Managed VPN
World economies are changing and corporate businesses are focusing their attention more on their core strategic business whilst outsourcing non-core business functions. IT departments are no exception, especially when it comes to the network.
Building and managing your own wide area network (WAN) can be very costly from both a capital and monthly operational expenditure point of view. Many corporate businesses are now moving to towards outsourcing this function to reliable network operators in order to save on the overall costs associated with maintaining their own WANs.
ECN in the past few years has built a carrier grade national IP network with points of presence (POPs) in all the major metropolitan areas. ECN’s Managed VPN Services enable corporate customers to build their own private networks using ECN’s national network. This means the customer gets a WAN without having to spend any capital on infrastructure. Additionally, because this is a managed service, the customer reduces overall operational expenditure because the skills required to maintain the network are outsourced.
Service Description
ECN’s core Multi-Protocol Label Switching (MPLS) network comprises of redundant ATM, Fibre and Metro Ethernet circuits which link all of the POPs together around the country. The core is linked together using best-of- breed Cisco and SUN infrastructure to offer a very reliable network service.
Customer sites are connected to the closest POP on the network be means of a leased circuit and customer premises equipment (CPE) which integrates to the local area network (LAN). This establishes an end-to-end secure and private IP-based network. ECN implements Quality of Service (QoS) over the core network to ensure that voice has great quality and that core business critical applications function smoothly..
ECN is responsible for commissioning, maintaining and monitoring the core network, the leased circuits to customer sites and any deployed CPE devices, which in essence makes up the whole Managed VPN Service.
Managed VPN Services come with a Service Level Agreement (SLA) to give customers peace of mind and to ensure that ECN provides the highest levels of service at all times.
Solution Costs and Terms
Overall costs and associated terms are based on the customer’s business requirements and the VPN solution that is deployed. The overall costs would be made up of the following individual costs:
Once-off Costs
- Initial VPN setup costs with regard to configuring the VPN on the core network
- Installation and configuration costs associated with linking sites to the core network
Monthly Costs
- Infrastructure rental costs on all leased circuits and CPE devices used to connect sites to the core
- VPN Management Fees
- Backhaul charges, if applicable to the solution
- Port fees, if applicable to the solution
Terms
- Subject to a customer agreement and contract term
- Accompanied with an SLA
