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how were they spending that 50k previously? a bespoke saas thing or self hosting?

Likely they are mixing timelines (one time cost or yearly cost with AWS’s monthly charges).

Cisco anyconnect VPN capable appliances (that can do 10GBE) are very expensive, and licenses are per user- so if an appliance needed an upgrade it is conceivable that it could cost $50k in the first year.

I agree. You're probably looking at:

• The cost of two hardware gateways (the depreciation cost, that is)

• The cost of 24x7xNBD (next business day) hardware support

• The cost of the user/session licenses (which might be depreciated also)

• The cost of software support/upgrades

This. It wasn’t Cisco. Far crappier vendor! I don’t want to name names but they had a few high profile incidents that suggested their software was written by idiots. There was a panic move by the security people to switch away and still tick the box but they didn’t really understand the billing and architectural models of AWS.

Pricing was around 75k for 1000 seats for a year. They thought it was going to be $25k a year but it turned out to be that a month.

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