We have seen a return on our investment. Thunder SSLi is definitely something that has helped us prevent certain types of attacks that come through in malware events and the like.

The true measure of a solution is what impact to our customer does it have. In the past year, we have had zero impact. That is what matters the most.

The ROI is still maturing because of its ability to leverage some capabilities that wasn't necessarily the initial intent. I think the jury's out on total. I can only expect it to go up. I don't think we have a hard number we could give you today on ROI. From a system-wide perspective, we know what's going to be in the positive.

A lot of what we do in technology are soft benefits. E.g., what's the going value for a five-year-old's social security number on the dark web? What's the going value for a school administrator's credit card number? Louisiana just declared a state of emergency because they had three schools get attacked by ransomware. With our data segmentation in our Thunder SSLi, we don't have those same concerns. Those extra two hours a night that I get to sleep, how do I quantify that?

It has been a good investment. We used to have six proxies to handle our internet traffic and for SSL interception. But the SSL interception was a very CPU-based operation. Since the A10 implementation, we have decreased the number of proxies to three. They are not doing SSL operations now and their CPU resources are much more available for other operations. It could happen for other devices: our firewall, our IPS. But last year, with our data center migration, we didn't look at their resource usage because the data center migration was a huge project. There was a possibility of missing our SLAs and our company wouldn't accept that. Instead of lift-and-shift, they said we should set up the new data center and then forward to traffic there without an SLA-out. That's the reason we couldn't investigate how we can save resources on other boxes. I believe it could work the same way the proxies did.

By not renewing six proxy boxes, rather just three of them, it saved over $100,000. It could even be more than that.