You’re Paying for the Same Network Twice

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 (00:00) - Intro (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. Broken: What Should Never Have Been Built (01:43:41) - The Double Egress Problem Explained: Why You’re Paying 2–3x Per Request What We Mentioned Cloud egress pricing models Zscaler architecture and traffic inspection flow SD-WAN design tradeoffs Multi-cloud networking complexity About Doug Houghton Doug Houghton is Director of Global Channels at Alkira, where he works with enterprise teams designing and scaling multi-cloud network architectures. His focus is on helping organizations navigate the cost, complexity, and tradeoffs that come with modern cloud and network infrastructure. Connect with Doug: https://www.linkedin.com/in/douglas-houghton-9b77882/ Learn more about Alkira: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alkiranet/ About Signed The IT market is built for sellers, not buyers. Signed is the podcast for the buyers. Host Max Clark, CEO of ITBroker.com, sits down with CIOs, CFOs, operators, and founders who’ve lived inside real enterprise tech deals — the ones who can tell you what actually determined whether the deal worked, not what the deck promised. New episodes weekly. An ITBroker.com podcast. Full Transcript Click here to view the episode transcript.