We have definitely seen return on our investment. If you look at some of the things we can measure, like an 11 percent reduction in support tickets, that can easily be turned into cost savings. Other things, like improved customer satisfaction, are a bit harder to monetize. But for us, we were convinced that within a year, we'd definitely earn back the investment, both in the A10 equipment, as well as developing the end-to-end solution, including the integration with our administration systems.

We had a customer who was down for six hours and the loss of revenue for him was three times the price he was paying for us per year. The customer just said, "I don't care about paying you because on only one attack I saved money. It's three times better than losing money."

When customers start to get attacked, they need to be protected and we protect them. It's like insurance. When you buy your car, you don't use it. You say, "I pay for nothing." But the day someone crashes your car, and you are paying for insurance, you are happy that you are insured. This solution is exactly the same for customers.

We have definitely seen return on our investment by going with A10. We have been able to scale back our cloud services due to the deployment of the A10s. Our future goal is to actually discontinue use of cloud services for DDoS mitigation.

ROI is a tough one on this solution because it doesn't make us money, but it potentially saves us from losing some customers. I don't know how many customers would have left us if they got DDoS'ed or if our network didn't perform. So ROI on something that doesn't create revenue is a big, black hole. We don't know what would've been. 

We don't charge for this, so there's no revenue associated with it. I'm sure it's saving us some revenue but, day one, it also saved expense. It actually cost us less to put this box in. For the expense that we were paying out to the cloud providers before, it was probably just a couple of months before it broke even with that expense that disappeared.

It was so variable, based on traffic. Some months we would spend $30,000 with that cloud provider and other months we'd spend $5,000. It was all based on the number of attacks that we would get. If we had a bad month of attacks, or even one bad day where somebody attacked us for 20 or 24 hours straight, we could be looking at spending $30,000 or $40,000 with that cloud provider. Today, it's nothing. There's no expense.

Our situation is unique because we're owned by the 14 independent broadband providers in North Dakota. So we may not directly see an ROI because the bandwidth of the DDoS traffic basically gets to us. However, we save that extra bandwidth to our owner companies from downstream services. We're saving our members money with the solution.