The ROI of SCION compared to MPLS, SD-WAN, and VPNs

Since I joined Anapaya – the SCION Company, there are a few questions that I hear again and again in conversations with business leaders.

• How does MPLS cost compare to SCION? 

• How does SD-WAN cost compare to SCION?
  

• And maybe the most important question: what is the real ROI of SCION?

These are very fair questions. Because if we speak about changing enterprise connectivity, we are not speaking of a small technical detail. We are speaking about business continuity, cybersecurity, compliance, cost, AND the ability to stay in control of critical communication. 

The good news is that we now have a clear answer.

In the white paper “Cost savings and business benefits of SCION,” we analyzed selected use cases including Enterprise WAN and secure remote access. The result is very clear: SCION delivers cost benefits across all analyzed scenarios. Depending on the setup, organizations can save up to CHF 1.3M per year compared to MPLS, SD-WAN, and VPN-based solutions.

So, in short, rethinking your WAN is not only a technical upgrade. It is also a financial and strategic decision.

But before we go into the numbers, let’s start with the question I often hear first; if there are already so many solutions on the market, why do we need a new one?  

4 pain points of today’s cybersecurity landscape

For many years, enterprise connectivity has been seen as mostly an IT topic. It had to work, it had to be stable, and naturally it had to be secure.

But today, the situation is different. What we see in the market is that the Internet has become the foundation for almost everything; remote work, cloud services, partner ecosystems, digital customer platforms, supply chains, IoT devices – you name it.

At the same time, the risks around this infrastructure continue to grow – quickly and fiercely.

While there are multiple factors at play when it comes to the cybersecurity landscape, there are four main challenges that every business leader needs to consider.

1. First, we are past the era of the "internal network.” Modern organizations no longer operate inside a closed perimeter, they work with partners, suppliers, customers, multi-cloud platforms, remote employees and third-party providers. The network has become much more open, distributed – and also much more complex.
   
   
2. Second, AI is changing the attack landscape. And not in a good way. Attacks are becoming stronger, faster, cheaper and more automated. AI can help scan attackers scan networks, identify exposed systems and exploit weaknesses much more quickly than before.
   
   
3. Third, zero-day attacks are becoming an even bigger problem. These are among the most dangerous attacks and are now increasing in both frequency and speed, driven in large part by AI. And what we see again and again is that even well-known security products can become vulnerable. Firewalls, VPNs, gateways and other perimeter tools are important, of course. We still need them. But if exposed to the public Internet, they also become easy targets this day in age.
   
   
4. And fourth, critical infrastructure is now directly connected to geopolitical risk. Cyber resilience is no longer only an IT concern. For banks, healthcare providers, public institutions, and other critical sectors, it is also about national security, economic stability and trust.

This is the real challenge: today’s Internet was never built for the level of trust, control and resilience that critical sectors now need.

Of course, this does not mean we should just stop using the Internet all together. That is not realistic. The Internet as we know it is flexible, open and extremely powerful. But if your critical communication infrastructure is exposed to the public Internet, then you need to ask yourself a simple question: how much exposure is really necessary?

Because if we can reduce the attack surface, then we should do it.

That is exactly where SCION comes in. SCION gives organizations a way to keep flexibility while reducing exposure to the public Internet. In a nutshell, it enables a secure, resilient and controllable network architecture where critical services are much less visible and much less reachable from the outside. Read more about this in detail here: “SCION Secure Access Groups vs MPLS, SD-WAN, and VPNs.”

Now, let’s go deeper into what this means from a cost and ROI perspective.

Replacing MPLS or leased lines: save up to CHF 1.3M per year with SCION

MPLS and leased lines are still widely used in enterprise WANs, and there is a good reason for that. They provide isolation from the public Internet, which is very important for critical communication. 

But this isolation comes with a price. Traditional MPLS and point-to-point leased lines architectures can be expensive, rigid and difficult to scale. Costs increase as the network grows. Provisioning can take time. And in many cases, organizations become highly dependent on one provider, which can create concentration risk. So the question is not just “does MPLS work?” but rather “is it still the best way to achieve secure and resilient connectivity?”

In the white paper, we see an enterprise network with a headquarters and six remote locations. In a setup using point-to-point leased lines (P2P) with backup MPLS, annual costs are around CHF 1.5 million. Even a simpler MPLS-only setup with redundancy runs around CHF 740,000 per year.

What’s interesting is that this is still a relatively basic network set up. If the organization grows, opens more locations, adds more bandwidth, or expands internationally, then costs and complexity grow as well. On top of that, the organization would now be dependent on a single point of failure, significantly downgrading cyber resilience.  

The analysis shows that:  

• Replacing leased lines with SCION can reduce connectivity costs by 91%, saving approximately CHF 1.3M per year. 

• Replacing MPLS with SCION can cut costs by over 80%, saving roughly CHF 600,000 per year.  
    
  

That is impressive from a financial point of view. But for me, the more important point is that SCION does not only reduce cost. It also improves the foundational infrastructure. 

With SCION, organizations can benefit from a multi-provider architecture. This helps reduce single-vendor dependency and concentration risk. It also gives organizations routing-level visibility and control over their full technology stack at the network layer. This is increasingly important for compliance, data sovereignty, and operational resilience. 

For industries where data routing and governance are strategic topics, this control is not just a technical benefit. It is a business benefit. And in many cases, it is priceless.

Replacing SD-WAN: 228% ROI and <4 months payback with SCION

Now let’s look at SD-WAN.  

SD-WAN became popular because it brought flexibility and cost efficiency compared to traditional MPLS architectures. And that was a very strong argument. 

But there is also another side to the story. 

Most SD-WAN solutions run over the public Internet. This means that organizations often need to add more security layers on top: firewalls, secure web gateways, SASE components, monitoring tools and other protection mechanisms. 

Again, these tools make sense. We need them. But they also add cost, complexity and operational effort. And, as we have seen recently, security products themselves can become the targets, especially when they are exposed to the public Internet. 

Major security vendors including Palo Alto, Cisco, and Ivanti have all suffered significant zero-day breaches in recent years. AI is accelerating this trend, compressing the window from vulnerability discovery to active exploitation from months to days. In quite the plot twist, the tools meant to protect the network have become a primary attack vector.

The SD-WAN benefits of cost efficiency and flexibility now come with a security tradeoff that is increasingly difficult to ignore. 

When calculating SD-WAN ROI, the full security stack cost must be part of the equation, and that is bound to change the picture significantly. 

This is where the calculation becomes more complex. If we compare SD-WAN and SCION, we should not only compare connectivity costs. We also need to consider the full security stack, the operational burden, vendor lock-in, and the risk that comes from Internet exposure.

In the white paper, there was also an analysis of a large enterprise ecosystem with a headquarters, service center, data center, and multiple branches running SD-WAN with redundancy. This setup costs around CHF 965,000 per year, before considering hidden costs such as vendor lock-in, scaling licenses, and ongoing security additions. 

The white paper shows that: 

• Replacing SD-WAN with SCION reduces total connectivity costs by 32.6%, delivering 228% ROI with payback in under four months.  
  
  

But once again, the financial ROI is only part of the story.

The bigger change is architectural. SCION can remove the public Internet from the threat model for critical communication. This reduces attack surface by up to 99.99% and gives the organization more control over how traffic flows.

And what we know, what we’ve seen time and time again, is that control creates resilience. If you can see and steer your traffic, you can react better, design better and reduce dependency on fragile or exposed paths.

This is where SCION becomes so much more than a connectivity solution. It becomes a resilience layer.

Adding SCION for remote access: 71.6% ROI in 9 months

Organizations running business-critical public services – eBanking platforms, insurance applications, e-commerce systems – face a distinct challenge. These services must be accessible to external users, devices, and systems, but that accessibility makes them high-value targets. Unlike MPLS or SD-WAN replacement scenarios, SCION here works alongside the existing security stack, reducing the attack surface of perimeter-based solutions.

Traditional perimeter-based defenses (VPNs, firewalls) operate on the public Internet and are therefore subject to the same zero-day risks and AI-accelerated attack patterns as any other Internet-exposed system. The tools designed to protect these services have increasingly become the primary attack vector.

The white paper looks at the impact of deploying Anapaya GATE at a Swiss banking institution with 800 employees in addition to the existing cybersecurity stack. The results include the following facts:

• ROI of 71.6% with a payback period of nine months
• Reduced hardware costs through decreased system load
• Lower personnel and external services costs as the security team’s operational burden decreases
• Reduced incident response resource requirements

The hidden value is equally significant. Industry benchmarks place the average cost of a data breach at USD 4.4M and the average cost of network downtime at USD 2M per hour. A 99% attack surface reduction materially reduces the probability of incurring those costs. 

VPNs, MPLS, and SD-WAN vs SCION: Cost comparison

Across all scenarios analyzed in the white paper, SCION delivers positive ROI with short payback periods.  

Table: Cost and ROI scenarios with SCION

All figures are drawn from the white paper and include both annual operating costs and initial investment costs for SCION deployments.

What this means for your organization

The question is no longer only whether SCION is cost-competitive with MPLS and SD-WAN or VPN-based architectures. The analysis shows that SCION is cheaper across every scenario we looked into, with fast payback and strong ROI.

But the more important question is this: what is your current architecture actually costing your business?

Not only in annual connectivity spend, but also in hidden security costs, operational complexity, concentration risk, compliance pressure and exposure to downtime, attacks or data breaches (that average USD 4.4M when they happen). 

That is why cybersecurity ROI cannot be calculated only as a line item. It also needs to include avoided incidents, reduced response effort, improved resilience and the value of a smaller attack surface. 

SCION is not an incremental improvement. It is a structural change in how an organization connects to the Internet and manages the risk that comes with it.

For Enterprise WANs – with remote access, partner connectivity and critical services –SCION becomes a real strategic advantage. 

And the best thing is, this does not require a complete reinvention of everything from day one. In many cases, it starts with a simple upgrade together with your provider.

So if you can reduce public Internet exposure, improve control, increase resilience and save money at the same time, then this is no longer a discussion for tomorrow. It is a discussion for today.

Get the cost analysis for your specific case

Every network environment is different. That is why our team uses a dedicated cost calculator to run a personalized cost analysis. 

With this tool, we can show what adding Anapaya GATE or deploying SCION would cost in your specific environment, how quickly you'd see a return, and what the expected ROI and payback period would look like. 

To get started, we typically need three things: 

• Number of users
  

• Current annual cybersecurity costs
  

• Cost breakdown across personnel and external services, hardware, and software  

With that, we can show you exactly what Anapaya GATE would cost, how much you'd save, and where the strongest business case in your ecosystem is.