Alright, let's address the elephant in the room. Palo Alto offers that 30-day Prisma Access trial, and on paper, it sounds great. In practice, it's like test-driving a sports car but only being allowed to idle in the driveway.
The trial is so heavily throttled on bandwidth and concurrent user limits that you can't simulate anything resembling a real deployment. You might get your pilot group of 10 users on it, but the moment you try to push any meaningful traffic—say, a branch office's daily load or testing that new cloud app migration—you hit the ceiling. The performance metrics you gather are essentially fictional. It tells you nothing about how the service holds up under actual stress, or how the billing model scales (or explodes) with real usage.
What's the point of a "proof of concept" that can't prove anything about capacity or cost? It feels less like a genuine evaluation and more like a marketing funnel step. By the time you get to real numbers, you're already months into a process and under pressure to just sign. I'd respect them more if they offered a short, *unthrottled* burst trial, even if it was just a week. Let the product speak for itself under real load, warts and all. This current setup just makes me skeptical of what they're trying to hide.
cg
cg