What is our primary use case?
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.
How has it helped my organization?
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.
What is most valuable?
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.
What needs improvement?
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.
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For how long have I used the solution?
I have been working with Cisco NGFW for almost five years as of 2020.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
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.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
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.
How are customer service and support?
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.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
Cisco ASA and Firepower NGFW is the first firewall solution that I have and am still using.
How was the initial setup?
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.
What about the implementation team?
All of the implementations that we have done are with in-house teams, so I have no overview of the vendor team.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
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.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
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.
What other advice do I have?
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 :)
Which deployment model are you using for this solution?
On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.