For about the last three years, the company where I work has been relying on Logmein Hamachi so much it's ridiculous. We have a corporate office with dual T1 lines, a main plant half a mile away with dual T1 lines, and eight other sites in the immediate metropolitan area with single T1 lines. We also have eight sites in outlying areas of the state with varying internet providers providing DSL anywhere from 2Mbps to 10Mbps (with much smaller upload pipes).
Instead of using VPN routers at each location to tie everything together, the previous IT guy bought cheap Best Buy routers for every location and installed Hamachi to network everything together. Not my ideal solution, but it worked well enough for our needs.
Our graphic designer works at one of the satellite locations with a T1 and Hamachi, so when she needs to manipulate large files stored on the file server at the corporate office, the experience is...painful. The marketing manager works very closely with the graphic designer so when they need to share large files, they either email them (don't even get me started) or use the shared drive on the main server here. Management thought that moving the marketing manager to the same building as the graphic designer would alleviate some of these issues, but obviously it didn't. This decision was made without my input. Moving them both into the corporate office is not an option I am told.
Now for reasons that I'm not privy to, they want to move the marketing manager to a yet different location, keep the graphic designer where she is, and keep the server where it is. So now they need to collaborate on files that are stored at the corporate office with 3x3 internet, at different satellite locations with 1.5Mbps internet, all over Hamachi which is flaky at best in my experience.
My solution that I'm going to present to management is to upgrade all three sites to 6x6 internet (switching to another provider that offers better speeds isn't an option) and install new Sonicwall VPN routers at each location so that we can (mostly) ditch Hamachi for these operations. The issue is that it will require a 127% increase in the telecom bills for these three sites. How can I present this solution to management in such a way that it isn't rejected without a thought? How do I show them that Hamachi is a good solution for a mobile worker on a laptop at home or in a hotel room, but it's really a terrible solution for what we are trying to accomplish? Help!!