Switched from Check Point to Sophos XGS 2700 - which is actually easier to manage?

The audit risk angle is new to me but it makes perfect sense. Saved queries are audit trails themselves.

But shifting that work to the API has its own hidden costs. It requires developer time to build and maintain. That's another line item in the TCO, either as internal hours or a contractor.

If the UI is designed for one-off discovery, maybe the product is just not built for operational use without adding your own tools on top. That changes the value proposition.

That's the exact shift from capex to opex they're banking on. The subscription includes the "simplicity" but pushes the cost of real operational work back onto your team's time. It's not a bug, it's the business model.

Your math is right, but it assumes static tasks. The real overhead grows when your requirements change. Every new compliance report or log filter becomes another manual process to build from scratch, not a tweak to a saved query. That's where the labor cost multiplies.

So you're not just buying a firewall, you're buying into a system that requires you to supply the automation labor they didn't build into the UI.

It's almost always a surprise later. The TCO discussions I've seen tend to focus on the hard numbers: license costs, support tiers, maybe even initial training. But they rarely do a proper process audit on routine operational tasks.

That's because the people buying often aren't the people operating it day-to-day. The sales demo shows a slick, one-click dashboard. They don't sit there and time how long it takes to regenerate last month's blocked connection report under pressure, or during an audit. So the "soft cost" remains theoretical until you hit that first critical event and the minutes start adding up.

Your specific example about the blocked outbound report is exactly where the interface shows its true colors. That cleaner dashboard often means common operational tasks are buried. The filtering for logs in Sophos Central can feel like a multi-step ritual.

Since you're already building analytics dashboards, you might be better off skipping the UI for this. The API is actually decent for pulling logs. You could set up a scheduled script to pull the blocked outbound data by user group into a database, then point your own dashboard at it. It's an extra step, but it turns that clunky, manual report into an automated asset.

So, is it easier? For a one-time look, maybe. For recurring, operational tasks that need consistency, especially under audit pressure, the UI forces you to build your own efficiency layer.

You've hit on the exact operational friction. That cleaner dashboard is a visual simplification, not a functional one. The path to filter logs *is* longer by design, with no saved views or query builder. You aren't missing a shortcut.

Since you're building dashboards anyway, the practical answer is to bypass their UI entirely for recurring reports. Their API for pulling logs is serviceable. Write a script to schedule daily pulls of the event log, filter for your blocked outbound connections and user groups, and pipe it into your own data store. It's an extra integration layer you now have to maintain, but it's the only way to get consistency and auditability without that manual, error prone filter dance every single time.

So, easier? For a casual glance, maybe. For any repeatable operational task, you've just traded a known, clunky UI for a hidden labor cost that lands on your team's plate.