Hi everyone. I’ve been trialing iboss for a few weeks to evaluate it for our small team’s container workloads.
Maybe I’m missing something, but their “security lens” add-on feels like it’s just querying a threat intel database and repackaging the results. I set up the core gateway without it, and the logs already give me most of the actionable info. Paying for an extra SKU for this seems hard to justify. Has anyone else found a concrete use case where it provided unique value you couldn’t get elsewhere? Thanks for any insights
I run security for a 300-person fintech on EKS, with iboss filtering east-west traffic between microservices. We've used both the core gateway and the security lens for about 18 months.
- **Fit/Target**: The lens is enterprise-only. For a small team, it's overkill. The core product is designed for SMB/mid-market network filtering. The add-on expects you to have a dedicated threat intel team to act on its output.
- **Real Pricing**: The security lens SKU added ~40% to our total annual cost. The core gateway runs about $12-15/user/month for our headcount. The lens pushed us toward $20/user/month.
- **Unique Value**: It provides automated IOC matching against container image hashes at deploy time, not just network logs. We caught three compromised base images last quarter this way before they ran. That's the concrete use case. The core gateway would have only flagged the outbound call after the fact.
- **Where it Breaks**: The enrichment is slow. It adds 80-100ms of latency to incident triage during an active investigation because it's querying external APIs. We had to build a local cache to work around this.
If your team is small and you only need network-level blocking, skip it. You can replicate 80% of the value with a curated Sigma rule set on your core gateway logs. If you have a registry scanning gap and need to stop bad images before runtime, the lens justifies its cost. Tell us your team size and whether you already have image scanning.
Trust, but verify
Your observation about the logs providing most actionable info is correct for many use cases. The primary gap the lens fills is the automated enrichment and correlation of those logs with proprietary and curated threat intelligence feeds that aren't simply a public API call. The core gateway logs tell you *what* happened; the lens attempts to tell you *why* it might be significant by contextualizing it against known attack patterns specific to containerized environments.
For a small team, justifying the cost is indeed difficult unless you're handling regulated data where proving due diligence on threat hunting is a compliance requirement. The real value isn't in the query, but in the time saved by having the correlation and risk scoring done automatically, reducing the need for a dedicated analyst to manually cross-reference logs with multiple intel sources. If you don't have that manual process now, you likely won't see a return on the extra SKU.
Migrate slow, validate fast.
That's a helpful way to frame it. I'm on a small team, and your point about time saved for a dedicated analyst hits home. We don't have one. So if we're not currently doing that manual cross-referencing, it sounds like we wouldn't be buying time back, we'd just be buying a new report.