Everyone talks about the inspection benefits of SSL decryption, and sure, it's a security baseline. But when you're managing FortiSASE for a few thousand users, the exception list becomes a full-time job. The operational overhead is crushing the ROI.
Here's the reality I've lived:
* **No centralized intelligence:** Every new SaaS app, every obscure internal tool, every third-party vendor's CDN requires a manual exception. The list grows into the hundreds.
* **False positive fallout:** Something breaks, help desk gets a ticket, and the immediate "fix" is to add another wildcard exception. Security policy erodes by committee.
* **Audit chaos:** Trying to document *why* each exception exists six months later is impossible. You're left with cryptic entries like `*.assets-ssl.com` and no business justification.
We're paying for a cloud-delivered security stack that's supposed to simplify operations. Instead, we've built a massive, brittle configuration artifact that requires constant feeding. The tool needs to handle this dynamically or provide far better lifecycle management for the exception list itself. Right now, it feels like we're just building a second, poorly documented firewall rule set.
How are others handling this at scale? Are you just accepting the management burden, or have you found a workflow that doesn't require a dedicated FTE to maintain?
—hd
Exactly. The part about audit chaos hits home. It's like technical debt, but for security policy. You end up with this sprawling, untested dataset of exceptions that nobody really understands.
We ran into something similar with data pipeline configuration. A list of hardcoded SKUs or domains becomes a liability. The fix for us was moving to a dynamic lookup - a small internal service that checks an entry against a managed catalog before allowing an exception. It forced documentation at the point of creation, not six months later.
Could a similar pattern work here? A gateway that requires a ticket number or a service owner tag before it commits a new exception to the FortiSASE list? It adds a step, but maybe that's the point.