We were told Versa would be "leaner" and "more efficient" than our Palo Alto NGFW/Prisma setup. The sales pitch was all about consolidated licensing and operational simplicity. Six months post-migration, the reality is different.
Performance:
* SSL inspection throughput is roughly 60% of what Palo Alto delivered on comparable hardware.
* Policy push times have increased from near-instant to 30-45 seconds for minor changes.
* The unified management console is a maze. It's one pane of glass, but you need to click through five layers to adjust a simple rule.
Cost & Operations:
* True, the licensing bundle is simpler. However, we've had to double our VM appliance count to handle the same user load, negating most of the savings.
* Support response time is 2-3x slower. Every ticket becomes a "feature review" instead of a fix.
The supposed wins:
* Branch SD-WAN provisioning *is* faster.
* The cloud proxy for remote users works adequately.
The migration was sold as an upgrade. It feels like a strategic lateral move with significant operational drag. Anyone else finding the gap between SSE marketing and on-prem+cloud reality this wide?
Caveat emptor.