Once up and running, we see value from it right away. The impact is immediate. The biggest problem I have now is that something that gets forgotten is how bad things were before the implementation. C-level people tend to forget that.

The biggest part of ROI is the improvement to the operations. Our clients with CDO are having fewer issues. Things are just not going down. People are more productive. I don't know if any of the organizations that I've been with have done a study, but from an IT ticketing standpoint, tickets are down to one-tenth of what they were. People are able to bring in new projects and think about new things. From a staff being overtaxed due to remediation, because so-and-so clicked on an email or there was an issue with some type of a compromise, now it's eerily quiet.

I don't measure ROI, but for me, the return of investment would be the amount of time saved, versus doing it manually. The upgrades of the ASAs would be where the biggest time savings are for us.

Once we had CDO up and running, after first implementing it, it took about six months to see value from the solution.

The ROI comes from the fact that, before CDO we had different teams in charge of different companies. They were responsible for updates, checking for vulnerabilities, making sure the devices follow protocols and have all the policies necessary in those companies. For the most part, the companies share the same policies. We try to leave everything standard. We had teams in charge of that, but now we have one person who is in charge of it. That is saving a lot of money for our company and time for the clients. CDO has made our security team more productive. We're saving all that time. Again, it's just one person who can now take care of that.

The main return on investment is time. If a firewall goes down, the site goes down. We need to get the backup config for it and get it applied as soon as possible. If we don't have a decent enough backup config, we have to put a config on there that is supposed to be okay, but there can still be issues. Now, we get the site back up with the config they were running when it went offline. Some of these sites are our major mills. They do process control, handle large machines, they make paper and boxes, etc. Getting them back up the way there were saves time.

I'm sure somebody could put a monetary value on it. And the first time that happened, the savings probably exceeded what CDO costs. That would be a definite return on investment. I don't have a way to quantify, but I definitely believe it is worth the price we're paying for it, just in that respect alone.

The more Cisco keeps adding to CDO, the more capabilities, the better it's going to be.

The benefit that I really like, which has made my job easier, is the update portion. It saves time.

The biggest thing that we were looking at it for was the ability to push out a mass firewall change, if we needed it to. We just never got to a point of testing that feature and setting that up.

For one customer I have in mind, I think it could save up them eight to ten hours per week.

We do experience a return on investment in time savings, security and device management. It would be hard to quantify.