Hey everyone, been wrestling with a network redesign for our regional offices and hit a classic fork in the road. We're currently testing Barracuda CloudGen Firewall (using the Centralized Management & Cloud Security subscription) against Zscaler ZIA for secure internet and SaaS access.
The pitch for both is solid: reduce backhauling, improve user experience. But the *real-world* latency for users in branch offices is what I'm trying to nail down. Our primary sites are in Chicago, Dallas, and Atlanta, with smaller branches in some more remote areas.
In our initial tests, the results aren't as clear-cut as the datasheets suggest. A few observations so far:
* **CloudGen (with F-Series VFs at branches):** Latency seems heavily tied to the proximity of the CloudGen Control Center we're using. Traffic inspection happens "closer" to the user, but then there's the hop to the cloud services.
* **Zscaler ZIA:** The nearest ZEN is a key factor. For a branch in Montana, the hairpinning to the nearest ZEN added noticeable milliseconds compared to a Dallas branch.
* **App-specific weirdness:** Microsoft 365 traffic behaves wildly different on each. Zscaler's direct-to-app seemed faster for Teams, but CloudGen had better latency for some legacy web apps we still run.
Has anyone run a similar head-to-head, specifically for geographically dispersed users? I'm trying to build a comparison sheet focused on:
- Average latency increase over direct internet (by region)
- Impact of adding full TLS inspection on each platform
- The "management overhead" latency – e.g., policy push times in CloudGen vs ZIA policy updates
I'll share my spreadsheet once I get more data filled in. Curious if your experiences match the marketing or if there are hidden latency sinks I should be testing for.
Hey user322, been in your exact shoes last year at my logistics company. I'm the platform lead for a team managing about 60 branch locations across North America. We run a mix of on-prem k8s at hubs and a ton of SaaS, and I handle the secure access piece. We went through a full POC with both Zscaler ZIA and CloudGen before making a call.
My breakdown based on running each for 90+ days in parallel across a dozen test branches:
* **Latency Determinism:** CloudGen is predictable, Zscaler is variable. With CloudGen F-Series VFs, inspection is local, so your latency floor is just your internet circuit plus the hop to their cloud service (usually 5-15ms added in my tests). Zscaler's latency is entirely a roll of the dice based on ZEN proximity. We saw 8ms from Chicago but 45ms from a rural Alberta site, which matches your Montana hairpinning.
* **True Cost:** CloudGen's quote is for the box and sub, but the hidden operational tax is real. You're still managing virtual firewalls, doing OS updates, and tuning policies per location - it's a lighter but similar burden to traditional edge gear. Zscaler's cost is truly OpEx (we were quoted $5-7/user/month for the full ZIA suite) but you trade that for near-zero device management.
* **App‑Specific Tunneling:** This is where Zscaler clearly won for us. Their Microsoft 365 and Salesforce "direct-to-app" tunnels work as advertised. Our Teams call quality scores improved because traffic bypassed full proxy inspection. CloudGen can do similar with Application Rules, but it's a manual, per-app policy config we found brittle after updates.
* **Deployment & Failover Reality:** Deploying a CloudGen VF is a 30-minute task per branch once you have templates built. Failover between ISPs is handled locally, sub-second. Zscaler's branch connector (Z-App) deployment was faster, but failover entirely depends on the client's ability to find a new ZEN, which sometimes led to 10-15 second service blips during our forced outage tests.
My pick is Zscaler ZIA, but only if your primary goal is user experience for modern SaaS and your team wants to get out of the firewall management business. If you have legacy client-server apps that need stateful, L7 inspection at the branch, or if deterministic latency is non-negotiable, CloudGen is the safer bet. To make it clean, tell us: what's the ratio of SaaS-to-internet traffic in your branches, and what's your team's tolerance for ongoing device-level troubleshooting?
YAML is my love language
Your point about the CloudGen Control Center proximity is crucial, and it's often an oversight in these comparisons. The inspection may be local on the F-Series VF, but the policy and threat intelligence updates, and crucially the logging path for any cloud-delivered services, all route through that Control Center. If your chosen region (say, US East) is geographically distant from a branch, you'll see a subtle but persistent latency in session establishment and cloud security lookups, not just raw throughput.
On the Microsoft 365 behavior, that's the classic split-tunnel versus full-proxy dilemma. Zscaler's direct-to-app acceleration works because their cloud can often peer directly with Microsoft's ASN. CloudGen's architecture typically requires the VF to forward that traffic to their own cloud scrubbing nodes before egressing to Microsoft, unless you've tuned specific SD-WAN rules for trusted SaaS IP ranges. The "weirdness" you're seeing is likely that architectural mismatch.
I'd be curious what your test methodology is for these latency measurements. Are you measuring simple ICMP, or actual TCP handshake times for web and SaaS applications? The latter exposes more about the TLS decryption and re-encryption overhead, which differs substantially between a local appliance and a cloud proxy.
That's interesting about the Microsoft 365 behavior. We noticed something similar in our limited testing. For our remote team members on residential connections, Zscaler's performance with O365 was much more consistent. I think that direct peering makes a big difference for SaaS-heavy offices.
But for branches with their own on-prem servers, the local inspection from the CloudGen VF felt better. Have you looked at your actual user traffic mix per branch? That might be the deciding factor.