Case Study: How a National-Security R&D Center Cut $1M in WAN Costs While Adding Resiliency

The situation

A federally funded R&D center that develops technology for national-security sponsors came to MALA with a network that had grown site by site for over a decade. Its core hub depended on a single carrier over a single physical path, so one fiber cut or carrier outage could cut the main campus off from its field, test and partner sites. Legacy MPLS circuits and routers were nearing end of support, data-intensive research was outgrowing circuit sizes set years earlier, and auto-renewing contracts, legacy rates and services no longer in use had piled up on the bill.

Where MALA fits: see our network and connectivity advisory and our work in research and development.

What the assessment found

MALA started with a full inventory of every circuit, contract and invoice, and mapped the physical path behind each connection. That review surfaced two problems that turned out to be one. The network was more fragile than the contracts implied, and the organization was paying for it at rates, sizes and terms the market no longer justified, including unused and duplicate services still being billed every month.

It's a pattern MALA sees often: resiliency and cost look like a trade-off until someone with no stake in the outcome reviews both together.

What changed

Working from requirements set with the network, security and research computing teams, MALA designed a vendor-neutral target architecture and ran a competitive multi-carrier sourcing process. The new WAN runs an application-aware SD-WAN overlay across two independent carriers with verified, physically diverse paths at core sites. Remote sites gained a secondary path with automatic failover, traffic is encrypted end to end, and segmentation maps to the client's existing security zones.

Migration ran in phased waves, with parallel running and rollback plans, timed around research program schedules so no test campaign or sponsor deliverable was disrupted. Legacy circuits were then decommissioned and billing stops verified.

The result: approximately $1 million in savings over three years, all from lower monthly recurring charges, roughly $27,800 less per month on average, with no reliance on one-time credits. The client now has no single-carrier dependency at its core sites, more bandwidth, per-application visibility and co-terminous contracts with stronger SLAs and no auto-renewals.

Why this result generalizes

Most WANs are never reviewed end to end after they're built. Circuits get added, contracts auto-renew, and the gap between what an organization pays and what the market offers grows every year, while single points of failure stay hidden behind a reliable track record. An independent audit of what's installed and billed is usually what turns resiliency from a budget request into a project that pays for itself.

Start with the audit, not the RFP

MALA runs this review at zero upfront cost, because compensation comes from participating providers only if a client chooses to move forward. Talk to an advisor about what a WAN and telecom review would find in your environment, read the full case study, or see SD-WAN vs. SASE: which one your organization actually needs.

About the author: Eric Anderson is the Founder and President of MALA Technology Advisors. After two decades working with organizations ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, he saw the same pattern repeat: significant technology decisions being made without independent, vendor-neutral expertise at the table. He founded MALA to close that gap, and now leads its advisory practice across cybersecurity, cloud, AI infrastructure, and technology procurement.