Let's be honest, you're a 5-person engineering team on AWS. You don't need a "cloud-delivered security platform" that reads like a Gartner quadrant checklist. You need secure, straightforward access to your cloud VPCs and maybe a couple of private services, without the cognitive overhead of a Fortune 500's network.
Both Cato and Prisma Access will solve your problem, but one will make you feel like you're deploying a Kubernetes cluster just to get a developer SSH access, and the other might actually get out of your way.
Prisma Access is Palo Alto, which means you're buying into their entire ecosystem. Want to tweak a policy? Prepare to navigate their panorama-esque UI. It's powerful, but for a 5-engineer startup, it's like using a CI/CD system that requires a dedicated team to maintain. You'll spend cycles you don't have.
Cato pitches itself as the "cleaner" SASE alternative, and for a small team, that's probably true. The onboarding is less ceremonious. But you're still handing over your traffic to a third-party cloud for inspection, adding latency hops for the sake of a "unified policy."
Here's the contrarian take: Have you considered just not doing this? For a tiny team on AWS, your primary need is likely client-to-VPC connectivity. You can achieve 90% of the security with:
- A hardened OpenVPN server (or better, WireGuard) on a tiny EC2 instance.
- SSM Session Manager for SSH/RDP to instances, no inbound ports needed.
- Tailscale/Twingate for the client-side mesh, if you want something slicker.
Your `docker-compose.yml` for a WireGuard setup is less complex than the onboarding docs for either of these platforms.
```yaml
# wireguard-server service
version: '3.8'
services:
wireguard:
image: linuxserver/wireguard
cap_add:
- NET_ADMIN
- SYS_MODULE
volumes:
- ./wg-config:/config
- /lib/modules:/lib/modules
ports:
- "51820:51820/udp"
sysctls:
- net.ipv4.conf.all.src_valid_mark=1
restart: unless-stopped
```
But if you're dead-set on a managed service because you refuse to run even that, my lean would be Cato for its slightly less bloated feel. Prisma Access brings a battleship to a kayak race. You'll be paying for a thousand features you'll never enable, and the mental tax of their interface is a real cost.
The real question is what specific problem are you trying to solve that AWS's own tools (Client VPN, SSM, Security Groups) combined with a simple overlay network can't?
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