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Cisco Secure Firewall pros and cons

Vendor: Cisco
4.1 out of 5
15K followers
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Pros & Cons summary

Cisco Secure Firewall offers stability and reliability, minimizing downtime and securing networks with advanced malware protection and intrusion prevention. It supports VPN solutions and excels in network segmentation. However, its integration with third-party devices is limited, and the complex configuration requires Cisco command-line expertise. Performance issues like high CPU usage and complex licensing present challenges, and integration with other Cisco tools occasionally suffers glitches.

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Prominent pros & cons

PROS

Cisco Secure Firewall offers comprehensive VPN solutions and robust troubleshooting and debugging tools.
The detection engine and historical analysis capability, based on Snort technology, enhance threat investigations.
High stability and minimal maintenance requirements make Cisco ASA a reliable choice for network security.
Clustering architecture allows for zero downtime upgrades, ensuring near-perfect uptime.
Advanced Intrusion Prevention Systems and integration with other Cisco tools provide enhanced security and protection against threats.

CONS

Cisco Secure Firewall requires extensive knowledge of ASA command line, as many functions are not available in the graphical interface.
Integration with third-party devices is limited, favoring Cisco products.
The VPN capabilities are weak as route-based VPNs are not supported.
Memory leakage issues cause system freezing, requiring manual reboots for resolution.
The setup and configuration are complex, involving separate setups for ASA, SFR module, and FMC.
 

Cisco Secure Firewall Pros review quotes

reviewer1217634 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 28, 2019
With the FMC and the FirePOWERs, the ability to quickly replace a piece of hardware without having to have a network outage is useful. Also, the ability to replace a piece of equipment and deploy the config that the previous piece of equipment had is pretty useful.
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MC
Sep 14, 2021
One of the most valuable features of Firepower 7.0 is the "live log" type feature called Unified Event Viewer. That view has been really good in helping me get to data faster, decreasing the amount of time it takes to find information, and allowing me to fix problems faster. I've found that to be incredibly valuable because it's a lot easier to get to some points of data now.
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MB
Feb 22, 2021
One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful.
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Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Firewall
February 2025
Free Report: Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews and More
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reviewer1512729 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 17, 2021
We get the Security Intelligence Feeds refreshed every hour from Talos, which from my understanding is that they're the largest intelligence Security Intelligence Group outside of the government.
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JT
Sep 27, 2019
The most valuable features of Cisco firewalls are the IPS and IDS items. We find them very helpful. Those are the biggest things because we have some odd, custom-made products in our environment. What we've found through their IPS and IDS is that their vulnerability engines have caught things that are near-Zero-day items, inside of our network.
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EV
Oct 24, 2019
The protection and security features, like URL filtering, the inspection, and the IPS feature, are also very valuable for us. We don't have IT staff at most of the sites so for us it's important to have a robust firewall at those sites
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JV
Jul 5, 2021
The most important feature is the intensive way you can troubleshoot Cisco Firepower Firewalls. You can go to the bit level to see why traffic is not handled in the correct way, and the majority of the time it's a networking issue and not a firewall issue. You can solve any problem without Cisco TAC help, because you can go very deeply under the hood to find out how traffic is flowing and whether it is not flowing as expected. That is something I have never seen with other brands.
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Mike Bulyk - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 9, 2021
It is one of the fastest solutions, if not the fastest, in the security technology space. This gives us peace of mind knowing that as soon as a new attack comes online that we will be protected in short order. From that perspective, no one really comes close now to Firepower, which is hugely valuable to us from an upcoming new attack prevention perspective.
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EV
Aug 30, 2021
Firepower NGFW has improved my organization in several ways. Before, we were trying to stamp out security threats and issues, it was a one-off type of way to attack it. I spent a lot of manpower trying to track down the individual issues or flare-ups that we would see. With Cisco's Firepower Management, we're able to have that push up to basically one monitor and one UI and be able to track that and stop threats immediately. It also gives us a little more granularity on what those threats might be.
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DC
Sep 12, 2019
Once you add Firepower onto to it and you start enabling some of its features, you get some IDS/IPS involved with it and you can even do web filtering.
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Cisco Secure Firewall Cons review quotes

reviewer1217634 - PeerSpot reviewer
Oct 28, 2019
We had an event recently where we had inbound traffic for SIP and we experienced an attack against our SIP endpoint, such that they were able to successfully make calls out... Both CTR, which is gathering data from multiple solutions that the vendor provides, as well as the FMC events connection, did not show any of those connections because there was not a NAT inbound which said either allow it or deny it.
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MC
Sep 14, 2021
The change-deployment time can always be improved. Even at 50 seconds, it's longer than some of its competitors. I would challenge Cisco to continue to improve in that area.
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MB
Feb 22, 2021
FlexConfig is there as a bridge for features that are not yet natively integrated into Firepower. It is a way of allowing you to be able to configure things that wouldn't otherwise be possible until the development team can add them into Firepower's native capability. There is still some work that needs to be done around FlexConfig. There are still quite a few complex things, like policy-based routing, that have to be done in FlexConfig, and it doesn't always work perfectly. Sometimes, there are some glitches. It is recommended that you configure FlexConfig policies with Cisco TAC. It would be good to see Cisco accelerate some of those configurations that you can only do in FlexConfig into the platform, so that they are there natively.
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Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Firewall
February 2025
Free Report: Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews and More
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Secure Firewall. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: February 2025.
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838,713 professionals have used our research since 2012.
reviewer1512729 - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 17, 2021
It would be great if some of the load times were faster.
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JT
Sep 27, 2019
The worst part of the entire solution, and this is kind of trivial at times, is that management of the solution is difficult. You manage FireSIGHT through an internet browser. I've had Cisco tell me to manage it through Firefox because that's how they develop it. The problem is, depending on the page you're on, they don't function in the same way. The pages can be very buggy, or you can't resize columns in this one, or you can't do certain things in that one. It causes a headache in managing it.
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EV
Oct 24, 2019
The user interface for the Firepower management console is a little bit different from traditional Cisco management tools. If you look at products we already use, like Cisco Prime or other products that are cloud-based, they have a more modern user interface for managing the products. For Firepower, the user interface is not very user-friendly. It's a little bit confusing sometimes.
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JV
Jul 5, 2021
The Firepower FTD code is missing some old ASA firewalls codes. It's a small thing. But Firepower software isn't missing things that are essential, anymore.
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Mike Bulyk - PeerSpot reviewer
Feb 9, 2021
There is limited data storage on the appliance itself. So, you need to ship it out elsewhere in order for you to store it. The only point of consideration is around that area, basically limited storage on the machine and appliance. Consider logging it elsewhere or pushing it out to a SIEM to get better controls and manipulation over the data to generate additional metrics and visibility.
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EV
Aug 30, 2021
One of the few things that are brought up is that for the overall management, it would be great to have a cloud instance of that. And not only just a cloud instance, but one of the areas that we've looked at is using an HA type of cloud. To have the ability to have a device file within a cloud. If we had an issue with one, the other one would pick up automatically.
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DC
Sep 12, 2019
In Firepower, there is an ability to search and dig into a search, which is nice. However, I'm not a super fan of the way it scrolls. If you want to look at something live, it's a lot different. You're almost waiting. With the ASDM, where it just flows, you can really see it. The second someone clicks something or does something, you'll see it. The refresh rate on the events in Firepower is not as smooth.
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Show 10 more reviews (out of 328)

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