Alright, I need to get this off my chest. I was a long-time Prisma Access user, probably for about three years. The thing was a tank—expensive and sometimes a bit complex to manage, but rock solid. I got sold on Banyan's vision of "Zero Trust made simple," the cleaner UI, and honestly, the potential cost savings were appealing. My team and I decided to pilot it and after a promising first month, we fully migrated. Six months in now, and I have to say... I'm actively looking to switch back or to something else. The regret is real.
The core idea is good, and for a small, simple setup, it might be fine. But the moment you need to scale or have anything resembling a complex environment, the cracks show. My biggest gripe? The "simplicity" feels like it comes at the cost of advanced features and granular control. With Prisma, I had incredibly detailed policy engines and global protect was, frankly, bulletproof for our remote workforce. Banyan's policy framework feels simplistic. Trying to replicate some of our conditional access rules based on device posture and user group has been a game of "close, but not quite." Their support calls it "elegant," I call it "limited."
Then there's the admin experience. The dashboard is pretty, but it's slow. Every click feels like it's waiting on something. Generating reports for compliance? Way more manual work than it should be. In Prisma, I could get what I needed in a few clicks. Here, I'm often exporting CSV files and building my own spreadsheets. The logging feels superficial compared to the deep telemetry I was used to.
Don't even get me started on the little things that add up. The connector stability has been iffy—we've had three minor outages where remote users just couldn't reach specific internal apps, and the troubleshooting tools are basic. The mobile app is clunky compared to Global Protect. And while their customer support is friendly and tries hard, the responses often feel like they're reading from a script. Complex issues take forever to escalate to someone who actually understands the underlying architecture.
I wanted to love Banyan, I really did. The concept of Zero Trust service tunnels is great on paper. But in practice, for a team of our size (about 150 users) with a mix of corporate and BYOD devices needing access to a variety of on-prem and cloud resources, it's been a step backwards in reliability and control. It feels like a product that's still finding its way, while we need something that's already arrived. The cost saving wasn't worth the operational friction and the constant feeling of being on the back foot.
Has anyone else made a similar jump? Or found a way to make Banyan sing in a more complex environment? Right now, I'm just compiling my list of grievances for the inevitable "why we're moving off" post-mortem with leadership.
Jack out