Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

To safeguard our clients' system data and related aspects, we rely on Next-Generation Firewalls as a system integrator. In particular, we use Cisco Secure Firewall for enhanced security measures.

We have provided our services to the National Information Center in Riyadh, which is a government database. They installed Cisco Secure Firewall systems and have given us positive feedback, which is why most of the areas prefer to use Cisco. To date, we have not received any negative feedback from our clients regarding any issues, such as hacking. Everything has been secure, and I hope it stays that way in the future.

Our company operates in Saudi Arabia, primarily working with government sectors. If any hardware malfunctions, the defective device is removed, and we receive a replacement from the reseller. We have not encountered any issues related to delays in receiving replacements for malfunctioning devices which has been beneficial.

In today's world, cyberattacks have become a common occurrence. However, so far, we have not faced any issues with our systems. I hope the situation remains the same in the future. If Cisco introduces even more advanced security measures, it would be beneficial.

One of the major issues we face in the Middle East is the long delivery time for Cisco products. Currently, they are taking almost 10 months to deliver, which is much longer compared to before when we received the products within 70 to 80 days or even two to three months. For instance, we recently placed an order that has a delivery date in the middle of 2024. This delay is unacceptable as customers cannot wait that long, and they may opt for other alternatives, such as Huawei, Juniper, or HPE. Therefore, Cisco needs to improve its delivery time and ensure that they deliver products within a reasonable timeframe, as it did before.

I have been working with Cisco Secure Firewall for more than 10 years.

We have not encountered any stability issues. The only issue we faced was with another company that did not have proper cooling systems in their data center.

The scalability of the Cisco Secure Firewall is excellent.

A few years ago, we faced an issue with some of our devices in Saudi Arabia, and we reached out to Cisco for assistance. They responded promptly and repaired our devices within the given time frame. While the delivery time for their solutions in the Middle East may be longer, Cisco still delivers their solutions on time, whether it's for repair or new orders. Even if the delivery time is up to a year, Cisco ensures that our products are provided on time.

I rate the support from Cisco Secure Firewall a ten out of ten.

As a system integrator, our primary focus is not on selling products, but rather on providing comprehensive solutions to our customers, starting from scratch and ensuring everything runs smoothly. In this regard, we rely heavily on Cisco devices, including switches, routers, code devices, NK, Nexus, 7000, and 9000. We also use other Cisco products, such as IP phones and access points. In Saudi Arabia, Cisco is the most popular brand in the market, but its popularity is declining due to prolonged delivery times. Customers cannot afford to wait a year, and this is the primary reason for the decline in demand.

The prices of Cisco Secure Firewall are competitive, especially for us as Cisco partners. We purchase the products directly from Cisco as a gold partner, which allows us to obtain better pricing than we would get from normal distributors or the local market.

Our current company, SNC ICT, is already a Cisco Gold Partner. We are actively involved in investing, purchasing, and selling Cisco products to our customers, as well as performing installations, configurations, and providing other related services.

In the Middle East, most people with a budget opt for Cisco. However, I do not have any information about the preferences in Europe, South Asia, or Asia.

We use Cisco IronPort, Firepower, Secure Firewall, Email, and Secure Connect.

As with most products, integration could be better where needed. Sometimes, for example, the Cisco Secure Firewall and IronPort are in a class of their own. When it comes to management and logging, there's room for improvement.

Most of the products aren't configured on their own, but they are related together. There should be some sort of management. We would need a supervisor to manage it before using all of the solutions together.

They address services that belong together. For example, the Secure Client provides remote access. Authentication and multiple-factor authentication are two different products that belong together. There should be a link between both products and between both management interfaces to see, for example, troubleshooting or reporting so that you have both sources together.

It would be great to have all the data correlated to have an overview and one point of administration. 

The grouping of the solutions helps save time. If you have a problem and you have a high-level overview of the system, you can easily dig deeper into the problem. For example, I can check to see why ASA isn't working but the reason for the outage is actually because of Duo. I can spend a lot of time working in the wrong direction because I didn't have an overview.

IronPort stuff looks at first a little bit outdated. It's not a fancy-colored view, but it does its job and is extremely helpful. Debugging on this platform is very easy. 

Firepower's implementation and reliability need room for improvement. 

We address our problems with the relevant people. Some of the quality of their support has dropped. If your problem gets escalated, there are many skilled people who are absolute pleasures to work with. They are brilliant at what they do. 

If you talk to someone who solves the problem within five minutes you can't do any better. But on the other hand, the other end of the range needs improvement.

You can have a case that lasts 15 months in which you have to talk to 20 people to resolve. 

Neutral

The complexity of the installation depends. It's not so easy to install. Each topic needs one management interface. So you end up with 20 to 40 different management platforms. All of them use a tremendous amount of resources. If you're willing to install it, you need a huge pile of hardware. It is not clear what everything does. Some consolidation there would be helpful. Other vendors face the same problem.

We have seen ROI from using Cisco.

I chose Cisco because I've been working with them for 23 years. I choose it for its stability and because they have the right range of products. Most of our IT staff is happy with it.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

We use WSA proxy and Cisco Firepowers with the FMC suite and Cisco Umbrella. We mainly use WSAP for on-premises data centers to get traffic outbound to the internet. Cisco Umbrella is for our endpoints, and Cisco firewalls are to protect our perimeter but also internal choke points to secure segments on our LAN.

Currently, we don't have any integrations between the three of them. They all run in isolation. 

Our external partner does the day-to-day management. We are not using it on a day-to-day basis. We position the products from within my team, but the detection mechanism is different per platform. We mainly trust the policy, and our security department is checking logs for anomalies in the patterns.

In terms of cost savings, we've been using this mechanism for years on end, so we haven't been able to see a real cost reduction between using our own personnel versus our external partner for management. It has been like that for 10 years or so.

In terms of time savings, it doesn't put too much burden on day-to-day activities to go over the details. The policies are rather straightforward, and anything not configured is not allowed. In that sense, it's easy.

Protecting our landscape in general and being able to see logging when things aren't going as set out in policies are valuable features. Our security department is keen on seeing the logging. 

If WSAP remains to be an active product, it might be an idea to integrate the configuration policy logic between Umbrella and WSAP. There should be one platform to manage both.

The integration between the on-prem proxy world and the cloud proxy would benefit us. One single policy setting would make sense.

That's great. Sometimes, you need to be clear on the severity levels, but once determined, we have a good experience with tech support.

Positive

That was long ago, but we had Blue Coat proxies before. We switched because of our strategy to go for Cisco as an ecosystem.

We chose Cisco products because we have a Cisco-first strategy. We typically check first with the Cisco product portfolio and then make up our minds. Historically speaking, it serves our interests best.

I am not involved firsthand in its deployment. We have an oversight role within our company, so we ask our external supplier to do the implementation, and when needed, to have it validated via Cisco, but I've no real hands-on experience.

I would expect that we have seen an ROI because our sourcing department would make sure we get the best price for the solution.

Licensing is quite difficult to get your head around. My biggest challenge is to understand the details, the inner relations. Luckily, to some extent, we have enterprise agreements, but licensing for me is a real black box.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

We started with the old ASA 5510 and migrated to Firepower, first using ASA as the basic operating system. Lately, we've been using FTD because it simplifies operations a lot. We are a very small networking team, and being able to push one policy to many firewalls eases our workload.

We are a global company, and we don't always have IT staff in all corners of the world. Therefore, having one place to do everything is very nice.

Cisco Secure Firewall has made it easier so that more than one person can handle things. We are able to have a bigger team that can handle simple tasks and have a smaller team focus on the deep-dive needs.

We have the same basic policies everywhere now, which makes it more flexible for us to manage.

I like the central management and IPS features. Having everything in one place is very valuable.

Cisco Secure Firewall is very good at detecting threats. We see a lot getting blocked by the IPS in our DMZ, that is, our internet-facing web service.

It helped free up IT staff time. Before, we would have to manually configure every single firewall. Every time we configure something on a firewall, it takes five to ten minutes, and we have more than 50 firewalls around the globe. We do changes every week, and the automated policy and upgrades saved us a lot of time.

In terms of the organization, we have been able to save time by getting things out faster. However, the only downside is that the policy push takes quite a while. Thus, a quick fix still takes at least 15 minutes, and troubleshooting can take time as well.

Some of our problems are related to software updates in remote sites where the internet connection is not stable. Sometimes, the image push just gets disrupted and fails.

The most annoying thing is having to replace the hardware so often. It's very difficult for us to do.

The integration between different tools could be improved. For example, with SecureX, I am yet to find out how to forward security events to different tools such as Microsoft Sentinel, which is what we use for log detection.

We've been using Cisco Secure Firewalls for a very long time.

We had to get in touch with technical support a few times, and our experience was good. I would give them a rating of nine out of ten. 

Positive

The initial deployment is easy, and I have not had any issues.

The solution is deployed on-premises. We have an on-premises FMC that connects everything.

The cost of the firewalls versus the ROI is okay.

We are quite Cisco-centric because of the performance we get for the price range. We have a lot of smaller sites, and we are not a very big organization. The price fits us perfectly.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We use Cisco ASA and Firepower.

ASA is used for AnyConnect connections, that is, for users to connect to the office. It is very reliable and works fine.

We use Firepower in some sites as firewalls to control inbound/outbound access. We use it as a software protection layer. However, because most users are now working from home, few users need it in the office. As a result, in some places, we have switched to SD-WAN.

The network products help save time if they are well configured at the beginning. They help increase security and protect the company's data.

Firepower's user experience should be a little bit better.

I've been using Cisco Firepower for six months.

There are some hiccups here and there, but compared to the technical support from other vendors, I have had the best experience with Cisco's technical support. I would rate them at nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was somewhat easy because we had previous experience with implementation. We copied that strategy or tried to align it to that implementation, but there were some challenges.

We have a hybrid cloud deployment. We have our own data centers and a lot of branches. In the data centers, most Cisco technologies start with ACI. With firewalls for big branches, we find that it's easier to break out to the internet globally rather than to use data centers.

Cisco's prices are more or less comparable to those of other products.

Compared to other vendors' firewalls, Cisco's firewalls are a bit behind. Overall, however, I would rate Cisco Firewall at eight on a scale from one to ten.

The main use cases are firewalling, routing, site-to-site VPN, and remote access. We have some older 5585-X ASAs in place. We do have Firepower 2000 Series and 4000 Series. 

For most setups, we do have high availability in place. We've at least two devices in active-active or active-standby. If it's a highly secure setup, we sometimes have two firewalls.

Cisco has a huge variety of products and features. It's a benefit to have the knowledge of all those things and also put it in the firewalling products. The knowledge that comes from other products or solutions that Cisco is selling is finding a place in security as well, and that's one of the key benefits.

There are time savings when you have a good solution in place for stopping or preventing security risks. In general, it isn't saving me time on a daily basis, but there is peace of mind knowing that you are being protected.

Basic firewalling is obviously the most valuable. In addition to that, secure access and remote access are also very useful for us. When COVID came, a lot of people had to stay at home, and that was the basic use case for having remote access.

One con of Cisco Secure Firewalls is that Java is used a lot for the older generation of these firewalls. Java is used for the ASA and the ASDM tool for administration. It's an outdated way of administering, and it's also a security risk to use this kind of solution. This is a pro of Firepower or the newer generation of firewalls because they are using HTML for administration.

In general, they can make it easier to manage the solutions. They can make it easier in terms of administration and provide a single tool for different firewalling solutions. They have different tools to manage different firewalls, such as Firepower or ASA. Sometimes, both are on the same thing. You have ASA with Firepower modules, so you manage some of the things via HTML, and then you manage some of the things via another management tool. It's not seamless. It should be bundled together in one solution.

I have been using this solution for six to seven years.

They have been very stable. I did not have any cases where a network was down due to firewalling. Fortunately, I did not have any hacker attacks, but that's being lucky. It's not something I would point out to firewalling or configuration. It's just that sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not.

It's very scalable. Cisco is for mid to large businesses. For small businesses, there are solutions that are cheaper, but that's not the main focus. 

A large environment comprises several thousand users. We have small to large size environments, but we mostly have mid to large.

Cisco's tech support is good in general. It varies and depends on with whom you're speaking and how the knowledge on the other side is. That's basically the same for our company. I'd rate them an eight out of ten. A ten would be perfect, and no one is perfect. You can reach maybe a nine, but no one can reach a ten.

Positive

For more security, we sometimes have two firewalls. We have other vendors in place, such as FortiGate or Palo Alto. We have Cisco at the front or at the end, and another vendor on the other side so that there is more security, and if there is a security breach in one solution, we still have the other one. These firewalls differ mostly in administration and how you configure things but not so much in terms of features. They may differ in small things, but in the end, they are all doing the same things.

I deploy and manage them afterward. I'm not only in the designing and implementing; I'm also in the operational business. Its deployment is not more complicated than other solutions. It's fine. When it comes to documentation, in general, Cisco is very good.

We mostly try to do it ourselves. Our approach is to have knowledge or any certification of the topic we are trying to take.

I'm not a salesperson. I'm more from the technical perspective, and I don't know if there are any savings at the end, but I believe that all that was bought in the past was used the way we wanted it to use. So, the money was well spent.

Licensing is not only for Secure Firewalls, and it's too complicated.

To someone evaluating or considering Cisco Secure Firewall, I'd advise having a good greenfield approach regarding what component to use. If there is no greenfield, you should evaluate what solutions you need and what type of use case you have and then decide based on that.

I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten. Cisco is a big player in networking and security, and that's basically the pro on their side.

It is primarily our VPN solution. Initially, it was used in our firewalling. Then, we transitioned it into just our standalone VPN service for the company.

It is on-prem. We have it in two different data centers: our main data center and our backup data center.

With what is going on in the world, e.g., hybrid work and work from home, and everything that happened, VPN was everything to us. Without it, we wouldn't have been able to operate.

Typically, before COVID hit, we were a very much work-in-the-office type of environment with five to 10 people on our VPN solution. We quickly ramped up to 500 people when COVID happened, which is the majority of our full-time users. Onboarding our entire company onto this solution was pretty cool.

It is very good at what it does. It is a very dependable, long-standing product that you can trust. You know exactly how it works. It has been in the market for a lot longer than I have. So, it is great at its core functionality.

We are still running the original ASAs. The software that you are running for the ASDM software and Java application has never been a lot of fun to operate. It would have been nice to see that change update be redesigned with modern systems, which don't play nicely with Java sometimes. Cybersecurity doesn't seem to love how that operates. For us, a fresher application, taking advantage of the hardware, would have been a better approach.

I have been with the company for seven years, and we have had it the entire time. Cisco Advanced Services came in in 2013, which was two years before I joined. They did a deployment and installed it then.

There is your regular day-to-day maintenance, e.g., the patches and updates. Because it sits at the edge, it is exposed to the world. With threats always being of concern, you often have to patch and update. However, it is nothing more than regular maintenance

We have never had to ramp up more than a small- to medium-business use case. For that, it has been great. Limitation-wise, we would run into challenges if we ever hit 2,000 to 2,500 users. We would then have to move onto hardware. Its scalability is only limited by the size of the appliance. So, if you ever have to exceed that, then you just have to buy a new box.

ASA has always been great because it has been such a longstanding product. There is a lot of knowledge in-house with Cisco. I always know if we call to get help, it is great. I do wonder in the future, as the product gets close to the end of its life, if those people will move onto other things and it gets lost a bit. However, it has always been easy enough to find that help.

For the ASA specifically, probably nine.

Positive

We were just looking for a different feature set. We found that ASA was rock-solid as a VPN piece. We wanted to separate the VPN from our firewall policy management, so we just moved it over to VPN as a solution.

We had a partnership with Cisco. They came in and redid the entire environment. Before that, there was no Cisco environment whatsoever. So, they came in with the Nexus switching and Catalyst Wireless solution, then the VPN came with that as well as the ASA.

I have never found it hard to deploy. We didn't have a BCP solution set up as our secondary when COVID hit, which was something that we had to scramble to put together. However, it was something like a couple of days' work. It wasn't really a big deal or really complicated. It was a fairly straightforward system to separate and manage.

It brings us the ability to work from anywhere and has allowed us to work remotely without having to incur a lot of other costs. If we didn't have this type of solution, since we have so many on-prem services that are required, we would have likely lost money and been unable to deliver. We have a video services team who helped build the content for our sporting events. When you are watching a Leaf game and those swipes come by as well as the clips and things, those are all generated in-house. Without the ability to access our on-premise resources, we would have been dead in the water. So, the return on that is pretty impressive.

We integrate it with our ISE solution, TACACS+, etc. We have a Windows NPS server for MFA through Azure. We don't have any challenges with it. It has always worked well. I can't think of a time when we have ever had problems with either of those things. It has worked just fine.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

We are an insurance company. The core of what we do is service. We manage people and security. We have all the implementation for security. 

We have one ERP running on-prem and another one is running on the GCP cloud. We have a cloud service that runs that ERP on GCP. Our other service is running with Microsoft 365. So, we have an in-house AD that syncs with the cloud AD, but it is the firewall that is managing the communication process in between. The on-prem AD sync with the cloud AD is managed by the firewall. It is like a gateway. 

A vendor implemented this system for us to use and manage the process. We have an integration with the GCP. We've integrated this system with our network in such a way that you cannot access the GCP applications or infrastructure if you are not on-premises. This integration with the GCP and our virtual network online has been done locally.

In general, the management of our infrastructure is now easy. I can manage remotely. I can manage on-prem. I can always log in. I have a couple of users who work remotely via VPN because of the license. Not everybody works remotely in my organization. For people who work remotely, we have licenses for them to log in remotely from where they are and use the service. So, managing people, resources, and devices is easy. It has been a good experience. I don't intend to change it because it's giving me the service I need.

In terms of money, it has saved a lot of money. A lot of other organizations that don't have this kind of easy-to-manage layer of security are going through different kinds of attacks. We have a culture of being careful, even though you cannot be a hundred percent careful. When I hear that people have some security issues, I come and check my devices, and I notice that my firewall has actually blocked a lot of things. It gives me rest and peace. So, it saves a lot when you consider the cost of the organization's operations going down, even for one, two, or three hours. We would lose a lot if that happens. It probably saves us over a million dollars a year. The investment is totally worth it.

Our network is a little bit flat. We have a load balancer before getting into our network. We have configured the load balancer on the device itself. We have two major service providers. We have a core business application, and there are some people who use the core business application. We also have some light users. We have set up criteria to give priority to the people who use the core business application. I have a provider that gives me 300 MB to 500 MB, and I have another provider that gives me 20 MB to 25 MB as a backup. I have set priority based on the usage. If you're using the core business application, it pushes you to the fast network. Otherwise, it sends you to the other network. All that has been done on the firewall. It has been very good for this. I have no complaints.

It enables us to implement dynamic policies for dynamic environments, which is important for us. We can control the network based on different kinds of users. We can quickly and easily define the policies. We can set priorities based on different applications, systems, and users on our network.

Its security and filtering are most valuable. Every layer of data that comes into the organization goes through it. After setting up the criteria, it automatically filters the traffic. We don't have to check it often. Sometimes, when users complain that they are not able to see a particular thing, we log in to check the scan and see what it has scanned and filtered. It is usually something it has filtered out. It works perfectly.

It is easy to use. There is a GUI, and there is a backend that is being managed by our consultant. When we log in to the GUI, we are able to do anything we want to do. Its user interface is good, but it could be better. Currently, you have to know what to do before you can manage a device. If you don't know what to do, you can mess things up. There are some devices that are easier, such as FortiGate. The user interface of FortiGate is more intuitive. It is very easy to log in and configure things. With Cisco, there is also a lower limit on virtual accounts. In FortiGate, they could be in thousands. Cisco is also more expensive. 

I have been using this solution for about three to four years.

It is very stable. I've not had any thought of reconfiguring it. I have just applied my criteria, and I'm good.

Scalability is not a problem because I still have a span of five to seven more years. After that, I might have to go for a bigger device. For now, I have no issues. I can scale up or down. I'm good with that.

Their support is very good. We had an issue where the OS got corrupted. We got Cisco to log in. They did the reset on it, reformatted it, and sent it back to us. Because of the subscription we have with Cisco, we got a copy back in no time. We're now good. We've not been calling their tech support very often. We only call them when we have a very serious issue. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

It wasn't simple. Its implementation doesn't take much time, but we had to get a consultant in. Implementing a Cisco solution from scratch is harder than implementing FortiGate. With FortiGate, I can do my implementation and put all the criteria easily, but with Cisco, I need to do a lot more research, and I need to get someone to help me, but after implementation, it just works.

We had a consultant from a local vendor here called Incognito. Our experience with him was good. I can refer him to anybody.

When we have issues and we need improvement, he comes in. There was a time we noticed that we had lag on our network. We were trying to figure out the cause for it. We were using two service providers but the same backbone. We called him to make the required modifications.

It is more expensive than the other solutions. 

I'm the CIO here. When I came here, I did an audit of the IT infrastructure to see what was there. I looked at what was existing and thought of improvement. I got in all the vendors and had a meeting with them. I also got in a Cisco vendor and sat down with him and told him about the implementation I wanted. Because of the cost, I didn't change any equipment. So, he did the implementation. At any other place, I would look at the users and implement what is easy for them to manage. For a big enterprise with a whole crew, I would definitely consider Cisco. For any other place, I would go for Fortinet. Cisco is harder to implement and manage, but its stability is good. It is also more expensive. There are other cheaper solutions I would have gone for, but I had to focus on what was existing and improve. I had to make sure I worked with what was existing. We also have Cisco switches.

What it's been configured to do, it does it well. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.