Hey everyone! 👋 Just dove into the Banyan free trial after hearing about it on a podcast. I've been playing with their Zero Trust access stuff and... well, it's awesome, but it's also *a lot* for some situations. I kept getting stuck on when to actually use it versus just sticking with our old firewall rules.
So, I made this super simple flowchart for myself. It's based on my own "aha!" moments during setup. Maybe it'll help other folks who are on the fence about whether they need this level of tooling or not.
Here's my basic decision logic:
**Start:** Need to give someone/thing access to an internal resource.
➡ **Question 1:** Is this a human user needing access (e.g., a developer, a contractor, a remote employee)?
- **YES** ➡ **Question 2:** Do you need to enforce more than just an IP address? (Think: device trust, multi-factor auth, specific user groups, short-lived access)?
- **YES** ➡ **Use Banyan.** This is where it shines. Setting up a policy that requires a trusted device certificate *and* MFA before reaching a dev server is a game-changer.
- **NO** ➡ A simple firewall rule *might* suffice (if the user has a static IP and you're okay with just IP-based trust).
- **NO** (It's server-to-server or a service account) ➡ **Question 3:** Is the access cross-cloud or across complex network boundaries?
- **YES** ➡ **Strongly consider Banyan.** Their connectors and service publishing can be way simpler than managing VPNs or intricate firewall rules between AWS and GCP, for example.
- **NO** (Everything's in a simple, flat network) ➡ A firewall rule is probably simpler and faster to set up.
My big takeaway? Banyan isn't just a "firewall replacement." For me, it's become the go-to for any access scenario where **identity and context** matter more than *just* network location. If you're just whitelisting a static IP for a known API, a firewall rule is totally fine. The moment you think "I wish this access would expire on Tuesday" or "Only people from the finance team with a company laptop should see this," that's your signal to look at Banyan.
Would love to hear if this matches your experiences! Especially curious about how you handle the server-to-server stuff.
I'm Henry, I lead marketing ops for a 150-person SaaS company, and I manage access for our growth and analytics tools, from our data warehouse to internal dashboards. We've run both simple firewall rules and Banyan for about a year now, with Banyan securing our customer data environments.
* **Fit and cost**: Banyan is mid-market and up. List price is around $9-12/user/month for their core Zero Trust product, but you'll pay extra for advanced SSO integrations or premium support. A firewall rule costs you nothing but your network admin's time.
* **Deployment effort**: Opening a port in AWS Security Groups or on your office firewall takes 10 minutes. Getting Banyan fully rolled out, with the Desktop App deployed to all user devices and policies tested, took us a solid two weeks of part-time work.
* **Where Banyan clearly wins**: It's for conditional, user-centric access. We have a policy that only allows access to our analytics platform if the device is company-managed (checks a cert) AND the user is in the "Data Team" group in Okta. That's impossible with IP rules.
* **Where it can break or lag**: If your internal service has very high throughput needs (like streaming large query results), the Banyan connector adds a hop. We saw a 15-20% latency increase on some database queries until we tuned the resource profile. For raw server-to-server traffic, a firewall is still simpler and faster.
I'd recommend Banyan if you have contractors, remote staff, or need to enforce device trust for compliance. If your use case is literally just "allow this one static IP to reach a test server," a firewall rule is the right tool. To make a clean call, tell us if you need to audit individual user access and what compliance framework you're under.
Cheers, Henry
That's a great real-world breakdown, Henry. The conditional access point you made is key.
> Where it can break or lag
I've run into this with devs streaming large build artifacts or logs from internal endpoints. The Banyan connector adds a non-trivial latency and throughput overhead compared to a direct, firewall-whitelisted path. For those specific high-bandwidth, machine-to-machine workflows, we ended up keeping a simple, locked-down firewall rule for the CI/CD network range and using Banyan exclusively for human user access. It's a hybrid model that works but adds complexity.
Have you found a clean way to segment those use cases in your policies, or is it just a known trade-off you manage?
yaml is my native language
That latency overhead is exactly what I'm worried about. We have a few on-prem file servers with large media assets, and the idea of routing all that traffic through a connector gives me pause.
So in your hybrid model, how do you stop it from becoming a management nightmare? Like, do you have to constantly update the firewall rules when a CI/CD IP changes, or did you find a way to make that static?
One step at a time