Cisco IOS Security Reviews

I deal with Cisco Secure Firewall, especially when dealing with zero-day attacks, and known and unknown malware, both inbound and from within the network.

So, it includes IOS Security and IDPS functionalities. 

Cisco IOS Security is a mature product with extensive capabilities, serving as the base for the defense layer. It offers good network visibility, which helps in rapid response through the Rapid Threat Containment feature. Its deployment and configuration are straightforward.

From a networking perspective, for instance, Cisco IOS incorporates time-tested security features.

The zone-based firewall feature has significantly influenced our network security management. For instance, when managing multiple geolocations, it's essential to apply geographically appropriate policies. 

If a customer operates within the UK zone, I need to implement UK-specific policies. This approach is also applicable to customers in the Asia Pacific and UK regions. It enables me to tailor security policies based on the geographical location of my customers, such as adjusting policies for customers in China or Japan. This flexibility helps in creating a comprehensive zone list.

Additionally, this feature allows for seamless service agreements between all zones from headquarters, providing access to all zones within the firewall we create. Essentially, it facilitates the creation of zones within the firewall.

The product is quite mature. Cisco is well known within the industry.

The solution's most valuable aspect is that it is extremely integrated. The product basically comes with the firewall features including IPS, URL filtering, malware, et cetera. The integrated features are great.

The functionalities of the product are pretty good.

Cisco has always been a premium product. There's a lot of other entry-level solutions. This is more robust.

The solution offers a good mix of features. You can always add more modules as you need to if you need even more features.

The pricing of the solution can be improved. It's not cheap. It's quite expensive.

The company needs to make its solution more affordable to make it more accessible to larger markets. Otherwise, it's seen as an enterprise-level solution that small or medium-sized organizations can't afford and therefore they won't even look at it.

We use it as a firewall, mainly for protection.

The most valuable features are DNS service and shell self-service within a network.

This solution should be implemented for most enterprise-level customers. It ensures that users accessing the corporate network or wireless network with their own devices are authenticated and authorized. As a network administrator, I can track who is accessing the network, what devices they are using, and their device profiling.

This solution, called Network Access Controller, handles authentication, authorization, and accounting for devices accessing the network. It includes device profiling and various other features. I focus primarily on the MAC part for access control, but there are other features available.

IOS Security is a firewall, and every connection goes through it. We have around 12,000 people in the company.

In Pakistan, we only use Cisco because they have good local support infrastructure. Huawei and Fortinet don't offer direct support in Pakistan.

We use the solution for the security of the network.

The stability is fine. The technical support is good.

Our primary use is just as a firewall. That is pretty much it.  

We are able to filter a lot of traffic. The is especially effective when a lot of the traffic is in layer 7 — the internet aspect of security for application services.  

My organization is an ISP using IOS Security to secure enterprise resources. We previously had it deployed on-premises, but we have switched to the cloud. We prefer AWS for latency purposes because it's based in South Africa. 

The VPN was valuable for us because more people are working from home. It has a lot of reporting and easy-to-use management tools.