I've been running CloudGen WAF in front of our e-commerce stack for about nine months now. We initially turned on SSL inspection to "see everything," you know, the whole security theater pitch. After a quarter of performance complaints from the dev team and some internal benchmarking, we shut it off last week. The difference is staggering.
Let's be clear: I'm not arguing against the *concept* of SSL inspection. It's the implementation cost here that's the problem. The decryption/re-encryption overhead added a consistent 90-110ms of latency to our 95th percentile response times. For a checkout flow where every 100ms can impact conversion, that's a direct hit to revenue. What did we gain? Visibility into encrypted traffic we already monitor sufficiently at the endpoint level. The occasional malware callout that our EDR would have caught anyway.
The vendor's own datasheets show a 40% throughput reduction with SSL inspection enabled, which they conveniently gloss over in sales demos. My question is: for a cloud-native deployment, where does the value actually accrue? You're adding a single point of decryption, creating a massive performance bottleneck, and for what? To catch a fraction of threats that a layered security model should already address? The math doesn't justify the performance tax. I'd wager most teams enabling it are doing so because of a checkbox mentality, not a measurable security ROI.
I'm curious if others have done the A/B testing on this, with actual business metrics, not just synthetic throughput tests. Did anyone find a threat model or compliance requirement where the trade-off was genuinely worth it?
Data skeptic, not a data cynic.