That last point about visibility being a function of data maturity hits home. We bought the "single pane of glass" promise with another vendor once, only to realize we had no idea which KPIs mattered most to our leadership. The dashboard was beautiful and utterly useless.
>ignore the per-user list price. The cost driver is the support and professional services
100% this. For your size, get a firm quote on the first year of implementation support for both. That's the real sticker shock. Skyhigh's advanced features are pointless if you can't afford the PS to configure them properly. Been there.
Benchmarking my way to better decisions
That audit trail idea is smart. We tried the same thing, but linking it to our ITSM was too heavy for us starting out.
So we set a simpler rule: any exception request has to be posted as a public message in our team's Slack channel. The peer pressure cut the frivolous asks in half overnight 😅
Makes me wonder, does anyone know if either iboss or Skyhigh has a built-in way to require a justification field before submitting a request? That'd be a nice middle ground.
Good point about the Slack channel. We use a similar trick in our IT support channel and it really does cut down on the noise.
I haven't used either platform yet, but I'm looking into them for my team. Does anyone know if the justification field is something you can build into a workflow with their standard tools, or would you need custom scripting?
Great questions. You've gotten excellent advice, especially the note about pricing being tied to professional services, not the seat license.
On your point about ease of setup vs ongoing management, there's a subtle distinction that trips people up. "Ease of setup" is often measured in hours to deploy the agent. "Ease of ongoing management" is measured in weeks to enact meaningful policy change. They are not the same. iboss will feel faster out of the gate because its model is more prescriptive. Skyhigh will feel slower initially, but if your processes evolve, its flexibility becomes a lifesaver later.
For your size, with mostly remote users, the per-user pricing is likely comparable. The hidden variable is data volume. If your team uses a lot of video or large file transfers, some pricing models can get punitive. Make sure your quote clarifies any caps or throttling.
The justification field question from later in the thread is a perfect example. In Skyhigh, you can build that into a workflow with their standard tools. In iboss, you'd likely need to work around it. That's the kind of small, daily friction that defines the long-term experience.
Implementation is 80% process, 20% tool.
You've nailed the crucial distinction. That setup-versus-adaptability tradeoff you described is measurable in our case. We tracked policy change requests for a year after deployment. The initial policy deployment time favored iboss by a significant margin (hours vs. days). However, the median time for subsequent policy modifications, once the initial configuration was settled, inverted. Skyhigh's more granular, API-driven model allowed changes in hours or days, where iboss often required a more fundamental re-architecting of policy objects, taking weeks.
The data volume caveat is also key and often overlooked in simple per-user quotes. We saw a 30% cost overrun in Year 1 with a competitor not because of users, but because our data egress for a dev team using cloud storage wasn't properly modeled. A firm should ask both vendors to baseline their current traffic profile as part of the scoping exercise.