You’re Paying for the Same Network Twice

About this episode

The episode discusses hidden network costs and the implications of double egress in cloud infrastructure.

You’re paying for your network in ways you don’t see. Most teams don’t catch it until the bill shows up. Traffic leaves the cloud for inspection, then gets sent back in. Every step adds cost. Most teams never map the full path, so it goes unnoticed. Max Clark sits down with Doug Houghton from Alkira to break down how double egress happens, why costs can spike by 300x, and how these decisions quietly lock you into inefficient infrastructure. If you’re responsible for network or cloud spend, this is the kind of problem you only catch after it’s already costing you. What We Get Into 00:34 — Why SD-WAN Didn’t Solve the Problem (And What Broke Instead) 06:31 — MPLS at $3,500/Month — The Problem That Started It All 14:30 — SD-WAN Promised Simplicity — It Delivered Complexity 18:08 — When “SD-WAN” Meant Anything (And Nothing) 20:31 — $54 Billion Lost in a Day — The Real Multi-Cloud Risk 25:35 — 500 Sites, One Mistake: Asking the Wrong Question 34:33 — Eight Figures in Cloud Spend — And No VPN 43:07 — SD-WAN Didn’t Fix It — It Doubled the Problem 53:00 — Why Most SASE Architectures Break in the Real World 01:05:58 — 1,400 Stores, One Bad Design: The Michaels Case 01:13:05 — Legacy vs…

People in this episode

Host: Max Clark

Guest: Doug Houghton

Topics covered

• network costs
• cloud infrastructure
• double egress
• SD-WAN
• multi-cloud risk
• network efficiency

Keywords

• network spend
• cloud egress pricing
• SD-WAN complexity
• MPLS costs
• multi-cloud networking

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Alkira

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