Signpost Deploys Network-as-a-Service to Save $100K in VPN Costs

The Time for Rip-and-Replace Had Arrived

When many technology startups first launched in the 2010s, they bought all of the greatest and latest equipment for building their on-premises network. The problem is that in five, six, or seven years, a lot of equipment begins to approach its end-of-life, and then it all needs to be suddenly replaced at once. 

“We had reached an inflection point in the life of our corporate network. Most of our employees were working from home due to Covid, and our networking equipment was end-of-life,” says Alex Shtilkind, the Head of Corporate IT at Signpost. 

All of the company’s VPN connections were through the NY headquarters. The connection speeds were limited by available bandwidth and latency issues, but upgrading the network seemed like a bit of luxury in a period of uncertainty. “The performance wasn’t great before Covid, but once the whole company was working from home, the VPN became painfully slow. We had initially delayed the investment, but as our business started to grow again, we realized that we could no longer delay the inevitable.”

A Successful Demo in the Nick of Time

Shtilkind reports that an unusual combination of good luck, bad luck, and excellent customer service led Signpost to adopt Perimeter 81. “Just before upgrading our VPN equipment with our previous vendor, I decided to do a sanity check and scope out some cloud-based firewall solutions. Perimeter 81 was the first cloud-based VPN I found online, and I scheduled a convenient evening demo. The demo went very well.”

“The very next day, our VPN suddenly died. Replacing the VPN was transformed from an important action item to a business-critical one, and there was no way our existing vendor could meet our schedule. So it was a no-brainer to go with Perimeter 81. I quickly contacted the company, and within 24 hours, we were fully operational.”

Perimeter 81 Delivers Improved Performance and Dramatic Savings

Signpost initially bought 60 licenses on Perimeter 81’s Enterprise Plan. The plan provided the company with unlimited policies for Firewall as a Service and high-performance 1000 Mbps gateways that let the sales and customer success teams easily access the Signpost SaaS solution and internal software products hosted on Amazon AWS. In addition, the entire solution was backed by Perimeter 81’s 24×7 support at no additional cost.

Many companies think upgrading legacy equipment is the easier, less expensive choice, but appearances can be misleading. “While the cost of the software licenses was about the same as our previous VPN vendor, Perimeter 81 saved us $50-60,000 on hardware. Having dual high-availability VPNs would have required two hardware devices for each office and twice the number of licenses. But with Perimeter 81, we only needed extra gateways at each site. Also, some vendors charge an additional $10,000 for cloud-based monitoring and configuration, which are standard Perimeter 81 features. In other words, Perimeter 81 can save you $100,000 or more.”

From Hybrid Workplace to Fully Remote

Following Signpost’s migration to Perimeter 81’s cloud-based secure networking and Firewall-as-a-Service solution, all remote employees were connected to their corporate networking resources via Perimeter 81 data centers in New York, Dallas, or Chicago. Using a secure edge connection solved latency and bandwidth issues. Each employee had a unique connection rather than sharing a single 100 Mbps VPN connection with dozens of other employees.

Cloud-based networking gave Signpost the business agility to handle just about any challenge. While the company was in the midst of plans to relocate the corporate headquarters from New York to Denver, the Covid Delta wave hit the USA. 

“Our CEO lives in Denver, so it seemed only natural that our headquarters would be there. But it no longer made sense when we realized that our new office would be empty because of another wave of Covid. Perimeter 81 had already given us the flexibility to become hybrid, and we just took it to the next level by becoming 100% remote. As a result, we saved both moving costs and millions of dollars annually in rent. It was a fantastic business decision that would have been impossible with our legacy VPN.”