Hey everyone! 👋 I’ve been lurking here for a bit but finally have something to share. I’m a project manager at a small, fully remote team, and we handle a lot of sensitive client data. Our IT lead recently pushed for a firewall change, and I got pulled into the cost analysis side of things.
We used to run a Palo Alto VM-Series firewall on AWS. It was powerful, but honestly, the complexity and cost felt overkill for our 40-person team. Our IT guy suggested trying Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, saying it might be more aligned with our actual needs (and budget). We made the switch about three months ago.
So here’s a quick breakdown of our costs for the first 90 days, comparing the old Palo Alto setup to CloudGen. I'm not a networking expert, so I focused purely on the numbers our finance team cared about:
**Palo Alto VM-Series (Last 90 days before switch):**
- AWS compute instance for the VM (needed a pretty hefty one): ~$1,200
- Palo Alto licensing & threat prevention subs: ~$2,850
- Management overhead (our IT guy's hours tweaking policies): estimated $600
- **Total: ~$4,650**
**Barracuda CloudGen (First 90 days):**
- Barracuda CloudGen Firewall PAYG on Azure (similar sizing): ~$780
- Included subscription bundles (security, web filter, etc.): ~$1,500
- Setup & config (much simpler, less IT time): ~$200
- **Total: ~$2,480**
The savings are pretty dramatic for us—almost cut our firewall costs in half for this period. The interface feels more straightforward, which is great for someone like me who occasionally needs to check reports. I'm curious if others have seen similar savings? Or maybe we're missing some advanced Palo Alto feature we’ll regret losing later? For our use case (securing SaaS apps like Asana, Slack, and client portals), it feels solid so far.
Thx!