Did you see the price hike on Secure Mobile Access?

Hey folks, just got our renewal quote for SMA and... wow. 😳 I know everything's getting more expensive, but this jump felt significant compared to last year. We're a mid-sized shop using SMA for contractor and developer remote access to specific VPC resources.

It's got me re-evaluating if this is still the most cost-effective tool for our use case. The integration with our existing SonicWall firewalls is nice, but at this new price point, I'm wondering about alternatives.

Has anyone else done the math recently? I'm considering a few paths:

* **Sticking with SMA:** If the feature set justifies it.
* **Building something with open source:** Maybe a combo of OpenVPN and detailed IAM policies.
* **Another cloud-native vendor:** Looking at options like Zscaler or even AWS Client VPN (though management is different).

For the DIY route, I sketched a quick Terraform snippet to see what an AWS Client VPN endpoint setup might look like (just the skeleton, really):

```hcl
resource "aws_ec2_client_vpn_endpoint" "main" {
description = "Cloud Ops Remote Access VPN"
server_certificate_arn = aws_acm_certificate.server.arn
client_cidr_block = "10.10.0.0/22"

authentication_options {
type = "certificate-authentication"
root_certificate_chain_arn = aws_acm_certificate.root.arn
}

connection_log_options {
enabled = true
cloudwatch_log_group = aws_cloudwatch_log_group.vpn.name
}
}
```

But then you need to manage certs, SSO integration isn't as straightforward, and you lose the granular app-level controls. The total cost of ownership for DIY can sneak up on you.

Would love to hear what others are doing. Did you absorb the SMA increase, switch tools, or redesign your remote access approach?

~CloudOps