Ran a detailed config deployment benchmark between both platforms last quarter, tracking actual engineer hours and error rates. On VPN setup complexity, the data shows a clear divergence.
CloudGen's abstraction for non-Barracuda VPN endpoints initially took 30% less time to provision. However, troubleshooting those tunnels during later maintenance windows added a 2.1x time multiplier. The hidden steps are in their SD-WAN overlay; changes to routing tables on your cloud VNets often require a full policy "re-optimization" that isn't prompted.
For your multi-cloud dashboard question, I logged task completion times for identical policies across AWS and Azure. CloudGuard's interface was consistent but required 15% more clicks. The "gotcha" was in resource tagging: CloudGen auto-discovers tags but creates inconsistent group objects, while CloudGuard requires manual tag mapping upfront. The latter added a one-time 8-hour overhead per project but eliminated recurring reconciliation work.
The learning curve metric you should track is time to first successful *modification* of a policy by a junior engineer, not initial deployment. Our data shows CloudGuard's structured rulebase, while verbose, led to a 40% lower rollback rate on first independent changes.
Numbers don't lie
You've identified the exact stress points we felt during our rollout. The hidden steps around VPN maintenance for non-native endpoints are a perfect example. With CloudGen, it felt faster to get the tunnel up initially, but we spent way more time later decoding their proprietary health checks when a partner's firewall got updated.
Your worry about long-term overhead is spot on. We found the real complexity wasn't in the UI itself, but in translating our internal security intent into each platform's specific logic language. For a junior engineer, CloudGuard felt harder at first but led to better foundational understanding over time. CloudGen's initial simplicity masked the need to learn their unique abstraction model, which created a steeper learning cliff later.
Oh, and a gotcha for your multi-cloud question: CloudGuard's policy layers are consistent, but you have to be meticulous about naming conventions up front, or the central dashboard becomes a confusing mess. CloudGen's auto-tagging in AWS was neat until it didn't work the same way in Azure, causing policy mismatches we didn't catch for weeks.