Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) Reviews

Right now, we are doing all wireless through ISE. We have also started migrating to wired.

We have about 20 sites. By having enough node regionalization, we have been able to have all our sites utilizing it.

It is deployed to multiple locations. We have one in Mexico, one in Kelso, two in Asia, and then two in the US.

It improved our standardization with all its policy sets being the same. 

Since migrating towards doing wired ports over ISE with 802.1X and MAB authentication, our organization's security risk has been better. We have been able to establish better layouts, so devices can move and we don't have to worry about where they need to go.

The Guest Portal is a big feature for us. 

It does a good job of establishing trust for every access request. We have had a little bit of a challenge with profiling, but we are probably about 80% there.

I have been using it for five years.

The stability is fairly good. Since we went to the 2.6 version, it has been a lot better.

Scalability is good as far as adding another node. However, if you ever wanted to increase the node that you have, then you need to buy a bigger license. You also have to build a new VM for it because you can't just scale it.

I had one problem with the portal. I got support from TAC and it worked out really well. It was really good. I would rate the support as 10 out of 10.

Positive

We did not previously use another solution.

We were looking to solve the challenge where people were moving devices that they were not supposed to.

The initial deployment was straightforward and took a couple of months. It was actually a project for a customer, then the customer backed out. So, we spent a good year without using it for anything.

The initial deployment was for a customer in Asia, so we had to deploy it in our Asia data center. We then deployed it in our US data center to kind of match that configuration.

We did use a consultant from Presidio for our first deployment project. Since then, we have been doing deployments ourselves.

Two people were needed for the deployment: the consultant and myself.

There is probably a return on investment as far as increased time for people not having to worry about devices moving around nor having to be contacted about moving them to the appropriate spot.

Its licensing could be improved. It used to be perpetual, but now they are moving away from that.

Make sure you understand where you want to deploy nodes and how far away they are from other locations since there is some latency involved.

We don't do any sort of application-based stuff right now. It is just purely assigning devices to what VLAN they are supposed to go to.

We are looking to upgrade to a newer version. Hopefully, by seeing some of the stuff at Cisco's event, I can find some more features that we could use.

I would rate the solution as eight out of 10.

One of our use cases is using it for authentication for the wireless. Our internal corporate network is using the Cisco ISE server to authenticate clients and make sure that we have the right clients on the wireless side, as well as on the wired side. We just introduced that about a year ago to make sure all our wired clients are our clients and not some "rando" plugging into the network.

Definitely, getting away from pre-shared keys has been the biggest key. It is allowing users to connect to the internal network, the employee's network, from anywhere, across the entire US. It is allowing that ease of use. 

It's also allowing us to see what's connected to the network. We can see that there are only really clients. We can see what's connected on the wired side and what's getting blocked, and understand [things] from our users. "Okay, that's getting plugged in. What do you guys use this for?" It's adding a layer of defense that's super important to our organization.

I don't think we've gotten away from trust completely, but it has helped a lot. It's allowed, on the server side and on the infrastructure side, to allow certain clients. We don't have to trust the client necessarily. We know that that's a corporate client and we don't have to play any guessing games. The corporate client that we want on that specific network is going to have the right cert and the right thing. It allows access control without a lot of human involvement.

It's helped significantly. We have fewer IoT devices on internal networks and that's the key. Your clients have the right firewall protections and the right anti-virus. Those are on the internal network so you're not putting stuff [on it] that you don't know whether it has a security vulnerability or if it's easily hacked. You're allowing those to be in separated networks that silo them off with a PSK. And you're keeping the internal network to clients that you know are protected.

[One of the most valuable features] is just the ease of use. It's pretty simple to set up certs that we can add to our clients to make sure that they connect properly, [as is] whitelisting Mac addresses. 

It also integrates really well with some of our other services like ServiceNow. A ticket comes in and then, boom, it's automatically going to the ISE, and then ISE is allowing that client with that Mac address to get on the network easily.

[In addition, regarding establishing trust for every access request, no matter where it comes from] it does the job. It's a perfect solution in order to manage a large corporate network.

It allows that access control [for a distributed network]. That's super significant. It allows you to segment things and allows only certain devices to access the network.

Automation [is an area for improvement]. It seems like everywhere I look, automation is super important. Automation and integrations. That's the area it could be improved, as we get more and more away from a lot of human involvement and [into] machine learning and just trusting that these systems could automatically help us.

My name is Edward Martinez. Network engineer. Our company has about 5,000 employees, and we're in the beverage industry.

[I've been using Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine)] ever since I started. That was one of the main services that I had to understand and get involved with as soon as I started at our company.

I haven't had many issues in terms of its stability. It doesn't really ever go down. Anytime we ever have any issues with it, it's usually human error.

In the past, I've always had pretty good support from Cisco. Their TAC is really good. They're pretty straightforward. I haven't had many experiences with ISE, honestly. It works so well we haven't had to reach out too much.

I would rate their support about a nine out of 10. It works most of the time. It depends on the engineer you run into. It depends on the people you deal with.

Positive

[The main challenge] was authentication and not using PSK, traditional pre-shared keys. They wanted to get away from pre-shared keys; people share them. They wanted something that would allow clients to just connect automatically, not have a pre-shared key, and be secure. That's the most important part, making sure that the right clients are getting on our internal corporate network.

[Our company] was just using PSK and that solution was really built around access control of our corporate networks. They were using PSKs at every site and rotating those PSKs, or had site-specific PSKs. Now, when somebody comes into the office, they can just connect to the employees' network automatically, and it's the same across the board at every site. 

It was this idea that we needed to simplify things. We needed to make it easier on our users to go into an office and connect to the internet and not have to ask an IT guy there or make a ticket. That was the important part.

I've just been involved with the secondary deployment, using the ISE on our wired ports.

It was pretty straightforward. It was funny. We did it during COVID so it was really easy when nobody was in the office to implement the solution. It kind of worked out that way, when there was nobody in the office.

But otherwise, people have started to come back and we haven't had really many issues in terms of authentication. It's really easy. People have wired in and if their client has the right cert, it's been a breeze. They've been authenticated and it takes a minimal amount of time.

We have an operations partner that we deal with pretty often. It's an Austrian company, NTS. They work with Cisco a lot on our solutions and, obviously, we're evaluating it with them and then making choices based off of that. I'm the onsite hands. I do a lot of the configuration on the switches, but they're doing a lot of the advising.

You're seeing less tickets and you have fewer security issues. I think the return on investment is there. It has really improved our situation in our corporate offices.

Resilience is super important. The solution needs to be able to hold up and promise what it [intends] to deliver. In cyber security, that's super important because if you have any slight exploit, you're going to have malware attacks, ransomware attacks. That's [a] big [issue] in our company as, more and more, you hear about legacy systems being affected. These legacy systems sometimes don't go away. Sometimes you need them. You have to do your best to either patch them up or protect them either through a firewall or an access control system. 

[It's about] protecting the network infrastructure from exploits and really allowing us to segment IoT devices and the corporate network. And because [on] the corporate network, once you get into it, there really isn't anything protecting against accessing critical storage systems, accessing mission-critical servers, [or] our sales numbers, it's super important that we have the ISE so that we're only allowing the things that we want into the network that we trust.

[What I would tell leaders who want to build more resilience within their organization would be] evaluate solutions, prioritize it, get manpower behind it. Also, too often they put cyber security on the back burner. They're trying to maintain operations and sometimes cyber security can get in the way of operations. But trust that system, once you build it up, will protect you and that it's worth the investment in terms of money, labor, and time.

The primary use cases include customer environments, BYOD, posture assessment, and dot1x for wireless and wired networks.

I'm customer-focused, and for my customers, Cisco ISE has enabled them to deploy secure wireless and secure wired networks and gave them a lot of flexibility to do security enforcement.

The posture assessment is a valuable feature because of the ability to do assessments on the clients before they connect to the network.

The guests' BYOD portal and onboarding are feature-rich and fairly straightforward and easy to set up.

From a zero-trust standpoint, it is critical that Cisco ISE considers all resources to be external because, in essence, we don't want to allow anybody on the network that hasn't been verified. Even when they're on the network, we want to make sure that they have the least amount of privileges to do their job.

Cisco ISE hasn't eliminated trust, but it's definitely helped us to migrate more toward zero-trust network environments. It helped us to have a much better security posture overall to help eliminate threats and also give visibility into the response.

ISE is generally deployed as a distributed environment, and it makes it easier to have local resources across the distributed environment so that you're not dependent on always-on access to a data center. In case you lose your internet connection or lose an MPLS connection, you can still have a certain amount of security control at the distributed location.

As far as securing access to applications go, with the posture assessment you get a lot more visibility into the applications on the client when you deploy it and a lot more control over enforcing connectivity in the network, especially with secure group access.

When I work with customers to do my knowledge transfer, they're really overwhelmed with the navigation of the product and the number of things you can do with it. From a user interface standpoint, Cisco could focus on making certain tasks a bit more guided and easier for customers to walk through. That is, a user-friendly interface and streamlined workflows would be great.

I've been using Cisco ISE for about eight years.

I've had very few issues with stability and haven't run into any bugs.

It scales quite well. Essentially, you can scale up to about 500,000 users, and most of my customers are south of that.

I am familiar with ClearPass. I prefer ISE because most of the environments I'm dealing with are Cisco networks. Having the device administration based on TACACS+ is a plus, with it being a proprietary protocol. ISE definitely implements it better than other solutions. From a conceptual standpoint, ISE makes more sense.

ISE may be a bit difficult for my customers because they're not used to it, but the reality is that the workflows make a lot more sense to me than they did with other solutions like ClearPass.

The first deployment I did was complex because I ran into the same thing my customers did. It's overwhelming at first to figure out because there are so many options and so many different use cases. It was tough to narrow it down to what was important and what could be added later.

However, after having done 30 or 40 deployments, it's now straightforward.

I've deployed the solution in a bunch of different environments. I have manufacturing customers with centralized management and monitoring, so the PAN and the MTS are in data centers that are separate but with PSMs deployed all across the network for the distributed model. There also are some, where everything's pretty much in a data center or is split across two data centers.

Licensing has gotten much simpler since Cisco moved to the DNA model because we just have the three tiers, but it could always stand to be improved upon.

I evaluated ClearPass.

To leaders who want to build more resilience within their organization, I would say that it's definitely worth moving toward a zero-trust environment. It's really a rebranding of an old concept of least privileged access, but the tools we have to implement it, such as Cisco ISE and firewalls, at the core and the ability to broker it out to the cloud as well, give us a lot more visibility and a lot more control over the traffic and our data, which is our biggest asset.

If you're evaluating the solution, pick two to three use cases, stick with those, and familiarize yourself with the solution. Try not to get overwhelmed with the interface, and don't try to see everything it can do and let it spin out of control; it's easy to do that. Just start with something you really need to implement and then worry about adding more features later on.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cisco ISE at nine.

We use it mostly for identity, authentication, and authorizations for wireless and wired. The challenges we were looking to address were mostly around the authorization and authentication of the users. We wanted to use the Identity Services Engine to make sure that the users accessing our network were authorized users, with the authentication happening before.

The integration with Active Directory, and finding and authorizing users based on their Active Directory groups, rather than just their identities, was a big change for us.

The most valuable feature is 801.1x and another very good feature is the TACACS.

In addition, it establishes trust for every access request. That's very valuable. We can't authorize users without it. The fact that it considers all resources to be external is very important. Without Cisco ISE, we couldn't authorize our users, contractors, and everyone else. It's our one source of truth for authentication and authorization.

It's also very good when it comes to supporting an organization across a distributed network. We like that. 

I would like to see integration with other vendors, and the RADIUS integration needs to be improved a little bit.

Other than that, all the features that we're using look good.

I have been using Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) for about six years.

It has been very stable. There's no problem with that, as we have redundancy in place.

It can be scaled very quickly by adding more nodes to the solution. The scalability is very good.

We have it deployed in three data centers in Austin, Texas, Lewisville, Texas, and one in Poland. It's a distributed deployment and we have around 8,000 endpoints on it so far.

Technical support has been okay, but I wouldn't describe it as "very good." We have had some problems with technical support. Sometimes it takes them too long to resolve a problem. 

Neutral

The pricing is good. The last time we purchased four new appliances the price was doable for any organization of our size.

In my previous job, I used Aruba ClearPass. It's similar to ISE. They're both good.

Design it well in the first place. If you design it well, you can scale it. Always read, line-by-line, the Cisco guide because that's where you'll find all the information about the design and the scalability. If you design it correctly in the first place, you will have a smooth ride.

We want to use it in a hybrid cloud deployment, but we currently use it 100 percent on-premises. As we move more into the cloud, we're trying to integrate that with Cisco ISE to make it our authentication and authorization source. We're not really into the cloud yet. We're just doing some dev. We're building a whole cloud strategy.

We use Cisco ISE for 802.1 network authentication.

ISE integrates well with other Cisco products.

This solution does not provide us with enough visibility into our network. We would like to see additional information that it does not show. In general, the reporting is not very useful.

ISE needs to have better integration with third-party products.

A basic profiling engine would make a good addition because device profiling is very important.

This product requires the use of agents and ideally, I would like an agentless version. I think that they should get rid of them because they are hard to manage and deploy. Also, they are not useful.

The interface is not very user-friendly and it is not simple to use.

I have been using the Cisco Identity Services Engine for six years.

This is a stable product. The features that do work, work well, and we use it on a daily basis.

I would say that this product is scalable because we are using it in our central headquarters, in addition to several branch offices.

We do not pay for Cisco SMARTnet, so we did not contact technical support.

Prior to using ISE, we were using a solution by Trustwave. It is a different product because it uses Name Poisoning methods. It was an interesting solution but we changed because the price of support is too high. We opted to instead purchase a new product.

The initial setup is not simple. I don't consider our deployment to be complete because we were unsuccessful at trying to use the majority of the features. The fact that we can't solve these problems is why we are searching for another solution.

We had assistance from a consultant for the deployment.

Internally, we have a team of five administrators who manage this product.

The SMARTnet technical support is available at an additional cost.

I am currently doing research on Fortinet FortiNAC because I find that Cisco ISE is not a very powerful tool.

My advice for anybody who is considering Cisco ISE is to first run a proof of concept to see that all of the features work well. In my opinion, you have to see all of the features.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We are using it in-house for phone profiling and for users' computer authentication needs.

The policy and segmentation that we use are currently based on the users and their domains. Let's say different domains, such as HR or finance and procurement. We have policies where users are assigned VLANs or specific requirements and are directed to corresponding policies where services are activated. They have access to specific services based on their domain or vertical.

Many Cisco ISE features are good. It offers automatic profiling of phones and computers, enabling administrators to identify and categorize devices seamlessly. Additionally, Cisco ISE can block anonymous devices attempting to connect to the network. This includes unauthorized attempts from non-domain computers or users trying to obscure their identity to gain network access. Cisco ISE ensures such attempts are thwarted by enforcing full identification authentication.

I struggled with spoofing, specifically the max spoofing feature, which I believe has started working after version 3. Before that, it was not that effective. They could incorporate some AI features.

I have been using Cisco ISE for over three years.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a out of ten.

Scalability is also good. I haven't seen any problem because I currently have a new deployment for the ISE and other branches. Getting an integrated access setup is easy, and scalability is also fine. Initially, the scale upon the licensing part and that sizing is low. ISE's existing policies pretty much work very well. There are no significant changes you have to make.

We have more than a thousand users using this solution.

ISE support is good.

The initial setup is straightforward. They are very easy to manage and not complicated at all.

We have received all our files from the client and deployed them. Currently, we are using single active nodes. We have one Primary Admin Node, which is active, and one Policy Service Node. We don't have a secondary admin node for administrative purposes. We have an active operational node. The deployment is pretty simple. You download the file from Cisco, import it into your Cisco ISE, and follow the prompts to set it up based on your requirements, including IPs, basic security needs, DNS servers, etc. Once the initial setup is complete, you can begin creating policies.

Cisco ISE protects your environment from potential physical attacks. This ensures that your environment and users are fully safe, thus enhancing your overall security posture as a first line of defense.

We don't have the full license. An enterprise license includes Apex and device management. We secured it for one of our new branches where the deployment will start. We have a full enterprise license, including Apex and device management, to cut costs.

The problem is we have a team of five. I look into the security and infrastructure part.

Integrating Cisco ISE depends on the specific products you're working with. Each integration may present unique challenges that require individualized solutions. There isn't a one-size-fits-all checklist for potential issues.

They were looking to protect their assets, such as devices, from somebody. If they have an environment exposed to users who frequently come to their office, and it's not a very closed environment, then Cisco ISE is very much required. It's the first place where the attack starts. From a risk and compliance perspective, ISE is essential.

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

We use Cisco ISE Identity Services Engine currently for TACACS and posturing.

The product elevated my organization’s security level, helped us meet some guidelines, and made our life easy.

We found all the features of the product to be valuable. We have no complaints about it. Posturing is valuable to my organization. Now, we're improving our whole environment to go into a Zero Trust policy, and Cisco Identity Services Engine plays a huge role in it. We're defense contractors, so we support DOD and have specific stakes and a baseline to go with. Our strict environment requires us to do certain things, and the solution plays a role in it.

They should improve their licensing. Licensing is always trouble with Cisco, and Cisco Identity Services Engine is no different. The way the product is licensed could be improved.

I have been using the solution for almost three years.

The solution’s stability is good to go so far. Some vulnerabilities had popped up like any other solution, but Cisco remediated them. There was no problem.

We haven’t even scraped to the surface of what the tool could do. It's very scalable, and we will try to use it as much as we can in the future.

We have had no issues with the product’s customer support so far. We had a neutral experience with support.

Positive

We have seen a return on investment in terms of not pursuing any other solutions. We didn't need to look further. The product did what it does for us now. We are very content with it. We don't have to invest further into something else.

The solution’s pricing is okay.

The tool secures our infrastructure to a certain point. However, we're not using it in terms of detection. My team is only four people, and we take all the tasks together.

The solution did not help us consolidate tools. However, it does help us with TACACS. TACACS was a big thing that we needed. We are trying to get rid of NPS and RADIUS, and we will probably use the product in the future for Certificate Authority. It could probably consolidate tools, but it's not doing it now. However, it will in the future.

The product has absolutely improved our cybersecurity resilience. With all the posturing we're doing and the Zero Trust policy we are bringing, it prevents other users from insider threats. It helps big time with insider threats. It's a big thing for us in our specific programs.

Give it a shot because we did give it a shot. People at first said it was very pricey, but it wasn't really as pricey as people say it is. It's worth trying it. Zero Trust will be mandated later, especially if you're in the government. The product will play a big role in it.

One of our team members was pursuing a certification in CCMP security. He was specifically on the Cisco Identity Services Engine track. We got that for him to demo and test it out. Eventually, it became part of our product. TACACS, Posturing, and Certificate Authority could be the reason why we chose the solution. We are using it now for 802.1X. All port security is not a thing anymore for us.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We use Cisco ISE to authenticate users or devices onto the network and then drop them into the appropriate VLANs to isolate them and maintain network segmentation.

Cisco ISE has been a great tool to segment our traffic and get the users into the right VLANs. It definitely does free up a lot of time from manual configurations.

It has definitely improved our security a lot. We used to be a single flat network, and now, we are a segmented network where we have all our different traffic isolated so that in case we do get a breach, not all the customers are affected.

Cisco ISE has been great for securing our infrastructure from end to end so that we can detect and remediate threats. We've already seen it detect some devices that we didn't know about, and they quarantine those devices, allowing us to take the appropriate security actions against them.

Our IT staff has been freed up for other projects with Cisco ISE because we're able to do a little bit more automated configuration. We just throw out a single configuration to the ports, and then the users get dropped into whatever VLAN they need to be in without us having to go to each site and configure these things manually. On a usual workday, it has freed up at least a couple of engineers for two to three hours.

Our cybersecurity resilience has improved with Cisco. Users are now segmented. We have firewalls in between, so we can take a look at all the traffic. We have quarantine enabled in there so that if we get a device on our network that we don't recognize, we can lock it down.

The feature that I found most valuable is profiling. We use that to profile certain types of devices, and then depending on the manufacturer, drop them into the appropriate VLAN without us having to go in and manually add the devices.

We would definitely like to see a little bit of an improvement in the web GUI navigation. Some of the things are a little bit hidden in the drop-down menu. If we could get a way to get to those quicker, it'd be much more useful.

We've been using Cisco ISE for about three years.

So far, from what we've been using, we haven't had any problems even with any of the additional patches that we've added. It has been great.

Scalability-wise, it's great. We have plenty of space to add additional nodes. Right now, the ones we do have are not being utilized to a hundred percent, so if we ever do need to add additional, it seems pretty straightforward.

Cisco support has been pretty good over the years, helping us get this stuff up and running. It has definitely taken us a while, and some of the cases have been pretty long, but Cisco support has been pretty good. I'd rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We weren't using anything in place of Cisco ISE previously. We were pretty lacking in that department. When we got Cisco ISE, we improved our security significantly.

We went for Cisco ISE based on a suggestion from one of our vendor partners who helped us with our network refresh. They said that Cisco ISE was something that they had used previously in lots of larger deployments, and they had seen great success with it.

I was involved in its deployment. It was pretty straightforward. A lot of the issues that we ran into were related to coordination with the users just because it was a change for them, but the actual deployment and everything else were pretty straightforward.

We used MTT. They were great. They walked us through the whole process. They designed the network refresh for us as well as the Cisco ISE integration portion of it.

We've seen an ROI. We've freed up some hours, so those engineers who were previously doing more mundane tasks are now able to do something else.

I don't know too much about the actual pricing on it. The licensing part is pretty straightforward. It's a lot more simple than some of the other Cisco licensing models. In that aspect, it's great.

Overall, I'd rate Cisco ISE a nine out of ten.