Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

We mainly use it for ICS security.

We definitely feel more secure. We have more control over things going in and out of our network.

Cybersecurity has been our top priority because of the last few attacks on our peers in the oil and gas industry.

The IPS solution helps us to not only navigate north-south traffic, but also east-west traffic.

Third-party integrations could be improved.

Not everything works out-of-the-box. Sometimes, you have to customize it to your needs. 

I have been using it for two years.

It is stable for the most part.

There is maintenance needed for software, firmware, and updates. Three or four people keep up with the updates, etc. 

It is pretty scalable. We can add as many devices as we want.

The technical support is good. I would rate them as 10 out of 10.

Positive

We previously had a different platform. We wanted to converge multiple platforms into one.

I switched companies. So, I have more experience with Palo Alto.

We saw immediate benefits after deployment from having more control and visibility.

Pretty much everything is included in the price for what we are using.

We looked at Check Point, Palo Alto, Fortinet, and a bunch of others. The management and support for the CIsco product is better.

Listen to your customers and see what their needs are.

The whole stack provided by Cisco is a holistic solution for cybersecurity experts, like myself, and companies who are looking to secure their network.

You should partner up with a good team to view all products available, which cater and are customized to your needs.

We haven't found any gaps where it is lacking.

I would rate this product as eight or nine out of 10.

We use it to control the traffic between our inside and outside networks. 

We use the same firewall for the vendor by creating an IPv6 HyperSec VPN between the company and the vendor. 

It is a security solution. We needed to protect our traffic from the outside to inside. That is why we are using this firewall.

Cisco ASA is pretty good. We use it for Layer 3 and as our main firewall, protecting the entire organization. All our Internet traffic goes through it.

Their CLI is pretty good. 

In order to do an upgrade, we need to upload the software to the firewall, then upgrade the secondary and do a failover. Uploading this software into the firewall is old technology. For example, if you look at the Cisco Meraki firewall, you can schedule the software upgrade. Whereas, here we can't.

Recently, we have been having an issue with the ASA firewall. We haven't found the root cause yet and are still working on it. We failed over the firewall from active to passive and suddenly that resolved the issue. We are now working to find the root cause.

I have been using the Cisco ASA firewall for the last four years.

It is pretty stable. I haven't seen many issues during the past four years.

It has the scalability to replace the firewall with a higher model number.

The scalability meets our needs and future needs.

The technical support is really good. If we open up a case, they are pretty good. As soon as we open up a case, they assign a case manager. Also, they have an engineer on call. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

They had this firewall when I joined the company.

We also have Palo Alto that we use as a firewall for Layer 2.

I haven't really used the GUI features that much.

We have not integrated with any other Cisco solutions yet, but we have been thinking about integrating with Cisco Umbrella.

I would rate the solution as eight out of 10.

We primarily use the solution for the various firewalls.

Cisco is powerful when it comes to detecting intrusions. It's better than, for example, Fortinet.

Cisco has multiple products - not just firewalls. The integration between other items provides a powerful end-to-end solution. It's nice and easy. There is one management system and visibility into all of the features. Using the same product is more powerful than using multiple systems. Cisco is known by most customers due to the fact that at least they have switches. However, when clients say "we need an end-to-end option" Cisco is there.

The stability is very good.

Technical support services are excellent.

Before an ASA, it was a live log. It was easy and comfortable to work with. After the next-generation firewall, Firepower, the live log became really slow. I cannot reach the information easily or quickly. This has only been the case since we migrated to next-generation firewalls.

There is some delay between the log itself. It's not really real-time. Let's say there's a delay of more than 20 seconds. If they had a monitoring system, something to minimize this delay, it would be good.

It would be ideal if I could give more bandwidth to certain sites, such as Youtube.

I work with Fortinet also, and I find that Fortinet is easier now. Before it was Cisco that was easier. Now Fortinet is simpler to work with.

On firewall features, Fortinet is better. Cisco needs to become more competitive and add more features or meet Fortinet's offering.

I've been using the solution since about 2003, when I originally implemented it.

The solution is extremely stable. We don't have any issues whatsoever. It doesn't have bugs or glitches. It works well. Occasionally, it may need patches, however, there's very little downtime.

The scalability of the solution is very good. We have no trouble expanding the solution.

They have multiple products that fit in multiple areas. They also have virtual firewalls, which are working well in virtualization systems. They have the data center firewalls feature for data centers. It's scalable enough to cover most of the use cases that might arise.

Cisco offers excellent technical support.  They're useful and very responsive - depending on the situation itself. Sometimes we require the support of agents and we've found Cisco to have one of the best support systems in the market.

I also work with Fortinet, and it's my sense that, while Fortinet is getting easier to use, Cisco is getting harder to deal with.

The initial setup is not complex at all. It's pretty straightforward.

A full deployment takes between two and three days. It's pretty quick to set up.

The pricing is neither cheap nor expensive. It's somewhere in the middle. If you compare it to Fortinet or Palo Alto, Fortinet is low and Palo Alto is very high. Cisco falls in the middle between the two.

As far as deployment options go, they often have more wiggle-room with discounts, especially for larger deployments. Therefore, in general, it ranges closer to Fortinet's pricing.

We're partners with Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto.

I work with on-premises deployments and virtual firewalls, however, I don't use the cloud.

The solution works well for medium-sized enterprises.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I'd recommend users to layer in solutions. At the perimeter, if they have two tiers, I'd recommend Palo Alto as the first and then Cisco ASA as the second. Cisco can work on the data center or Fortinet. In the case of Fortinet, they have the best backline throughput from all of the other products.

My primary use case with Cisco Firepower NGFW is implementing, configuring, maintaining, and troubleshooting lab and customer devices in both lab and production environments.

Using best practices for configuration, as well as fine-tuning intrusion policies and utilizing as many of the features that the firewall has to offer, which are feasible in said environment.

Overall, I am confident to say that I have worked with every flavor of Cisco Firepower NGFW, be it their older IPS-only sensors, ASA with Firepower services, as well as the FTD sensor itself.

Cisco Firepower NGFW has improved our organization by giving us the opportunity to protect both our network and our customer's environments. Being able to work with the device in a lab environment and utilizing the whole feature set is really easy with the Evaluation licenses of 90 days on the FMC. The only thing that you need is an environment with enough resources to virtualize both the FMC and FTD sensors.

I would like to emphasize the easy-to-use evaluation period of the Cisco Firepower NGFW because many other firewall vendors lack this and it is a real pain having to test everything in production environments because you cannot build a good lab environment without paying for licenses.

The most valuable feature that Cisco Firepower NGFW provides for us is the Intrusion policy. 

Again, with that being said, I cannot shy away from giving kudos to all of the other features such as AVC (Application Visibility and Control), SSL Decryption, Identity policy, Correlation policy, REST API, and more.

All of the features that are incorporated in the Cisco Firepower NGFW are awesome and easy to configure if you know what you are doing. Things almost always work, unless you hit a bug, which is fixed with a simple software update.

I believe that the current feature set of the device is very good and the only thing that Cisco should work on is improving the user experience with the device. 

Also, they need to ensure that all of the implemented features are working as they should, and able to integrate with more third-party software in an easier manner.

As it stands currently, Cisco is doing this, but I am not confident enough to say that their QA team is doing as good a job as they should as there have been software releases that were immediately pulled back the same day as they were released.

I have been working with Cisco NGFW for almost five years as of 2020.

I have seen devices working without any issues and/or without a reboot of the device for many years (although I do not recommend this) running on base versions of the software, and I have seen an out-of-the-box fresh install having many stability issues. However, overall my impression is that the most recent software versions are very stable without any evident underlying issues.

Keep your software up-to-date and the solution should be stable.

Cisco Firepower NGFW has a large variety of devices that are able to accommodate every company's needs, be they small or large. Overall, the scalability of the devices is very good.

Experience with Cisco TAC has been awesome almost always. The SLAs are kept every time, which is very hard to get from any of the other firewall vendors. I have not seen any other vendor get you a proficient engineer on the phone within 15 minutes.

Cisco ASA and Firepower NGFW is the first firewall solution that I have and am still using.

Once you deploy a few of these devices, the initial setup is really straightforward and easy to do unless the position of the firewall on the network needs you to do some connectivity magic in order for it to work.

All of the implementations that we have done are with in-house teams, so I have no overview of the vendor team.

Cisco, as we all know, is expensive, but for the money you are paying, you know that you are also getting top-notch documentation as well as support if needed. In some cases, this may save you a lot of money or stress, which is why everyone who uses Cisco solutions loves them.

I have worked with many other firewall vendors in both production and lab environments such as CheckPoint, Palo Alto, Fortinet, Juniper, but to be honest I find Cisco's firewall solutions and Palo Alto's firewall solution to be the best.

I believe that Cisco Firepower NGFW is the future leader in NGFW, with only maybe Palo Alto being the main competitor. This is very good, as we all know that having a rival is good for us, the users :) 

This solution is running behind the infrastructure and behind the hypervisor itself. We have two firewalls and two nodes in the cluster environment.

This solution is suitable for both cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments. I have implemented a cloud project, and one hybrid as well. The hybrid was between a public and a local cloud.

The Cisco security rules are very strict and very strong.

I like the Cisco ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager), which is the configuration interface for the Cisco firewall.

When comparing this solution to other products, the Fortinet UTM bundle has some better features in their most receive product. For example, there are better configuration features, the Sandbox is better, and so is the web censoring. These are currently in the Cisco solution, but they are better in Fortinet. The Sandbox and the Web Censoring in this solution need to be improved.

This solution has to be more secure from the cloud. The current trend is moving towards private cloud and hybrid cloud, so it is very important to consider the cloud security aspects when the solution is installed. This includes things such as IoT and the existence of user connectivity on the cloud.

The stability of this solution is great. The Cisco name and hardware are enough. The product is used in tier four data centers, so it is very trusted and very dependable. If you compare Cisco to others, the high industry and high workload have gone to Cisco. Stability is very, very high.

This is a scalable solution.

In terms of the number of users, it depends on the customer. A small customer may have less than twenty users. A larger customer can be complicated by having different branches with different users and different security rules. This means that you can reach up to the hundreds. 

Technical support for this solution is good. Most of the technicians are technical people that have certifications such as CCNA, CCNP, CCIE, and CCISP. I think that they are well knowledged and well educated about the Cisco culture, industry, and products.

The Cisco distributors are everywhere, even if I'm speaking about the Middle East. I can find distributors everywhere in Dubai. Here in Dubai, the support is great, including for firmware updates, and even replacing the hardware when the firewalls crash.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

The deployment does not take much time. It is just a matter of installing the firewall and configuring the basic system to get it up and running. That's it.

There are, of course, different models of deployment, like deploying customers, that have to be considered. However, for the most part, deployment time is not an issue at all.

The pricing for Cisco products is higher than others, but Cisco is a very good, strong, and stable technology. If we compare Huawei or FortiGate or others then the prices are lower, but the higher Cisco price is acceptable because of the stability, trust, and reliability.

This is my first recommendation for firewalls, and my second recommendation is Fortinet FortiGate.

This is the number one firewall product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The primary use is that it manages all of our incoming and outgoing VOIP transmissions as well as data transmissions between our branches and our third-party bank processor. It has performed well.

The ASAs are very stable firewalls, and they've been very good at protecting our assets here at the bank. They have done exactly what they were purchased for. They have done a great job.

I've always looked at Cisco products as being the industry standard. They're wonderful at being able to lockdown and manage that. 

The only con that I have really seen with it is the reporting structure. FirePOWER is good. It has been a great help because, before that, it was not good at all. 

Three to five years.

The scalability is very good. We use the 5600 models and the lower 5000s. We were able to upgrade as needed. We added a ton of VPN tunnels to them and they handled all that traffic quite well.

Support has been very good, very professional, got right to the point. My third-party administrator got stuck on setting up some tunnels. We called ASA support and they walked him right through how to do it. That was good.

The third-party did all of the setup. I told him what I wanted and he set everything up and got the tunnels for us as well.

The cost of keeping the licensing up on the ASA is very expensive. It has a lot of positives, but the cost of going with it is really starting to be a major negative right now.

Talk to your peers in the industry, find out what they use and why, and then look at exactly what you're using it for. We changed a great deal of our infrastructure, adding a lot of extra tunnels, so that made a complicated product even harder to manage. Look at what you're comfortable in managing with their interface.

We start looking at upgrade cost, our constant licensing cost. I look at other products that rank very high in industry ratings. Now I'm looking at similar products that are a little bit easier to manage. That is another fault of the ASA. They're very complicated to manage, but that’s because they have so many features. It's a very feature-rich product.

When selecting a vendor the most important factors are

• Security - obviously that is number one because we are a financial institution
• stability of the vendor
• how the product is ranked in the market.

In terms of security, right now is a really tough time for us because, even as a smaller community bank, we’re targeted. We have huge targets on us right now from hackers. I have to have a product that is stable, that will hold up, from a reputable company. I'm looking at companies that are top-tier.

I would rate the ASA equipment itself a nine out of 10. The software and manageability would rate a seven and the reason for that is the complexity of it. It is extremely complicated, even for our Cisco-certified person who manages it for us.

I use the solution in my company for some internal testing purposes, so I don't use it in a real environment. I use it in my dummy lab environment.

The product's user interface is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.

From an improvement perspective, the product's price needs to be lowered.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for three years. I am a customer of Cisco.

I have faced no issues with the stability of the product. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The product offers good scalability.

I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with Sophos.

The product's initial setup phase is a little difficult.

The product's deployment phase is a good and easy process.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The product is expensive.

I can't describe a particular scenario where the product has improved security, but I can say that the devices from Cisco are much more trustworthy and reliable compared to other devices in the market.

The most effective feature of the product for threat prevention stems from the granularity of the control that the devices from Cisco provide to its users.

The product offers great integration capabilities.

For our company's daily operations, the user interface provided by Sophos is much better and interactive compared to the one offered by Cisco.

You can choose Sophos if you want a low-budget or budget-friendly product. You can choose Cisco if you want a high-end and highly scalable tool with great integration capabilities, especially if budget is not an issue.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

For companies prioritizing security, the optimal choice is one that offers a range of feeds to cater to diverse needs. This is particularly crucial for organizations implementing DDoS mitigation. The preferred solutions typically align with the top server vendors, with Cisco, Forti, and Barracuda consistently ranking among the top three vendors we collaborate with.

It's not unexpected, but it's a common scenario where customers request dual layers of security. For instance, when dealing with regulatory compliance, especially in financial sectors regulated by entities like the Central Bank, having two distinct units is often mandated. If a client predominantly uses a solution like Palo Alto, they may need to incorporate another vendor such as Cisco or Forti. Importantly, there's a significant disparity in interfaces and management platforms between these vendors, necessitating careful consideration when integrating them into the overall security architecture.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for the past ten years. 

The solution is extremely scalable and based on my experience, I would rate it 7 out of 10.

Cisco is a well-established company, and it offers accessible support, both locally and through online resources. The abundance of information makes it easy to find the necessary details and assistance.

Positive

The implementation timeline for our firewall is contingent on the readiness of the policy. If the policy is prepared, the deployment can occur within a day. However, if the policy is not finalized, a brief meeting is convened to gather the necessary data for rule establishment. Once the information is ready, the implementation on VMware proceeds. Notably, there is a requisite waiting period, such as fine-tuning for optimal rule configuration, as each customer has unique requirements. It's crucial to tailor the rules to fit the specific needs of each customer, as there is no one-size-fits-all best practice in this context.

It is extremely expensive compared to its competitors and I would rate it 2 out of 10. 

I would recommend this solution and rate it 8 out of 10.