The words “network upgrade” are enough to make any CFO’s skin crawl. These large-scale projects are a necessary evil when it comes to technology, and the price tag is going to be substantial no matter which way you cut it.
After providing technology services to various small businesses, law firms, and nonprofits around the globe last two decades, you can imagine how we’ve performed so far. And it’s not like we can avoid these kinds of projects ourselves—especially with datacenters full of network hardware and jumbled up cables going here and there. But that it’s our job to put that in order and make best out of them.
When it comes time to trade in the old for the new, what can you expect to invest? This is an important question to ask not only for the sake of your budget, but to make sure that you’re being fairly treated by any outsourced provider.
To help answer this question, we’ll work through the elements that most directly impact the cost of your project, along with sample pricing for different upgrade scenarios.
What affects the scope of a network upgrade project?
The four main factors that affect the scope (and price) of your project are:
- The size of your network. You probably could have guessed this part. The more pieces you need to replace, the more your investment is going to increase. How many servers do you have? Firewalls?Switches?
- How much you’re trying to replace. Do you take on a full-scale upgrade every 3-4 years, or do you have a more piece-meal replacement cycle where you’re replacing a portion of your network on a rolling, yearly basis? Are you only replacing your servers? What about your network infrastructure, like switches, firewalls, and wireless?
- How long it’s been since your last upgrade. If it’s been a very long time since your last upgrade, you may find yourself faced with some incompatibility issues. For example, if you haven’t upgraded your Exchange server in the past 6 years, you will find that Exchange is only fully compatible with certain versions of Office (translation: you’re going to have to upgrade your Office licensing as well).
- The state of your environment. Are you growing and in need of additional storage or processing capacity? Do you need to add any capabilities to your network such as remote access or a new line-of-business application? Or are you in the position to down-size?
- What you’re upgrading to. Are you simply swapping out old physical hardware for new physical hardware, or are you opting to migrate your existing network into a virtual (cloud) environment?
To put it very simply, the more complex your upgrade project, the more you’ll have to invest.
What is the average price range for network upgrade projects?
As with many large-scale projects, there’s a sizeable range when it comes to the investment you’re going to make. To explore average pricing, we can walk you through the process with our experts in the field. However, everything depends on your need assessment. Once that part is done, rest is very easy to put in black and white. There are things you need to add while the project has started however. Those variables need to be added at later stage.
Clearly, the variables in play can have drastic effects on the total cost of your network upgrade project. It is not at all outside of the realm of possibility and it does happen in most of the projects. The fact of the matter is that every upgrade project is different, and you’ll need to get a customized SoW to determine your specific investment. Hopefully, though, this will give you a better sense of where you may end up.
More than anything, it’s critical that you secure a trusted resource to guide your upgrade from inception all the way to follow-up support; where the very foundation of your organization is concerned, you can’t afford to make a misstep.