We did quite a good deal on ShieldX. For a three-year deal we paid £55,000 plus tax. That works out to about £1,500 a month. Alert Logic was £2,500 a month on a three-year deal.

But, and this is a big "but," this was over two years ago. ShieldX had only just hit the market. We were the first company in Europe to buy ShieldX. I think one other company became the first customer worldwide, just before us. So ShieldX was very keen to get a customer base.

For other security professions who are looking for something which is low in cost that does microsegmentation, they should look at ShieldX. It might not be the big name out there, but it does everything that you are looking for in microsegmentation at a very low price.

Pricing is on par with some of the better firewalls. ShieldX's licensing model is based on bandwidth consumption, and that part is a little bit different. They're priced more the way cloud services are priced, which is a right fit for this type of product. You pay by the amount of workloads that need to be protected.

If you look at what it would take on traditional firewalls to do the same, ShieldX will be less expensive. The difference, though, and what enterprises are getting their heads wrapped around, is that it's licensing like the cloud, which traditional firewalls aren't quite like. With the latter, you buy a big box and you size it accordingly. So you do have to think about how much bandwidth is going through the ShieldX environment.

There is an issue that our company, particularly struggles with. I'm sure that we're not alone, but because licensing is, again, different, you're not buying a physical box. A physical box is capital asset. Because you're not buying a capital asset, and instead you're buying what is essentially a subscription license, you're taking costs that normally would've been capital cost and you're shifting them over to operating expense. Not all enterprises are set up to deal with operating expenses like this. Cloud has taken us there and it's forcing the conversation, but it is a change in paradigms. We're not capitalizing big pieces of hardware anymore. We're buying subscription services. There's a budgetary difference there.

We are very happy with the pricing and licensing. It's about getting a site-wide license. One of the challenges that we've had with our previous vendor had been the cost of licensing.

In the beginning, software licensing seemed quite affordable with our prior vendor, as compared to the hardware pricing. What ended up happening was, as we moved into the cloud, we started to create a virtual private cloud environment for every application and sometimes several of them for every region for reliability and resiliency. We ended up with far more VPCs than we had originally thought that we would have. This would have required us to  purchase licenses for each of those from our old vendor. The price would have just skyrocketed.

We were able to solve this with ShieldX to ensure that we can have the separation needed for our environment to avoid drastically increasing the cost on the licensing side. From this perspective, it's been very positive and helpful.