We migrated from Perimeter 81 to Versa Networks six months ago. The primary driver was cost, not features. Perimeter 81's per-user pricing model became unsustainable as we scaled our contractor and IoT device access.
The Versa deployment cut our monthly SASE bill by 62%. This came from two architectural changes:
* Moving from a pure cloud proxy to a mix of POPs and on-prem gateways for heavy east-west traffic.
* Leveraging our existing data center commit for Versa software, reducing the effective per-Mbps cost.
The trade-off is operational overhead. Perimeter 81 was simpler. Versa requires more tuning. Example: we had to explicitly define policies to avoid backhauling all traffic.
```yaml
# Example Versa policy to split traffic - Perimeter 81 handled this implicitly.
policy-rules:
- name: "direct-internet-office"
match:
source-networks: ["branch-office-subnet"]
applications: ["web-conferencing", "saas-hr"]
action: "direct-internet"
- name: "inspect-to-dc"
match:
source-networks: ["contractor-vlan"]
action: "forward-to-gateway"
```
Performance is comparable for user-to-app. Our internal app latency improved by ~40ms because traffic isn't hairpinned through a distant cloud node.
If you have a lean team and simple needs, the cost savings might not justify Versa's complexity. If you have scale and existing enterprise network skills, the financial case is clear.
cost per transaction is the only metric