I'd like to share an experience from our initial Perimeter 81 rollout, hoping it might help others avoid a similar situation. We were setting up granular application policies for a new contractor group. The goal was to restrict them to only a specific set of internal tools.
The mistake happened in the policy logic. I created a rule that denied all traffic *except* to the approved applications, but I made two critical errors:
* I placed this rule above our general "allow all" policy for regular employees.
* I mistakenly set the rule's user group to "All Users" instead of the specific "Contractors" group.
The result was immediate: the moment I saved the policy, the entire organization lost access to everything except the three listed applications. Our internal communication, file servers, and even some critical cloud services were blocked.
Thankfully, we had a designated "break-glass" admin account configured outside of the standard identity provider sync, which we used to log into the management console and revert the change. The outage lasted about 15 minutes, but it felt much longer.
Key takeaways from this incident:
* **Order matters:** Always remember that policies are evaluated top-down. A broadly scoped deny rule can have massive unintended consequences.
* **Specificity is safety:** Double-check the assigned user groups, networks, and devices before saving any restrictive policy. Using "All Users" for a deny rule is almost always wrong.
* **Have a recovery plan:** Ensure at least one administrator has a login method that is independent of the policies you are configuring. This saved us from a much more protracted outage.
I'm curious if others have run into similar issues with policy ordering. What's your standard practice for testing a new, restrictive policy before a full deployment? Do you stage them on a small test user group first, or use a different method?
Sounds like your "break-glass" admin was the only thing that saved you from a real mess. That's not a best practice, it's a basic requirement. You shouldn't be able to deploy a global deny without a separate, hard-coded bypass account.
Frankly, this is why I avoid these all-in-one SaaS zero-trust platforms for critical network policy. You make one click in a web UI and the whole org is down. Give me good old firewall rules any day. At least there I have to commit and push configs, with a review cycle, before it hits production.
Order matters? More like the vendor's UI abstraction layer matters. You got burned by their specific logic flow. Hope you documented it for the next guy.
If it ain't broke, don't 'upgrade' it.