Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

We are using it as a firewall for our data center and headquarter. We are also using it for DR. We are using Cisco ASA 5500 Series.

It is a security device, and it is useful for securing our environment. It provides role-based access and other features and helps us in easily securing our environment.

It provides visibility. It has been helpful for packet inspection and logging activities for all kinds of packets, such as routing packets, denied packets, and permitted packets. All these activities are visible on Cisco ASA. There are different commands for logging and visibility.

We use Cisco ASA for the integration of the network. Our company is a financial company, and we are integrating different organizations and banks by using Cisco ASA. We are using role-based access. Any integration, any access, or any configuration is role-based. 

The remote access, VPN, and ACL features are valuable. We are using role-based access for individuals.

IPS is also valuable for intrusion detection and prevention. It is a paid module that can be added. I'm using it for security, VLAN management, segregation management, and so on.

It is easy to use. In our region and our country, Cisco is well known, and most of the companies are using Cisco products. We have been using Cisco devices for a while, and our company primarily has Cisco devices. So, we are familiar with it, which makes it very easy to use for us. Even when we compare it with other products, it is easier to use.

It is easy for us to manage it because it is a familiar product, and it has been a part of our environment. Now, other products are providing free training, free access, and free license, because of which things are changing. So, you can easily become familiar with other products.

Its licensing cost and payment model can be improved. Cisco doesn't provide training and certification for engineers without payments. Other companies, such as Huawei, provide the training for free. Their subscription and licenses are also free and flexible. Other products are breaking the market by providing such features. 

It doesn't support all standard interfaces. It is also not suitable for big companies with high bandwidth traffic. Its capacity should be improved.

Other products are becoming easier to access and configure. They are providing UI interfaces to configure, take backup, synchronize redundant machines, and so on. It is very easy to take backup and upgrade the images in those products. Cisco ASA should have such features. If one redundant machine is getting upgraded, the technology and support should be there to upgrade other redundant machines. In a single window, we should be able to do more in terms of backups, restores, and upgrades.

We have been using this solution for almost eight years.

It is stable. It needs to be configured based on the standards and functionality. We have one device that has been working for more than 10 years, which indicates it is stable, but it requires licenses to upgrade features.

It doesn't have an expansion card. So, it may not scalable for huge buildings. It also lacks a lot of standard interfaces. Other products are providing capacity for a data center. Other technologies are expanding their interface bandwidth from 10 gigs. In my opinion, Cisco ASA doesn't have this capability.

Their support is very good. We have a support license, so their support is very good. They are tracing us and following up with us to solve the problem on time.

Its setup is easy. We are familiar with Cisco ASA and other Cisco products, and they are easy to configure. A lot of resources are available on the internet, so it is easy to set up for anyone with basic training. It is easy in different types of environments, such as universities and colleges.

It generally doesn't take more than a day, but it also depends on the size of the organization. If an organization is very big and if you need a line-by-line configuration for access role and VPN, it can take a bit more time.

Cisco is constantly upgrading and providing features based on current requests. We usually plan deployments at the end of the year and at the beginning of the year. Everyone plans for new products, new configurations, and new expansions based on that.

Any security product provides a return on investment. Any gap in security may cost an organization more.

It is expensive. There is a cost for everything. There is per year license cost and support cost. There is also a cost for any training, any application, and any resource. Things are very costly to do with Cisco.

Other brands are cheaper. They are also more flexible in terms of training, subscription, and licensing. They give lots and lots of years free. They provide more than Cisco.

I would advise understanding its features, advantages, and disadvantages as compared to other solutions. It is simple, but its cost is a negative point. 

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall an eight out of 10.

Telindus, our company, is an integrator. We sell Firepower and we do use it ourselves. I use all the different versions of the product. 

We either replace our customers' other brands of firewalls with Firepower, or we upgrade their old Cisco ASA Firewalls to the new Firepower firewalls. The type of device we advise them to install depends on the customer's requirements and the throughputs needed.

Our primary use case for Firepower is for big networks.

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. That is why, when people move from another brand to Cisco, they never leave Cisco. They see that advantage.

Something I like about Firepower, in general, is that it still relies on the old ASA code. That's something customers really like because when they go into the CLI, they remember, "Oh, that's the ASA, that I am familiar with," but it's enriched with all the next-gen features of Snort. When a customer has knowledge of the ASA codes, they can do intensive troubleshooting because they know the device.

Customers also like Talos, which is the intelligence behind all of Cisco's security products, including Firepower. Talos is very good and is actually the most important part of a security product. It's important that you have something in the background that is continuously enriching intelligence so that you get information about upcoming threats on time. That keeps you protected as soon as possible when a Zero-day happens. Something that customers like about Cisco Firepower, in combination with Talos intelligence, is that full-time people are working in the background to provide information to Cisco security products.

Customers really want visibility into their networks. For example, they want identity management and that is something you can use Firepower for. With it, in addition to an IP address going somewhere, you can also see the username. That's a big advantage of Firepower, and can be set up quite easily.

Also, in very large networks, our customers use Cisco DNA Center. They have automation orchestration for their access network and that works seamlessly with Cisco Firepower firewalls. Security Group Tags can be used from DNA to an edge Firepower firewall. That way, they have microsegmentation within their access network for DNA. And they can extend that to their firewall rules for Firepower. 

Our customers also use Cisco ISE to get user information. ISE is connected to DNA Center. That is something that Firepower works seamlessly with, and we do sell it a lot. We sell a lot of Cisco's other security equipment, and they all send their information to SecureX. Having more Cisco security products means your security information is becoming enriched within the SecureX platform. The integration among these Cisco products is more than easy. Cisco documents everything, in detail, when it comes to how to integrate the different parts. I've never had an issue with integrating Cisco security products with each other.

And for smaller networks, like those our government customers have, what they like about Cisco Firepower, and why they purchase it nine out of 10 times, is its ease of use and the reporting in Firepower Management Center. That is something they really like. They can look up things themselves and they like the SecureX integration.

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.

I've been using Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall since it came out; from the time Cisco started to use the name Firepower and they bought Snort. That's when they put in the next-generation features. 

Firepower is rock-stable. So far, I have not seen any failed firewall. The only thing that was not quite stable in the past was Firepower Management Center, but since version 6.6 that has also been rock-stable. I haven't had any failed components in the last couple of years. I did have them two years ago and further in the past, where firewalls were not functioning and needed a reboot, but since 6.6, the stability is very good. We don't have priority-one tickets anymore.

In the Netherlands, where I work, we don't have very big customers requiring very high throughput. So I cannot say anything about clustering where you can pile different ASAs or Firepower devices together to increase performance when you require it. 

But scalability, in general, is pretty hard. Competition-wise, sometimes it's hard to sell Cisco security products because, in my opinion, Cisco is quite honest about the real throughput they are able to provide. Other vendors may be giving figures that are a little bit "too perfect." Sometimes it's hard for us to sell Cisco firewalls because a customer says, "Well, when I go to other brands they say they have double the throughput for half the price." Well, that's great on paper, but... 

In general, after we have installed Cisco firewalls, our customers are very pleased by the performance. They also like that they can tweak settings to get more performance out of the firewall by enabling specific policies for specific traffic, and by disabling inspection for very internal data center traffic. That provides a big boost to the overall firewall performance. When a customer complains that we didn't scale it correctly, and they say it's not performing as well as they expected, I'm always able to tweak things so that it performs the way the customer requires.

I have interacted with Cisco's technical support many times. Nowadays, it sometimes takes a while to get to the person with the correct knowledge, but that is happening in the world in general. First-line people are common around the world and they are trying to figure out if an issue is actually a second-or third-line issue. But when you do reach the correct department, and they know that you are knowledgeable and that you are really facing a high-priority issue or a strange behavior, Cisco's support does everything it can to help you fix things, including involving the development department. I'm very happy with their tech support.

Most of the time we replace Sophos, Check Point, SonicWall, and Fortinet firewalls with Cisco firewalls. Customers really like the overall integration with SecureX. They see the advantage of having more security products from Cisco to get more visibility into their security. We also replace old, non-next-generation firewalls from Cisco; old ASAs.

The initial deployment of Firepower is a straightforward process. For me, it's pretty easy. If you have never worked with it, I can imagine it might be complex. 

Cisco makes it easier all the time. You can now deploy a remote branch by managing the device on an external interface. In the beginning, with previous software versions, that was hard. You needed to configure the file as a remote branch, but for that you needed the central Firepower Management Center to configure it and you didn't have a connection yet. It was a big issue to set up an initial firewall remotely when there was no connection to the Management Center. But that's been fixed.

In general, you just put down some management IP addresses and configure things so that the devices see each other and it starts to work. It's far from complex.

Generally, the initial setup takes four hours. The implementation strategy depends on the customer. I always have a conversation with the customer upfront. I explain how the connectivity works for Cisco Firepower, and then I say that I want to be in a specific subnet field. Then I start configuring the basics, and that is the part that takes about four hours, for Firepower Management Center and two firewalls in HA. Then, I start to configure the firewalls themselves, the policies, et cetera.

I have experience with SonicWall, Fortinet, Juniper, and Sophos firewalls, among others. We work with Fortinet and Palo Alto. It's not that we only do Cisco. But I can say from my experience that I am really more convinced about Cisco products.

What customers really like about Cisco, the number-one thing that they are really happy about within Firepower—and it was also in the old ASA code, but it's even more a feature in Firepower—is that the configuration is in modules. It's modular. You have different policies for the different functions within your firewall, so that your access control policy is only for your access lists and that's it. You have a different network address translation policy. It's all separated into different policies, so a customer knows exactly where to look to configure something, to change something, or to look at something which is not working properly.

Also, with Cisco, when a customer is not totally certain about a change he's going to make, he can make a copy of the specific access control policy or the NAT policy. If something doesn't go right, he can assign the copied policy back to the device and everything is back to the way it was. 

These are the biggest advantages our customers see. When a customer doesn't have any knowledge about firewalls, I can explain the basics in a couple of hours and they have enough familiarity to start working with it. They see the different modules and they know how to make a backup of a specific module so that they can go back to the previous state if something goes wrong.

My advice is "buy it." A lot of people prefer a specific brand and it's fairly hard to convince them that something else, like Cisco, is not bad, as well. They are so convinced about their existing firewall that they want to keep that brand because they are familiar with it and they won't need to learn a new firewall. It's hard for a customer to learn how a firewall works in the first place.

But my advice is that people should read about how Cisco security, in general, is set up and how it is trying to protect them with Talos. They need to understand that Cisco security is very good at what it does. They shouldn't blindly believe in what they have at the moment. I always hear, "My firewalls are good enough. I don't need Cisco. I will just buy the same ones, but new." Cisco Firepower is superior to other firewalls and people should not be afraid to dive in. By educating themselves about the firewall, they will be fine in managing it.

Practically speaking, Cisco firewalls are easier to manage than the firewalls they have at the moment, but they need to make the leap and try something else. That is the hardest part. When I do show them what they are capable of, and how you can configure all kinds of different things, they start to understand.

We don't have many customers that use other vendors' security products together with Firepower. We convince nine out of 10 customers to go over to Cisco fully. We do have customers who don't do that, and then we try to find a way to get the solutions to work together. For example, we try to integrate other brands' switches or firewalls with Cisco security products, but most of the time that is pretty hard. It's not the fault of Cisco. It requires that the other brands speak a protocol language that will support integration, but in the end, it's not perfect and the integration does not work very well. The majority of the time, we are not able to integrate into other security products. Cisco is using standard protocols, but the other vendor is abusing some sort of protocol and then it doesn't work well.

I don't prefer using applications in firewall rules, but our customers do use the application visibility and control, and it works perfectly. Firepower is very good at recognizing the application and is very good at showing you the kind of application that has been recognized. Customers use that in their access control policy rules, and I have never heard bad things about it. Cisco Firepower works very well in recognizing applications.

I get questions from customers because they do not understand threat messages generated by Firepower. Sometimes, it's hard to read what exactly the message is saying. In my opinion, that is not something that is specific to Cisco security or Firepower, rather it is an issue with security in general. Most networking people get these fancy firewalls and they get fancy security events. It's hard for some of them to understand what is meant, and what the severity level is of the message. It's more that a networking guy is trying to read security events. Firepower is doing a good job, but customers sometimes have problems understanding it and then they stop looking at it because they don't understand it. They assume that Firepower is taking the correct actions for them.

Firepower is not a fire-and-forget box. It is something you actually do have to take a look at. What I tell customers is, "Please enable Impact-One and Impact-Two messages in your mailbox, and if it's really something that you cannot understand, just forward it to me and I will take a look for you. Most of the time they are not very high-impact messages. There are only one or two high-impact messages per month.

There are customers who say, "We want you to review the messages in Firepower once a week." I have a look at them when I have time. We try to help the customer check security events once a week or so. That's not great, but it's always a question of finding a good balance between the money a customer can spend and the security aspects. When we do monitor all the events, 24/7, for a customer, you can imagine that it is quite expensive.

I configure every customer's automatic tweaking of IPS policies so that the IPS policy is enabled for the devices seen by Firepower, for recognition of what kinds of clients and hosts are in the network. Other than that, we do not do a lot of automation within Firepower.

Since 7.0, I don't have a lot of things to complain about. If I do have suggestions for improvements, I will give them during the beta programs. The speed of the FMC is very good. The deployment time is much better. They added the policy deployment rollback. That was something I really missed, because if I destroyed something I was able to undo that. Now, for me, it's actually almost perfect.

We use it for malware and IPS.

The automated policy application and enforcement have freed up time for us, on the order of 30 percent.

Also if one Cisco antivirus implementation is the subject of an attack, all other Cisco implementations get that information rapidly, in real time. All the other firewalls are in sync when it comes to malware attacks, through the update of the database. That is good.

The visibility it provides into threats is good. Every day we find lots of malware attacks targeting our network, but they don't get through to the network.

The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control.

Cisco Talos is well known around the world and everyone trusts Talos for malware intelligence. It is number one. It is also the most secure for Snort rules. It is more secure than others because its real-time analysis is better.

In addition, Firepower Management Center is helpful. 

We also use Cisco ISE and the integration between it and Firepower is okay.

I've been using Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall for four or five years.

It's a stable product.

The scalability is good.

Their technical support is good. When my NOC or my engineers have needed support the feedback I've had is that tech support has been good at critical moments. They have given us good service.

There was no issue with the initial setup. It's straightforward because Cisco gives us lots of documentation. It's not a big deal, for me. In four or five years I have deployed 35 to 40 Firepowers for financial organizations and corporate offices.

We also use Palo Alto, Fortinet, Sophos, and Check Point.

One issue with Firepower Management Center is deployment time. It takes seven to 10 minutes and that's a long time for deployment. In that amount of time, management or someone else can ask me to change something or to provide permissions, but during that time, doing so is not possible. It's a drawback with Cisco. Other vendors, like Palo Alto or Fortinet do not have this deployment time issue.

The other issue is the upgrading process, with Cisco. Sometimes, if we use a standalone device we need to create maintenance windows at that time and we need to restart Firepower. But with other vendors, like Palo Alto, there is no need to update in that way.

If they mitigated these two things, Cisco would be number-one in the world in the security domain.

We have not integrated Firepower with Cisco SecureX because it needs IOS 6.6. It's a limitation. If we have an external device, we would need downtime and in a financial organization, management will not allow us the downtime.

In my experience, the deployment procedure with Cisco is not the easiest, it's not plug-and-play. I hope that Cisco will give us that type of implementation.

Overall, I would rate Firepower at eight out of 10.

We are currently using this solution as a VPN and an internet firewall in some locations. In our data center, we are still using FortiGate as an internet firewall but we are evaluating other options.

If you compare the ASA and the FirePOWER, the best feature with FirePOWER is easy to use GUI. It has most of the same functionality in the Next-Generation FirePOWER, such as IPS, IPS policies, security intelligence, and integration and identification of all the devices or hardware you have in your network. Additionally, this solution is user-friendly.

We cannot have virtual domains, which we can create with FortiGate. This is something they should add in the future. Additionally, there is a connection limit and the FMC could improve.

I have been using Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall for approximately three years.

The solution is not stable. There seems to be always some issues. This is not ideal when you are running a system in a data center environment.

There is room for improvement in the scalability of this solution.

I was satisfied with the support we received.

When I did the installation three or four years ago it was challenging. 

This solution is expensive and other solutions, such as FortiGate, are cheaper.

I have evaluated FortiGate firewalls and when comparing with this solution there is no clear better solution, they each have their pros and cons.

I would recommend a Next-Generation firewall. FortiGate has a Next-Generation firewall but I have never used it. However, it would be similar to the Cisco Next-Generation FirePOWER, which has most of the capabilities, such as running all the BDP sessions and having security intelligence in one system. 

I would recommend everyone to use this solution.

I rate Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall a six out of ten.

Our business requirements are URL filtering and threat protection. We're using the Cisco 5525 and 5510 series. We have eight to 10 firewalls.

Our company is looking for vendors who can protect from the current, advanced technologies. We are looking for any technology that protects from the most threats, and that covers things like DDoS protection, spyware, and SSL.

We feel secure using Cisco firewalls. That's why we're using them. Cisco has never disappointed us, from a business point of view.

Cisco provides the most solutions.

We use some of our Cisco firewalls offsite. They provide DDoS  protection and multi-factor authentication. That is a good option as it enables work-from-home functionality. That is a feature that makes our customers happy.

Cisco needs to work more on the security and tech parts. Palo Alto gives a complete solution. Customers are very happy to go with Cisco because they have been around a long time. But that's why we are expecting from Cisco to give us a solution like Palo Alto, a complete solution. 

Cisco provides us with application visibility and control, although it's not a complete solution compared to other vendors. Cisco needs to work on the application behavior side of things, in particular when it comes to the behavior of SSL traffic. There is a focus on SSL traffic, encrypted traffic. Cisco firewalls are not powerful enough to check the behavior of SSL traffic. Encrypted traffic is a priority for our company.

In addition, while Cisco Talos is good, compared to the market, they need to work on it. If there is an attack, Talos updates the IP address, which is good. But with Palo Alto, and possibly other vendors, if there is an attack or there is unknown traffic, they are dealing with the signature within five minutes. Talos is the worst around what an attacker is doing in terms of updating bad IPs. It is slower than other vendors.

Also, Cisco's various offerings are separate. We want to see a one-product, one-box solution from Cisco.

I have been working on the security side for the last one and a half years. The company has been using Cisco ASA NGFW for three to four years.

The stability is good. It's the best, around the world.

The scalability is also good. But in terms of future-proofing our security strategy, it depends on the points I mentioned elsewhere that Cisco needs to work on.

We are getting the best support from Cisco and we are not getting the best support from Palo Alto.

In terms of costs, other solutions are more expensive than Cisco. Palo Alto is more expensive than Cisco.

Cisco is the most tested product and is more reliable than others. But Cisco needs to work on the security side, like website protection and application behavior. We have more than 40 locations around the world and all our customers are expecting Cisco. If Cisco provides the best solution, we can go with Cisco rather than with other vendors.

Palo Alto gives the best solution these days, but the problem is that documentation of the complete solution is not available on their site. Also, Palo Alto's support is not as good as Cisco's. We don't have a strong bond with Palo Alto. The longer the relationship with any vendor, the more trust you have and the more it is stable. We are more comfortable with Cisco, compared to Palo Alto.

If you're looking for a complete solution, such as URL filtering and threat protection, we recommend Palo Alto firewalls, but this Cisco product is also good.

We are using three to four security tools: one for web security, and another tool for application security, and another for email security. For email we have an Office 365 email domain so we are using other tools for that. For firewall security we are using Cisco ASA, Palo Alto, and Fortinet for protecting our business.

We have about 15 people on my team managing the solutions. They are network admins, and some are in security.

It's hard to judge how much time it saves our organization because it's doing things you don't realize. For example, when it's blocking web advertisements, when it's blocking phishing, when it's blocking geolocation, the time it saves is because of the things you might have had to deal with that, now, you don't. Any time we have some kind of internet-related event, it's definitely going to take us hours worth of time. We have to do an investigation, we have to report on it, we have to write something up. By protecting our environment it probably saves our security analysts a fair number of hours during the week.

It's the brick wall that keeps us from the bad guys. It does a lot of things. In the beginning when you just have a firewall, of course, it's your NAT and it's your Access Control List. It's the thing that allows traffic in and out. There is some routing involved in that too. But 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.

We used to do some web filtering on the Firepower but we moved into Umbrella once we started. We do use Firepower for one piece of web filtering because Umbrella has yet to provide it: advertisement blocking. We don't allow our end-users to go into advertisements. If they're going to go to a site, they have to know what the site is, not just try to hit some kind of Google ad to get to it because those can be dangerous.

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. It's definitely usable, though. You can get a lot of good information out of it.

It's hard to stay on the bleeding edge on firewalls because you have to be careful with how they integrate with Firepower. If you update one you have to update the other. They definitely have some documentation that says if you're at this version you can go to this version of Firepower, but you need to be careful with that.

We've been using Firepower for two to three years.

It's pretty stable. There are times where I'll get an email saying a process has stopped. But a few seconds later, they'll say it restarted it on its own. It's hardy enough that if it is having problems, it's bringing things back up. For the most part, it's been very reliable.

It's been really good. And even so, if I've had to reboot the actual appliance, I'll bring it back up and it's good to go.

We haven't hit that issue of scalability. We have increased the amount of traffic through it and it's handled it, but I think that's also a product of the ASA as well. If the ASA is going to choke, Firepower is going to choke as well.

We're going to be bringing in two new firewalls, as early as the fourth quarter or first quarter of 2020, and those are going to be pure FTD appliances. We'll probably be using those a little bit more extensively. I don't think we're going to be using the SSL portion, but we'll probably have the IDS/IPS, and we'll probably have the AMP turned on. That's because with the endpoints, we're not sure if we're going to be able to install an antivirus, so we can at least watch that. We'll probably use most of the suite on it.

I've always liked Cisco support. We're a pretty big Cisco shop, so you're not going to hear a lot of complaints from me about support. And not only that, but if I do have a problem with Cisco support, we get ahold of somebody - our customer-success people and the salespeople from Cisco who are focused on our organization - and we get help. It's very good.

Sometimes, I'll have to contact the first tier of tech support. I'll still open up a case. But in case that, for whatever reason, is not going to our satisfaction, at least we have a chain of command we can go through and talk to some different people. We might get it escalated if we're just not getting something fixed on time. But Cisco has very top-notch support.

We've been with Cisco and haven't had anything else yet. We haven't had a desire to move in a different direction. We've stayed with it because of how good it is.

We were initially introduced to Firepower by a consultant. At that time, it was for the web filtering because the web filtering we had was awful. We were using Sophos. Without getting too derogatory, it was just awful. There was no alerting and it was very hard to manage, whereas this is really easy to manage. With Cisco, it was very easy to set up content groups, to allow some users to get to some stuff and other users to not get to it. That's where it really started. There weren't any pros to Sophos that weren't in Firepower. We got rid of Sophos.

Our organization is a big believer in training, So I attended a five-day class on this. From that, I was able to set it up pretty easily.

We have a virtual appliance. Once it actually installs and we set IPs and got some of the base set up, it was done within about a day. But the time it takes will depend. We're not an organization that has 10,000 users. We're probably a medium enterprise, of about 400+ users, rather than a large enterprise, so our ruleset is comparatively small. As a result, it didn't take me as long as it might for some, a total of two or three days, and that's even with fine-tuning. But because we're still using the ASA and the ASDM, we still have those rules in the firewall. We're not really at the FTD point where all the rules are in there. If we were, to migrate it would probably take some time.

For me, it was relatively simple because of the valuable training I had. There are some good resources online, don't get me wrong. It was just nice to be able to do something hands-on at a place, in training, and then come back and be able to do it.

The neat thing is that the gentleman who taught us, instead of just teaching us the material from a book or even, "This is how you can pass the Firepower test," taught us how he would go into a Fortune 100 and set up an organization. I had almost a step-by-step lesson on how to keep going through the configurations to get to a finished product.

With a firewall, you're always coming back to it to tweak it a little bit. You might find, "Oh, I'm not getting the logging a lot," or, "Oh boy, this rule is doing this, but maybe I want to tighten it down a little bit more." But to get the base configuration, to get the objects in, it takes about a couple of days. At that point, you can at least have traffic going through it. You may not be blocking anything, but you can be monitoring things.

It was just me.

The return on investment would be the fact that I'm just not spending a lot of time either searching for things or trying to stop what's coming in and out of our network. The return on investment is the time I would have to spend during the day looking at things versus it proactively doing its job.

We're going to get to a point, not this year and not the coming year, probably going into 2021, where we're going to want to replace the ASA appliances with either virtuals or actual physicals. But the Firepower series of appliances is not cheap.

I just got a quote recently for six firewalls that was in the range of over half-a-million dollars. That's what could push us to look to other vendors, if the price tag is just so up there. I'm using these words "fictitiously," but if it's going to be outlandish, as a customer, we would have to do our due diligence and look at other solutions at that point.

In addition to that cost, there are licensing fees for some of the individual things like AMP, the IPS/IDS piece. It depends on what you want to use, such as the SSL piece and the VPN piece, which we don't use.

We haven't evaluated any other options. The only thing that may ever force us in that direction would be cost. Only if the cost of the solution got so large would we have to look at something comparable.

The neat part about this is how Cisco continues to evolve its product line and help us stay secure, while still doing our day-to-day business.

My advice would depend on how you want to use it. What are you looking for Firepower to do?

Firepower added features that, until we introduced into our environment, we could not have done. We probably could have added a third-party product but we would hate to keep doing all that. It's nice to be able to have our products from the same organization because then, if something's really wrong, we can talk to the same organization as we're trying to troubleshoot something through our environment. We use Cisco switches, Cisco routers, we use ISE, and Umbrella. We have a lot of products through Cisco.

We use the ACLs. We use the intrusion side, just to watch traffic. We have used the malware and have actually caught stuff in there. We do have a DNS policy so that at least we can check to make sure someone's not going to a bogus site; things can get blocked for that, but Umbrella is really good at what it does. We also have it connected to our Active Directory so I can see which users are going where, and that is valuable. But I can also see that in Umbrella, so there's some overlap.

For managing the solution it's me and at least one other person. I'm the primary resource on it.

We used to use AMP for endpoints through the Firepower but we decided to discontinue that. We have AMP on all our endpoints but with all the other things we have, such as Umbrella, we were satisfied enough with the security we have. We didn't want two different things possibly stopping files instead of having one console area to be able to see those kinds of things.

Overall, I would rate Firepower at eight out of ten. Every product can improve. But for what we're looking to do, it does a very good job.

Our primary use case for this solution is to protect data from unauthorized access.

The most valuable feature of this solution is AMP (Advanced Malware Protection), as this is really needed to protect against cyber threats.

The IPS is a must for a firewall.

The firewall throughput is limited to something like 1.2 Gbps, but sometimes we require more. Cisco makes another product, Firepower Threat Defence (FTD), which is a dedicated appliance that can achieve more than ten or twenty gigabits per second in terms of throughput.

I have found that Cisco reporting capabilities are not as rich as other products, so the reporting could be improved.

This is a reliable solution.

We started with version 5.4, but there were many releases available on the website and we were obliged to aggregate, step by step, to reach the current version.

This solution is really scalable and reliable. In my opinion, Cisco products are always scalable.

Cisco has a very good team for support. They are always available, and they give you a flexible solution. It is not just about getting a solution. We are learning, as well, when we request assistance. They also have a knowledge base that we can access in order to find resolutions for problems.

We were using the SonicWall solution prior to this one, but it reached end-of-life because we had updated our architecture. This is why we migrated to a next-generation firewall. We had also been using Fortinet FortiGate.

The initial setup of this solution was a bit complex because it was a new technology for us. We did find documentation on the vendor's website, and it also helped that we found some videos on how to do the configuration.

Our initial deployment took approximately three months because we were learning from scratch. We still had some service requests open because we could not fine-tune the solution, and ultimately it took a full year to fully deploy.

This solution is managed by the qualified people in our network engineering team. 

We tried to deploy this solution by ourselves, but our team was not quite qualified to implement this solution. It was a good opportunity for us to learn about it. 

We are in the process of renewing our three-year license, which costs approximately $24,000 USD for the thirty-six months. In terms of licensing, this product costs a lot, but this cost can save my assets that could be millions for my company. There is no choice.

We did have knowledge of other products, but we chose this solution because it facilitates the sharing of information with their knowledge base. It helps you learn from scratch.

My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is not to think twice about it. There are a lot of features that come with the cost. These institutions secure our network and they have to do research. The price of this solution is justified when you consider that it secures our network and protects our valuable assets.

This is a very good solution but it is not perfection.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

I am a banker. I'm working in the bank and our equipment is mostly based on Cisco for the moment. We have some incoming projects to deploy from Fortigate to firewalls.

Cisco ASA is that something I used when I was preparing for my CCNP exams. I've been using it on the incoming project that we want to do right now. 

It is easy to deploy Cisco ISP solution in the bank I'm working in, i.e. Cisco Identity Services Engine. We're already used Cisco ISSO. 

I have three Cisco ASA modules:

1. Security for perimeters
2. Security for data centers
3. Data center recovery

I have been using Cisco ASA since I've been at the bank for more than two years now. The model is 5515X. I have two modules of 5515X and the third one is the old 55105. 

My primary use of Cisco ASA is to take advantage of all the features. I use it to enforce security policy and also to take advantage of the Firepower module.

I have a firewall module on my two instances of 5515X. On the Firepower side, I use all features on Firepower modules that are included in the AMP.

The biggest improvement has been in the internet features. We have been asked to prohibit internet access for all users except the bank services division and that is improved. 

For AMP features, we use Cisco ASA to track traffic in inbound and outbound patterns, so we can set expectations for network traffic. I also used the exception for encrypted traffic. 

One problem: Before installing encrypted traffic, I had to decrypt it first. Before setting it back, I encrypt it again. That's just the way Cisco ASA functions.

I would say the Firepower module is most valuable. I'm trying more to transition to this kind firewall. I had to study a little of the Palo Alto Networks equipment. There is a lot I have to learn about the difference. 

Based on my certification, I had to do a lot of lab work, a lot of projects, a lot of technical work with Cisco ASA. Now, I'm moving to other vendors, like Palo Alto Networks and Fortinet so that I can empower my level of technical experience.

• All my change requests are for Cisco ASA to work more on ease of management. 
• All of the features of Cisco ASA are used by all of the other vendors on the market. 
• The firewall solutions are all based on the same network equipment. 

The difference is why each business chooses to use it and how they implement the architecture for their solution using Cisco ASA and Firepower features.

The installation and integration of Cisco ASA with Firepower can be improved. I used Fortigate as well and I can say that Fortigate's features are more usable. 

The management with Fortigate is easier than Cisco ASA on Firepower. The management side of Cisco ASA can be improved so it can be more easily configured and used.

The stability of the Cisco ASA platform is okay. I know that Palo Alto is the first rated one, followed by Fortinet.

The scalability is based on module support. We have a stand-alone version. It is not 100% applicable to talk about scalability at this point. 

There is another Cisco ASA module available that is more scalable than ours. For the module I have, the stand-alone, the scalability is not as good as on the higher model. 

The 5585 model, allocated for data center security, can be facilitated into the switching spot or the working spot in our data center. We can recommend the scalability there. 

For the module I have, I'm using it as a stand-alone. I don't think it is scalable too much at this point. 

I'm using Cisco ASA in my organization to support about 150 staff. For maintenance, I do all of the work myself.

I do everything if you need a Cisco ASA solution to be deployed for an infrastructure requirement. We are just a team of three. There is just me and my colleagues. 

I'm in charge of all the infrastructure system, including the network and security infrastructure. On all tasks related to the system security and network infrastructure, I'm in charge of it.

I had to work with Cisco customer support two or three times, a long time ago. I had to work with them based on a problem with my call manager. We had a good ability to work together with Cisco customer support. It was normal. 

They asked about the information on the installation. I had to upload it to them. They took that and came back to my problem with the results. I had a good experience with them.

I didn't use a different solution in my bank, but on some other enterprise jobs, I used some unique firewall solutions. 

Since I have been at the bank, only Cisco ASA has been deployed. We just added two new modules. In the bank, we only use Cisco ASA solutions.

I will say Cisco ASA has a complex setup just based on the security policy we have to enforce (asked by the chief, the CIO). For me, it's not complex. 

Cisco ASA is not difficult because I am in it for a year so it's easy for me to understand. I have no problem on the technical side. I always manage to do what I'm asked to do on security-side enforcement. I have no problem with that. It's normal for me. 

It was 2 years ago that we were trying to deploy our facility equipment. We took advantage to deploy the Cisco ASA firewall (model 5515X). 

For now, it's the only one. Since then, we're using it in an upcoming project. I will have to deploy some Fortigate and Cisco ISL as well.

I don't have a technical problem implementing Cisco ASA. I am a double CCNNP and I'm preparing for my CCIE. On the technical side, I don't need help.

I had to work with external partners because they provide us with uptake equipment. They're available to follow up on the project with us. 

We just had to make some tests to deploy some labs. However, when it comes to configuring Cisco ASA for production, I was alone. 

On a security basis, we couldn't let the partner know the details of our address space. This is prohibited within our organization by security policies. 

I had to re-do everything from scratch. For this implementation of Cisco ASA & Firepowe, I was alone.

The licensing for Cisco ASA is on a yearly basis. We have to renew the Firepower module license. We are in the process of renewing this one. 

I just made the demand. They have the management who is charge asking about the price and payment terms on different offers. 

We are just a branch bank. The decision is not made here and the branches just have to follow the central policy.

Cisco ASA is a good solution. I never had a problem with. I will say that I mostly recommend Fortinet because of their ease of management and Palo Alto Networks because of their reputation for business efficiency.

I would rate Cisco ASA with an 8 out of 10 points.