MuleSoft API Manager Reviews

We use the solution for process orchestration. We have some upstream and downstream systems, and the orchestration happens there with the help of MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager.

MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager is a low-code product. You can build an API with Python or Java as well. Since it's a low-code tool, you can easily develop an API and expose it to the consumers. The solution's data view coding language is easier to use than other languages.

The solution should facilitate the creation of custom connectors for use cases where a user would require extra connectors. This will make it easier for the user to use the product.

I haven't suffered many breakdowns or security issues with the solution. Nowadays, we are using CloudHub. However, we faced some stability issues when we previously used RTF (Runtime Fabric).

MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager is a scalable solution. More than 50 people use the tool in our organization.

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager is an expensive solution.

I would recommend the solution to other users because it is easy to use. However, users should first consider the solution's high license cost. Depending on the execution, the solution is worth the money. New users will find the solution easy to use.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The use cases are regarding telecommunication provisioning. Another aspect involves managing logistics, which includes connecting suppliers and the company's partners.

MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager is initially complex to utilize, but it provides extensive control over various capabilities. This means it can create high-cost solutions, allowing for a great deal of customization to make it well-suited for specific needs.   

When discussing potential enhancements overall, it primarily involves making it more user-friendly and lowering the pricing. There are several aspects that could benefit from improvement, or perhaps a few other areas to consider.

I have been using MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager for the past five years.

It is stable and has no problems. 

It is scalable and appropriate for every enterprise.

I have no experience with tech support.

The ease of maintenance depends on how you design your solution. You should consider having a team, typically consisting of four or five members for maintenance.

Comparing Mulesoft with Microsoft, MuleSoft has an advantage in the sense that it offers an all-in-one solution, while with Microsoft, it's more like dealing with numerous separate components. So, you have to figure out which specific components you need and how to connect them, almost like a toolkit that provides options to connect and integrate different things. It can be a bit challenging to determine which one is the most suitable for your needs in Microsoft's case. While you can build nearly anything with it, there's always a search for better methods to achieve your goals.

When considering the adoption of MuleSoft, it's important to take into account the expenses, including the licensing costs and the time and costs associated with training to become proficient in using it. On the other hand, starting with Azure might offer a more straightforward path to expansion and growth.

The entire offering and suite of tools that this solution provides have been very valuable. We are able to manage APIs on runtime on a cloud basis which has been very useful. 

The log management for this solution needs improvement. We would also like to have the capability to monitor usage metrics within the system. Currently, it is available, but only on a case-to-case basis. We would like to have an admin page where we could view and track all our usage metrics. 

We have been using this solution for more than six years. 

The scalability of this solution depends on how you configure it. When you design the implementation of the solution, you need to factor in multiple sets of requirements and configure the size of the APIs accordingly.

There is the standard SLA defined depending on the type of subscription or license. The support we have received has been good. 

Positive

I have previously used Oracle. 

The initial setup can be a bit challenging but usage of the solution after that is straightforward. 

When it comes to determining price, the pre-sales team interacts with the customer's primary integration team and the price is negotiated based on the specific usage of the system. 

If your organization wants to build reusable functionality using APIs and you are a cloud-first organization, I would recommend MuleSoft. I would not recommend this solution for tactical integrations but rather for strategic investments. You need to have a long-term vision as to what you are building, where you are building, and how best you can reuse what you build across the enterprise.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

The most valuable feature of Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager is the gateway that is provided.

Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager can improve some of the gateway features. We could use some more customization in creating rules. A lot of the policies are related to the APIs rather than the client. If I want to apply a policy based on a client that is not available.

The dashboards are configurable, but they are not readily available with the cloud. You can see a dashboard where you can check on what is deployed. For example, a complete view of what it is, such as how much code it takes. It's there in bits and pieces, we can configure it with our credentials, but it is not readily available. If they could add an enhanced visualizer it would be beneficial.

I have been using Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager for approximately one year.

Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager is stable.

Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager does not have out-of-the-box scalability and it is not something that you can receive readily. It is something you have to configure based on the requirements of the customer.

I rate the support from Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager a three out of five.

Neutral

Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager is on the cloud and there is no installation.

Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager is a complete API-led connectivity gateway and some of the other tools we have tried would not be appropriate for our needs, such as Apigee.

I rate Mulesoft Anypoint API Manager a seven out of ten.

We do business with a lot of other vendors and customers. Our main core business is to lend loans and lease furniture. In this context, we have to create partners and we have to do multiple transactions with multiple vendors and multiple facilitators. In this venture, we consider APIs the best, and our most sophisticated medium to communicate with other partners and other lenders at home and elsewhere.

We want APIs to be the most sophisticated and more robust. REST APIs are the core in this area. We have been using Mulesoft specifically to create our REST APIs, enlarge them, and also expose the endpoints to our vendors so that they can use them. Internally, we have been using the APIs extensively for all of our internal application communication. Raw ping and workflow and all those things. We use this Mulesoft extensively for API management, REST API stack, and also for the workflow.

We're going to have a task with another bank who will be lending us the loan or they will be giving us some money for us so that we can lend this to double customers and expand into different industries. We're doing the business directly with those banks who we're really trying to work with, and doing joint collaboration so that we can lend loans to the customers, the retail customers.

In this context, we have to collaborate with those banks in a sophisticated way. Few banks are very, very advanced in the necessary technology. We propose of them usage of the APIs. The advanced banks already have the APIs. That kind is a very smooth transition, but the banks whom we're working with, a couple of small banks, don't have the API stack. Whatever the legal systems they have, we enforce them to convert those existing legacy systems as the APIs, and also those other REST APIs, and we can have a smooth transition.

The initiative went very well, and they're very happy with a lot of the tasks we have been doing. Now, they have extended the business. They want to censor their existing systems. They want to expand their system. This is one of the examples of how the solution has improved our organization. In this juncture, we place Mulesoft as one of the core solutions in our organization API stack. Communicating with one application and other application, or the validation of the loan ID or the validation of a customer or generating the customer base, whatever it is. For the day to day tasks, we use API systems only. API is one of the most crucial parts of the IT initiatives which are going down in our office on a day to day business.

The ESB, the enterprise service bus is what we primarily use. In addition to that, the API management. These are the two tools which we have been using extensively. The enterprise platform. 

I don't think that it's a negative, but one of the biggest things is this: when they were merging with Salesforce they never said anything about that, they did not give any positive or negative news. They were just silent about that. I think there's something clandestine has been happening over there. I'd like to know what is the future roadmap of Mulesoft is after it got merged with Salesforce.

Nobody is giving proper information because I called a couple of Mulesofters and they're not giving information. I don't know whether they're naïve, or they don't want to disclose about whatever it is. That is the first thing they have to address. If they don't address probably they'll lose a lot of their customer base, so they must have to address that.

Also, in regards to near future resellers - they have to increase the capabilities for the Kubernetes, for continuous integration. Mostly you can call the DevOps. Still, now there are some gaps out there they have to address for the DevOps capability like continuous integration exclusively for the Kubernetes and Docker. They say that they have complained, but I asked for realistic examples and concerns, and still very few things have to be addressed. That is the first thing that they're going to have to address probably. I had some discussions with those people there. 

The second thing is they're mostly focusing on the security. I think security plays a vital role in going forward in regards to API stack. Not only for the API stack, but also for the enterprise service capabilities in which security plays a vital role. They're adding a lot of security capabilities over there. That is also one other thing I hope they continue to work on in the future.

In addition to that, they're going to add a lot of additional plugins. Plugins in the sense they compiled from Salesforce and a couple of other applications, but they have to address a few more applications. They should take a cue from Webex Desk. If everybody is using Webex Desk, every third-party application, and they want to communicate with Mulesoft, they don't have any plugins. They have worked a lot on the plugins. 

Lastly, regarding the streaming of data. In terms of streaming of data, I don't rely on Mulesoft. Whenever they do new data streaming or any streaming, the conceptual architecture connects to us, like data streaming and also for video streaming. Because the streaming capabilities are very minimal they don't stream. The capability was not there.

I heard that they're addressing this issue, probably in the next couple of months. They're going to address this issue. If they are, then I think this will be one of their biggest achievements. I think it will impact their business and also their challenge. It will impact the whole pipeline also, so they can accumulate more customers.

I've been using the solution for two years.

The solution is a stable one. But as the API stack has been increasing, whenever the new stack is saving, at the end of the day we have got our own Kubernetes to connect the APIs completely. The capacity has been increasing day by day, so we have to increase the capacity. We have to do so regularly. At least quarterly, we have to do some capacity planning for that. It's not cost-effective and it's got a cost impact too. We have to invest something around a few thousand dollars to enhance this capability.

Their method is not cost-effective. It's some costly, but for the performance and the overall customers who are using our APIs and what we're doing internally, we're happy with that. The organization is ready to bear that cost, but our only concern is they have to address our tasks. Whenever we seek their assistance they should address our task quickly. They should not insist to us that somebody from there will show up and do some due diligence. I think that is not required for all the customers because we feel that we're mature enough to tackle our own Mulesoft, whatever the day to day usage is concerned. We don't need their assistance anymore.

If we need them we will definitely put in some clear understanding that we need their assistance. But in future, we might only need assistance for Docker and Kubernetes because we're having some challenges over here. Or, in relation to security, we might need their assistance. 

It's highly scalable. It's a good technology. We have to increase and plan the capacity in advance. We have to execute our IP partly with other business because our business is very aggressive and very highly patent-oriented. To meet our business expectations, our IT stack has to be more efficient and more robust. We have to scale our business acumen in a very aggressive way. At this juncture, what we have to do is make our technologies or our applications more scalable and more persistent and continuously integrated. At this point of time, the features are being generously added. But there should give some flashpoints or something like that because the capacity has been missing.

I'm not sure whether we don't know how to configure those features or not. We're naïve about those features or maybe Mulesoft does not have them, but whenever we end up with this capacity, it has been going down, then we have to do a lot of due diligence and we have to do some capacity planning, which means we have to do some fibering, which has happened three to four times over a period of the last two years. We want to reduce that because it might impact our business. Because we have aggressive targets and loan book should be more, or I'll say we're expecting more from the customers.

At this point in time, our API stacks have been more supportive and more resilient. Mulesoft never gave any problem, but to scale up to this kind of capability, yes, we have to do some fibering but everything is going well, fortunately.

In terms of usage, I can say 1,000 to 2,000 users on day to day basis, because we have got a very big call center. They're not aware that they're using these APIs, but previously the APIs randomly show. I can say around 2,000 users are there. I'm talking about business users, not technical enrollment.

We want to scale up the user count, and want to increase our loan book on a regular basis. We're enhancing and emphasizing most on our digital capability so that a lot of customers who are entitled to and get to enroll as our customers, will be rendered loans. They will get paid online. Lots of things are new here. Innovations are being added and getting added in the near future. The customer base will also be increasing, so to make this happen, we have to scale our capabilities, and we have to meet our increasing customer base.

I don't oversee the Mulesoft activities on a day-by-day because I work on the enterprise architecture security. We rarely go and focus on Mulesoft but whenever we ask them any questions, rather than addressing the question, they completely answer in such a way that they will do some due diligence. Somebody will show up at our premises, and they'll send some statement of work or something like that.

They want to turn every question into a business. I understand business is not a charity. But at least, being customer service, something you have to understand through the customer perspective, is that customers are expecting to do some due diligence and that you understand the customer complaint correctly, and then address their concerns. If there really is any business potential there, then you can address that.

Rather than jumping into the business wagon initially, they should understand the concern. They should understand the issue, and they try to address that, then if they really feel that there's business, or they have a business opportunity out there, they can capitalize that. Nobody is refusing that.

Rather than focusing on numbers, they should focus more on the customer support service.

I don't think the company had a prior solution. Our IT stack has been matured from 2015 onwards. Gradually it's getting scaling up. In 2015 our company used to work on spreadsheets. IT stack was being set up in 2015. In 2016, we censored all our spreadsheets and all those things, and we brought Salesforce into our company so that all the call centers on the branch associates who disperse the loans, who grant and pursue the loans have been using that. Once the Salesforce has been established, gradually we found that API as one of the most innovative thing.

We brought APIs. First, initially we did some Java-enabled APIs, but we found that it was going to be consuming a lot of time and energy, so thought rather an API management product may be viable. We brought Mulesoft. I think somewhere around the beginning of 2017 we brought Mulesoft. 

Before joining the team, most of Mulesoft had already been initiated. But what I realized was that most of my colleagues and supervisors don't have the API experience. Secondly, even though they have the experience, Mulesoft gives a lot of tutorials on their website, but most of them are not self-explanatory. They insist that customers find a Mulesoft expert, mostly because they seek the assistance from the Mulesoft consulting group to come on board and do some due diligence, and then you will hear, "Somebody will come and install it." That is what they have been doing over a period of time. I think that this process is still continuing. I don't think that's been stopped.

So, we had a challenge with configuring initially when we installed Mulesoft, but you really have to understand the concepts of Mulesoft, and if you follow the regulatory and follow the manual if you have a little bit of experience, I think it's not a big deal. You can configure Mulesoft very efficiently.

In terms of the implementation strategy, initially, we were blindly following whatever the Mulesoft consultants said. They had been talking about creating your architecture, and this is what was involved in the deployment methodology. For almost one and one and a half year, we have been following them. Lately, we've changed the strategy, and we've customized our deployment strategy. We merged with Kubernetes, Jenkins, and we have JIRA inside our organization.

To make our customization comply with Docker and Kubernetes, it took some amount of time, but it consumes a bit amount of time to configure all these items within the Mulesoft and run it. It took around three to four months of time to complete this exercise because we struggled with the documents. They're not as explanatory as they should be. Also, whenever we tried to reach out the Mulesoft, they said that they would come out and they would do it, and they would do some consulting. But they would charge more. To avoid extra cost, we did our own exercise, and frankly speaking, the tutorials are not self-explanatory. The majority of this Docker and Kubernetes is not as mature as it should be when compared with Apigee. Apigee is very fast. 

Going forward, we're going to migrate all of our applications to Azure. That has also hasn't been addressed yet. But the concern has already been raised. I don't know when they're going to address it. Yeah, these are the challenges. The tutorials, whatever they give, is not self-explanatory. It takes a lot of time to build any new initiative as far as Mulesoft is concerned.

We already have our full development center. The email team is there who've been supporting us. We have an internal workforce in there we've been doing. Along with me, there are two more architects who report to me. They do their job, and one dedicated Mulesoft integration architect, I can say the solution architect, but she supports the Mulesoft activities. The Mulesoft delivery manager is there. They're checking this challenge. They're accepting this challenge, and we're looking all those things.

We had help with implementation by Mulesoft.

I cannot give you any figures because frankly speaking we never measured anything, but I can say that it has made a significant contribution. 

I'm unsure about licensing costs because I'm not the person who handles this. But, ballpark, it's probably somewhere around $300,000-$400,000 or something like that.

There are a lot of products available on the market. Mulesoft is very good. It's an amazing product, no doubt about it. There's quality in the standard version, and the acumen and the technology are very good. What I want to tell them is before going for Mulesoft to consider Apigee. There are a couple of open-sources out there. What I would suggest is to not go blindly with the product stack. If you want to use the APIs, understanding of APIs are must because no company is independent. They have to do business with other companies. API is one of the most standard and robust methodologies to communicate with other business and do the business for the day to day transactions. And API is one of the most friendly approaches.

In this juncture, before going with an API management solution, understand whether you can create your own in-house APIs and see if you can leverage on that based on for the timelines and the costs. Then you can examine your goals because not every company is the same. Product due diligence is must especially when you do business with huge numbers of customers. For those kinds of numbers, you have to do an aggressive and some scale due diligence before going for the product.

My suggestion is to do due diligence and find the registered products, which are capable, and customizable for your requirements. Then you go with that product. As far as Mulesoft is concerned, yes, most of the small-scale and medium-scale customers, yes, it is one of the best tools. But when you scale up for large-scale customers, it has got those capabilities, but the Mulesoft team is not addressing those capabilities.

With Apigee, they address the concern and they go after a solution, and have a different approach, whereas, with Mulesoft, they insist the customers follow their methodology, which may or may not be suitable for all the lines of businesses. But when you come to the Apigee, they tailor to vendors, they customize themselves and act as the business owner, and they make for the business one of the best solutions. That's the difference.

However, I'm sure that what Apigee can do, Mulesoft can do better. But they have to address these concerns. To address these concerns, they should publish more articles, and the tutorials should be updated. The tutorials and the knowledge base should be updated thoroughly, and it should be made available for all the customers, as well as new learners.

Generally, they can make their product more sellable. It should not be hidden. I feel that is one of the challenges they have been facing, and they're not addressing that over a period of time.

I would rate this solution at 8 or 8.5 out of 10.

We are using the solution to move away from a point-to-point integration to a more managed API platform while doing analytics to monetize the API. We use the solution daily.

When doing point-to-point integration, you would need to set up the VPN and Exchange, but it is now easy because once you define an API, you can quickly expose it to third parties. Since you do not need to redo the work, the time to market is faster. In terms of analytics, you can read the traffic rating and even the monetization.

The auto-creation of the API documentation is useful. I used RAML for that, and it made creating API catalogs easier. The solution automatically creates API documentation based on how you define it.

The solution is missing a monetization module. One of our key use cases is engaging with third parties, so the solution has a disadvantage because you are forced to enter a contract with another third party just for billing.

Moreover, there are readily-available connectors, such as Oracle E-Business Suite, but you will have to pay for that. In that way, the solution might get expensive. These connectors should be easily accessible from the marketplace once you have access to the platform, rather than them reselling other products to you. It now defeats the whole purpose of quickly integrating a finance platform without further costs, and you are then forced to redo an already available connector if the budget does not allow you to purchase that connector.

We are still in the initial stages but have been developing APIs on MuleSoft Anypoint API Manager for roughly three to four months.

I rate the stability a ten out of ten because there have not been any issues so far. I am confident we can add more APIs.

I rate the solution's scalability a nine out of ten. We have 20 developers at our organization using the solution, and we hope to increase that number because we are roping in other developers from our SPUs to onboard them onto the platform.

The vendor trained us and offered support beyond the contract, so I rate their after-sales support positively.

Positive

I rate the initial setup an eight out of ten. It is straightforward, and deploying the solution took a week or two.

MuleSoft technicians trained and then assessed us on the solution as a part of the deployment process. The solution architect then monitored us until we could deploy the solution on our own. There were some APIs that they deployed themselves, and we started onboarding our own APIs once we were ready to do so.

During deployment, we required one person for the networks and one for the connectivity, and we also needed a solution architect. We had one person designing the architecture and one for development.

We only need one developer/administrator for maintenance, but maintenance is not an issue if you are used to the solution.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten since it is expensive from a Zimbabwean perspective. There are no additional costs apart from the licensing costs.

The solution is highly rated and is in the top three in Gartner Reports, and I highly recommend it. I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We utilized Mulesoft API Management for a learning management system and content management system for the education sector.

We used the latest version of this solution. It was deployed on a hybrid Azure cloud.

There are around 200 people using this solution.

The security features are good. It's easy to configure the end-to-end integration with existing applications.

There should be more pricing options or certain discounts for the education sector.

I used this solution for about six months. I work as a cloud solution architect for a few companies.

It's stable.

We didn't utilize the scalability features.

Technical support is good. I was already working in Mulesoft, so I didn't require any technical help.

I'm a technical guy, so it was pretty straightforward by reading the documents.

Deployment took five months.

I was working as an architect. After that, they got their own in-house development team, and I handed over the entire project to them to manage the deployment and further development.

There were two people on the development team, and I was working as a cloud solution architect, so the whole team was three people.

I would rate this solution 8 out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for our APIs. We are moving from monoliths to API architecture and we have approximately 10,000 to 12,000 APIs across banks, which are hosted on this product. It also provides us a gateway service to ingress the traffic as well as whole policy management where stuff is taken care of from the PC Any Point. It also has some API-level runtime policy management, which we use.

The gateway service to ingress the traffic is great. 

The whole policy management has been great. 

It has some API-level runtime policy management, which is useful for us.

The solution is extremely mature.

You can scale the solution.

The only drawback is that, due to the fact that we are going into a completely API structured way of working, it is very tightly coupled with the vendor solutions. For example, the run times. What happens is when you have to do a change or you have to do anything, you have to rip off all the APIs and rebuild it.

If you see the features, they are really good in one sense, however, they have a certain drawback when you get into the operational way of working. We definitely need APIs to have policies at runtime. They provide a feature where there's a lot of policy on authorizations, however, the only problem is the runtime. 

When the runtime upgrades, we have to basically publish a new build pack and then do all the rebundling. When we were 2000, 3000 APIs, it was okay. However, when you start going up to 10,000 to 12,000 APIs, it was too much.

The whole cost is an issue. Deploying to production is not a very easy job in that bank as we go through the whole change process. The whole tight coupling of the product is a problem. 

As a bank, we didn't want to take any risk of getting so much tightly coupled with any vendor product. It should be replaceable as required. That's the only reason we are now changing products.

The upgrade is a very messy process. Mule 3.X to 4 or 4.2 requires you have to rewrite the APIs. It is not just upgrading the build pack with a runtime. That is something that gets us scared a lot. They came back and told us when we move to four run times we had to upgrade. You had to rewrite the APIs. The APIs cannot just work in a straightforward manner. There is a lot of change and we have approximately 5% Mule APIs and then the rest are boot APIs. While, now, that means 5,000 APIs need rewiring, after two years, we might have 20,000 APIs. They should have a proper way of having backward compatibility.

The initial setup is complex. 

If they are going with that control pane in a cloud, which is a very good feature and it is a managed service, they should give it 24/7, 100% uptime. They should also spin it across multiple regions. Currently, they are just the US and the EU is coming up. However, they should add, for example, China or Asia, et cetera. We operate in more than nearly 40 countries. Every country has a lot of its own governance and compliance and regulatory checks or some, where we cannot host to the cloud.

We have used the solution for three and a half to four years at this point.

We have a massive set up and definitely, there are sometimes a few issues, which come here and there, however, we manage to build a resiliency inside that.

We have scaled from a few hundred APIs to 10,000 APIs. Just on the retail part, the gateway service runs more than 125 million transactions per day. It's a huge setup we have. 

The only drawback back again is that their gateways are pretty heavy on hardware. Therefore, we spend a lot of money on the hardware. If you compare with Kong, Kong actually can just replace everything with two VMs. We have 500 VMs running for us as gateways. It has scalability, however, it will cost you, which is a problem.

Technical support has been helpful. There were also people embedded in my team.

We are migrating from Mule to Kong now. We just have signed the contracts and we are basically getting the thing set up. It is a big project and it is going to take maybe another three to four months to roll it out to non-production and maybe another five months into production as we need to get everything in compliance and clear.

The initial setup, if you go back three or three and a half years, definitely, for us, was complex. As a bank, we run through a lot of securities. Since then, they have matured the process. They worked with us, to do some upgrades. Kong also will have to do a few things for us, once we migrate. Currently, we are already finding some issues, which Kong is trying to help us and fix it. However, Mule took a bit of time to set up. If we were to do it now, it would be easy. 

They have come up with API management and cloud hub, which is the manual service. We have not used it much, however, there are some use cases from a different part of the bank that tried it out. It's a good option as you get rid of the whole operational management side of the whole control pane. The control pane we are running is a PC 1.7.3 or something, which is old and coming up on the end of support.

The cloud hub may solve the problem of the control pane, even though they have some issues with the maintenance windows and stuff. Due to the fact that the policies are cast in the control pane, and run times can struggle, if the control pane goes down or needs maintenance because we need a hundred percent of availability in some way or other, it needs to be resilient also. The maintenance windows can cause trouble for us in banking.

We originally signed a three-year licensing agreement.

There's room for improvement on the licensing. They could do better.

I'm not sure I would recommend the solution to everyone. The approach we have taken is, we have moved out completely from the Mule APIs to Spring Boot APIs. We will decouple the whole vendor locking and stuff. However, it depends on the use case for each company. There is no good and bad product. These guys are both very mature products. Depending upon the use case, you will have to consider how you will handle scaling, for example, or other challenges. 

Everything has a drawback and plus and minus, so pros and cons. Even Kong is a new product. It may be a good performer, and very lightweight, with low infrastructure needs. We don't know. 

Our cyber is very strong. Like us, people will have to evaluate, depending upon their use cases, all the pros and cons of security and see how it fits. 

I'd rate the solution at a seven out of ten.