Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

We use remote desktop services from our data center. We can clean the client and the remote desktop server and from there we can establish a VPN channel. 

We can create a profile and we can give them access depending on the access level they need to be on. All the way from level one to level 16. I just create the user and from the dropdown, I select what access level they need to be on and that's it. I don't need to go individually to each and every account and do the configuration.

I like the user interface because the navigation is very easy and straightforward. On the left side pane, you have all the sites that you need to browse. Unlike any other firewalls, it's pretty straightforward.

If I need to download AnyConnect in a rush, it will prompt me for my Cisco login account. Nobody wants to download a client to a firewall that they don't own. 

I would definitely love to have a much nicer web interface compared to the systems interface that it has now. I also would like to download utilities without having to login into the system. Nobody would want to download a client unless they're going to use it with a physical firewall. I don't understand the logic. If I was a hacker, I could get someone to download it for me and then I can use the client. There's no logic behind it.

I would rate their stability a nine out of ten. It's pretty stable. I never come across a situation where the firewall hangs and then I need to reboot it.

Cisco is expensive and when you want to grow, it means you're going to need to spend some money but you can justify it.

We have closer to 50 users on the firewall at the moment and do have plans to increase usage.

We were previously using Sophos firewall but it had a lot of issues. 

The initial setup is a little difficult compared to other firewalls but once you get it right, especially the assistant control list, it's fine. It's a little difficult compared to other firewalls. 

The deployment took us about three days because we did some testing and we also did certain attacks and checked some hackers which is why it took some time. We wanted to make sure that it was at least 99.99% protected.

We implemented through a UK company called Rackspace. 

Licensing is expensive compared to other solutions. Especially in other regions because people are very careful when it comes to spending on IT infrastructure. My suggestion is, first test it, once you see how good it is you will definitely want to renew it. 

I would advise someone considering this solution to just go for it. It's expensive but it's a robust solution. The only thing is that you have to convince your finance guy to go for it.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

• Reliability
• Security
• Flexibility
• Functionality
• Availability - controllability anywhere and with different methods

I can tell that when we have started using the Cisco AnyConnect for remote access to business apps it makes the work for remote staff much simpler. It's also easier to provide remote IT support. Aside from this, the security officers can sleep better now.

The ASA is an almost perfect device.

I've used it for two years.

I have had no problems deploying it.

Occasionally, the packet rate falls unexpectedly.

I currently do not need to scale on my network.

9/10 - the regional online support could be better.

10/10.

We use MySQL and Nagios devices alongside the ASA as our network infrastructure needs expanding and required more serious hardware solutions.

When Cisco was installed, it did not go as expected.

It is not simple to calculate for IT hardware. To calculate the ROI for using the ASA, I would need to have a lot of statistics on the quality of services, both before and after.

Cisco ASA 5512-X was bought for $3,000, and a further $1,000 was needed for installation and pre-configuration.

• Fortinet
• Juniper

As a rule, any device upon delivery is obsolete. Pick up the solution for your business, based on your specific needs.

We deploy the firewall on the customer end and the customer can facilitate the VPN for their clients. We use Cisco Umbrella to secure their network and their endpoints.

We only work with Cisco products. We have been working with Cisco products for many years. In that way, we save time and we don't want to change to other vendors.

The security features are the most valuable. My customers find the security products very useful because nowadays there are many threats from the internet and other malicious users. The security products really help.

So far, Cisco Secure for securing infrastructure from end-to-end so that we can detect and remediate threats is good enough.

It should be easier for the IT management or the admin to configure products. For example, the firewall products are not very straightforward for many users. They should be easier to configure and should be more straightforward. 

Some competitors are very easy to configure, you don't need to spend a lot of time reading the documents and learning them.

I have been using Cisco products for ten years. 

The support is good. Sometimes it has a long waiting time. The waiting time depends on the products. For some products, for example, the Data Center solutions, you have to wait for an hour, even though they said that they escalated the case. 

Positive

The initial deployment should be more straightforward. It's not that straightforward at the moment.

The licensing is not good, it's confusing. I'm an engineer so I don't care about the actual price that much but the licensing part is confusing.

We've evaluated other solutions. We've been consulted to use competitors' products. There are things that are good with those competitors, but everything has two sides.

We choose Cisco because we are a Cisco partner, so we only recommend Cisco products. They believe in us, so we have a good relationship with them. 

I would rate Cisco Secure products an eight out of ten. 

My advice would be to use them. 

We have a lot of use cases of FirePower. In one of the use cases, we have two offices, and we use FirePower on our two sites. One of them works through the site-to-site VPN, and we have a controller on this site.

I work with Cisco and other partners, but the Cisco team is the best team in our country. When I call them, they always help us. 

I started to configure the device with version 7.2. After that, I had a problem. It was not a physical problem. It was a software problem. They advised me to install 7.0. I uninstalled and reinstalled everything. It took time, but it started to work normally.

I am not a programmer, but on the business side, they should fix all such issues in the future. We are Cisco partners, and when we recommend Cisco FirePower to customers, they always think that FirePower is bad. For a single installation of FirePower, if I have to write about 18 tickets to Cisco, it's a big problem. There was an issue related to Azure. We had Active Directory in Azure. The clients had to connect to FirePower through Azure. We had a lot of group policies. After two group policies, we had to make groups in Azure, and they had to sign in and sign back. It was a triple-layer authentication, and there was a big problem, so we didn't use it.

We have been using this solution for about two years.

It's very stable now. Everything is fine for me.

I use just two devices. I've not tested anything else.

Their customer support is very good. We also work with other vendors, but Cisco's support is still the best. I'd rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

For me, it was very easy because I solved all problems, but I had to install it two times. 

We are a reseller, and for us, it's a 10 out of 10 because if we sell it, we will earn money, but customers have to agree with us.

We primarily use this firewall for IPS, IAM, threat defense, and NAT.

I am from the networking department.

We are using the Firepower Management Center (FMS) and the management capabilities are okay. I would not say that they are good. The current version is okay but the earlier versions had many issues. The deployment also takes a long time. It takes us hours and in some cases, it took us days. The latest version 6.6.1, is okay and the deployment was quick.

I have tried to compare application visibility and control against Fortinet FortiGate, but so far, I don't see much difference. As I try to determine what is good and what is bad, I am seeking third-party opinions.

The most valuable feature is the threat defense. This product works well for threat defense but for everything else, we use Cisco ASA.

This product has a lot of issues with it. We are using it in a limited capacity, where it protects our DR site only. It is not used in full production.

The main problem we have is that things work okay until we upgrade the firmware, at which point, everything changes, and the net stops working. As a financial company, we have a lot of transactions and when the net suddenly stops working, it means that we lose transactions and it results in a huge loss.

We cannot research or test changes in advance because we don't have a spare firewall. If we had a spare then we would install the new firmware and test to see if it works, or not. The bottom line is that we shouldn't have to lose the network. If we upgrade the firmware then it should work but if you do upgrade it, some of the networks stop working. 

We have been using the Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall for three years.

Cisco's technical support is the best and that's why everybody implements their products. But, when it comes to Firepower, we have had many delays with their support. For all of the other Cisco products, things are solved immediately.

Nowadays, they're doing well for Firepower also, but initially, there was no answer for some time and they used to tell us that things would be fixed in the next version. That said, when comparing with other vendors, the support from Cisco is good.

We use a variety of tools in the organization. There is a separate department for corporate security and they use tools such as RedSeal.

In the networking department, we use tools to analyze and report the details of the network. We also create dashboards that display things such as the UP/DOWN status.

We have also worked with Cisco ASA, and it is much better. Firepower has a lot of issues with it but ASA is a rock-solid platform. The reason we switched was that we needed to move to a next-generation firewall.

The initial setup was not easy and we were struggling with it.

In 2017, we bought the Firepower 2100 Series firewalls, but for a year, there was nothing that we could do with them. In 2018, we were able to deploy something and we had a lot of difficulties with it.

Finally, we converted to Cisco ASA. When we loaded ASA, there was a great difference and we put it into production. At the time, we left Firepower in the testing phase. In December 2018, we were able to deploy Firepower Threat Defense in production, and it was used only in our DR site.

We do our own maintenance and there are three or four of us that are responsible for it. I am one of the network administrators. We can also call Cisco if we need support.

From the perspective of return on investment, implementing the Firepower 2100 series is a bad decision.

Firepower has a very high cost and you have to pay for the standby as well, meaning that the cost is doubled. When you compare Fortinet, it is a single cost only, so Fortinet is cheaper.

Prior to Firepower, we were Cisco customers and did not look to other vendors.

Given the problems that we have had with Cisco, we are moving away from them. We are now trying to implement FortiGate and have started working with it. One thing that we have found is that the Fortinet technical support is very bad.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

We provide IT solutions. We provide solutions to our customers based on their requirements. We support them from the beginning and do the installation and configuration in the head office and front office.

We installed Cisco ASA to support a customer in a WAN environment. They used it for site-to-site VPN and remote VPN. They used it for accessing remote office locations via the remote VPN feature. They had Cisco ASA 5500.

It made our customer's network more secure. They also have customers outside the office, and they are able to use the remote VPN feature to log in securely.

The high-availability and remote VPN features are most valuable.

It is easy to configure. It has a GUI and a CLI.

It doesn't have Layer 7 security.

I used this solution for maybe a year.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

For any issues, we contact the local support. They are very easy to deal with.

I have also worked with Fortigate.

It was easy to configure. The site-to-site VPN configuration didn't take too much time. It was complete in three to four hours.

Its price is moderate. It is not too expensive.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a nine out of 10.

We use it to segment the east and the west traffic in our data center. We also use it on the internet edge and for VPN termination.

We use its multiple versions. We use the virtual and the physical ones. We have multiple Cisco Firepower 9300, and we also have a few Cisco Firepower 4100.

It helps in protecting against threats from outside and within our data center. With the enhancement in the newest version 7.0, visibility is where we always wanted it to be. The introduction of the Unified Events feature really helps us out daily.

It enables us to implement dynamic policies for dynamic environments. With the recently added Dynamic Attributes feature, we are able to create more dynamic and fast-changing policies. In our data center, workloads tend to go up and down very quickly, and that's why dynamic policies are important. Because the workloads in our data center are fast-moving, we need to be able to change our firewall policy accordingly and quickly. That's what makes it a very important feature for us.

Snort 3 IPS allows us to maintain performance while running more rules. Our performance has
definitely increased after migrating to Snort 3. Rules are easier to implement. We also like the underlying antivirus advancements that they made with the new architecture, which increases its benefit for us.

The VPN and the login enhancements that were introduced in version 7.0 are invaluable to us. That was something that was missing before. 

Feature-wise, we mostly use IPS because it is a security requirement to protect against attacks from outside and inside. This is where IPS helps us out a bunch.

It is good in terms of the overall ease to use in managing it. Some of the things need some tuning, but overall, it is good.

The visibility for VPN is one big part. The policy administration could be improved in terms of customizations and flexibility for changing it to our needs.

I have been using this solution for about six years.

Its stability is quite good. We couldn't find any issues.

Its scalability is very good due to clustering. 

In terms of our plans to increase its usage, it has everything we need. We don't plan to add anything more because it has all that we need as of now.

Their support is not perfect. Sometimes, you get the feeling that some of the support engineers don't have a deep knowledge of the product, but there are some engineers who are able to help.

Most of our clients were on Cisco ASA.

I wouldn't call it extremely straightforward, but I wouldn't call it complex either. Its deployment took about a day.

In terms of the deployment strategy, we create our deployment plans for ourselves and our customers. The deployment plan depends on the environment.

We deploy it ourselves.

It is very hard to say because we don't measure that. It is also very difficult to measure if it has helped in reducing our firewall operational costs.

Its pricing is good and competitive. There is a maintenance cost.

It includes SecureX that makes it cost-effective as compared to the other solutions where you have to pay for XDR and SOAR capabilities.

Technically, it is a very good firewall, but some improvements need to be done on the management side. I would advise getting a consultant or someone from Cisco to help you in implementing and using this firewall to its fullest extent.

We don't use workload integration as of now. We also don't use its dynamic policy capabilities to enable tight integration with a secure workload at the application workload level. Similarly, we don't use the solution's tags for VMware, AWS, or Azure for dynamic policies implementation in the cloud.

I would rate Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall an eight out of 10.

We use it for intrusion prevention and in our VPN that is connected to our head office. It provides protection and security and node clustering. It gives us all the security features that we need within our environment.

The features that are most valuable within the firewall are the IPS as well as the Unified Communications. We also really like the dynamic grouping.

An area for improvement is the graphical user interface. That is something that is coming up now. They could make the product more user-friendly. A better GUI is something that would make life much easier. Traditionally, Cisco products have been command-line-based.

The Cisco ASA Firewall has been in our environment for the past seven years.

The product is very stable. We've not had any challenges with it in all this time. It performs very well.

We have 2,000 users who connect through this product. We are planning to increase use as we go, toward the end of the year.

The technical support has been excellent. When there have been any issues, they've always been there for us.

The initial configurations were straightforward, not complex at all. It took us just two days to finalize things.

We did most of the setup in-house, but we also had assistance from our partner.

We pay annually and there are no costs in addition to the standard fees.

When you compare Cisco ASA Firewall with Sophos, they are more or less the same in terms of functionality.

Cisco ASA Firewall is very stable and very reliable. It requires very minimal support, once you configure it and put it in your environment. You don't need to attend to faults or issues. Once you install it and plug it in, it is good to go.

We have been using the ASA Firewall for a long time, and it is an advanced product for our current use. In terms of improvement, there's not much that can be done to it. It is a solid product, very effective, and it does its job well.