Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.
Cisco Secure Workload has undergone significant modifications, with certain functionalities being moved into Cisco SD-Access. Despite these changes, it still offers valuable features like vulnerability scanning and cataloging. It operates on an agent-based system and utilizes a catalog and scoring function to locate known vulnerabilities. Another valuable feature is that it provides end-to-end protection for Cisco products. Users appreciate its user-friendly interface and stability, and scalability.
A few users complained that Cisco Secure Workload is complex to use. They said the dashboard is not intuitive and that there is a significant learning curve. Some said the integration with products from different vendors could be better. Some users said they preferred the previous version of the product and wished all the functionality would be consolidated into a single product.
Users indicated they did not evaluate the return on investment (ROI) for Cisco Secure Workload.
Cisco Secure Workload is considered expensive, involving hardware and software costs.
The primary use case of Cisco Secure Workload is to support micro-segmentation within a Cisco shop, particularly in financial institutions. It complements the existing Cisco infrastructure, including routers, switches, and endpoints, as part of a suite of solutions.
Customers had good things to say about Cisco's customer service, finding the technical support to be satisfactory in terms of responsiveness. Cisco support is highly regarded in the field of networking products. However, some customers mentioned that the support may not be as strong for higher-layer products like software and application layer products.
The setup for Cisco Secure Workload involves deploying an agent, which is similar to other solutions. The initial setup process for Cisco Secure Workload was straightforward and could be completed within one to two days. It is recommended to have one to two people available for deployment and maintenance, although one person can handle the process with backup support.
The solution of Cisco Secure Workload is highly flexible and can easily accommodate growth.
The solution of Cisco Secure Workload is highly reliable and dependable, with no reported issues or interruptions.
Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.
Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.
Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.
When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.
Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.
Reviews from Real Users
“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor
Cisco Secure Workload was previously known as Cisco Tetration.
ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)