems were calculated with the following results:Comparison Of Cost Distribution With Non-Redundant On-Premise Solutions Brivo Onair Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO)
Comparison Of Cost Distribution With Redundant On-Premise summary clearly shows that the SaaS solution is the most cost efficient option. SaaS solutions, owing mainly to the reduced operational and IT expenses, are generally able to provide a much greater variety of functions than server based solutions, which often charge additional fees for high availability and each piece of added functionality.The cost savings of using a SaaS solution for access control are clear. Extending the cost savings of a SaaS solution even further, the above example does not factor in less visible, yet just as important functionality such as automatic upgrades to applications and system software, active data protection measures and unlimited linear scalability. If this additional functionality were costed out, the SaaS solution takes an even greater leap forward in cost savings over the server-based solutions.Brivo Onair Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO)
Added Benefits Of The Brivo Onair SaaS Solution ..In addition to the direct cost advantage of the SaaS solution, there are a number of additional benefits, which have not been quantified in this study. The chart below provides a quick summary of the additional values inherent in the SaaS solution.The data represented thus far have primarily addressed the single-site case with 16 doors. Qualitatively, the SaaS solution fares even better in a multi-site application, primarily due to additional cost penalties that the server-based solution must pay during the initial setup, along with higher ongoing IT expenses due to the complexity of managing the security management applications over a far-flung network. The SaaS solution is particularly beneficial in this environment because, as a web application, it is intrinsically multi-site from the inception.Another major advantage to SaaS solutions over server-based solutions is scalability. Our analysis did not include the often-significant costs to enlarge on-premise solutions in terms of door capacity and administrative clients. Many server-based solutions require fixed client installations for each site, increasing the cost of acquisition and the on-going expense to manage remote client software. As mentioned with the case study example above, initial setup costs along with higher IT expenses during installation prove out the superiority of the SaaS model over server-based options.Brivo Onair Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO)
Conclusions: As we have shown, our study indicates that using a SaaS solution for a security management platform –specifically electronic access control, ID badging and video –provides major, demonstrable cost savings. In addition to ease of installation and ease of use, the market’s increasing awareness of the cost benefits of the cloud are driving the substantial growth in the installation of such systems.These findings have several implications for system integrators and end users. The first is that –other things being equal –both groups would be well advised to calculate the relative cost of any proposed physical security solutions before making a decision on what to offer a customer (in the case of integrators), or what to ultimately buy (in the case of end users). The second implication is that the savings provided by SaaS can also be extended to other security services, such as hosted video, intrusion detection, remote monitoring, and many others. This is an important implication for the vast majority of business owners, as most businesses are not large enough to be able to absorb the cost of dedicated server solutions into a larger IT infrastructure. What this means is that such business owners can expect to enjoy enterprise-grade service levels at lower TCO points than at any time in the history of electronic security.Brivo Onair Total Cost Of Ownership (TCO)