For most organizations, network access is a tax—a steady drain on employees, infrastructure, and overhead that compounds over time. Most teams learn to live with it, treating complexity as a cost of doing business.
But what does "good enough" connectivity actually cost your bottom line?
To quantify that cost, we commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact™ (TEI) study. Modeling a composite enterprise of 3,000 employees, the results confirm what we’ve long suspected: when infrastructure is simplified, the benefits scale across the entire organization.
The big picture: 213% ROI
The study found that Tailscale delivered a 213% ROI with a payback in under six months. The driver wasn’t incremental improvement—it was a shift away from layered, perimeter-based networking toward direct, identity-based connectivity. By removing entire categories of infrastructure, Tailscale also eliminates the operational complexity that typically builds around them.
The biggest gains came from removing infrastructure–not optimizing it
The largest quantified benefit in the study was by simplifying the network itself.
Forrester found $1.2 million in present value from retiring legacy VPNs, remote access tools, and the infrastructure that builds up around them. That includes load balancers, NAT layers, and the operational overhead required to keep everything working together.
This is where networking gets expensive. Not in any one system, but in everything required to support it. As architectures grow, each workaround adds a new dependency to provision, maintain, and secure. Tailscale removes these layers altogether, replacing them with a flat, identity-centric architecture.
“We eliminated a bunch of infrastructure, decreased operational overhead, and reduced developer friction with the new platform. The overall architecture is much simpler and more secure.”
The real cost was everyday friction
Most networking issues don’t show up as major outages. They show up as constant, low-grade interruptions: access tickets, onboarding delays, reconnecting to the right system, or waiting on approvals. Across thousands of employees, they become a measurable drag on both IT and the broader organization.
Removing these hurdles had clear, measurable impact:
- $282K in IT Efficiency: Time spent managing remote access dropped by 60%.
- $734K in Productivity: Time lost to connectivity issues was cut in half.
Because access is tied to identity and works consistently across any environment, Tailscale reduces the edge cases, tickets, and workarounds that exhaust your helpdesk.
Narrower access shrunk the blast radius
The study attributes $861K in present value to reduced security risk, based on a modeled 70% reduction in exposure to breach costs for addressable attacks.
Interviewees noted that security gains didn’t come from more tooling, but from a different access model. Instead of broad network access with controls layered on afterward, Tailscale enforces smart policies—default deny, least privilege, and device-aware access—at the connection level.
Users and systems only reach what they’re explicitly allowed to. As the surface area shrinks, so does the blast radius.
The bottom line: less really is more
The study shows 213% ROI with payback in under six months. It’s a big change, especially at firms established enough to have 3,000 (composite) employees. But the pattern behind the shift is straightforward:
Less infrastructure. Less friction. Less exposure.
That’s what Tailscale is designed to do—replace layered, “good enough” networking with identity-based access that’s simpler to operate and easier to control.
Jillian Murphy
Will Moore
