Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) Reviews

My company is a system integrator and we deploy Cisco NGIPS in various contexts, typically in the banking environment and in other high-level security scenarios, depending on our customer requirements. 

We normally work with the most current models of Cisco products such as the Catalyst 9000 Series switches and 1000 Series routers.

The top features of Cisco NGIPS, which have been working very well, include stateful inspection and the access list-based security configuration. But from my perspective, the best part of Cisco NGIPS is the licensing process, which is very easy and straightforward. It's essentially copy-paste licensing.

The other aspect that I like is the technical support, who are highly capable. They were very good to us during the times that we used them and they tend to reply immediately to queries, even though you might not get the right engineer to help you right away. Tickets are usually assigned to junior staff at first but they do have escalation procedures, so if the support member can't solve the issue then they will immediately escalate it to higher management.

The feedback from some of our customers is that they weren't interested in Cisco because it was too complicated to deploy, especially in cloud-related areas.

Something else that our customers have commented on is that, in the current release of Cisco NGIPS that we are using, there have been some issues when they have tried to synchronize Cisco's hardware products with Cisco's management software.

If I recall correctly, the problems came from Cisco's Firepower Management software after we had proposed to our customers to use virtual machines as a cost-saving measure. After setting up the VMs, the software would start crashing, and it greatly disturbed the customers. It is possible that this was related to power issues because most of the time it would crash on power-on or power-off, but at other times it would crash due to incoming firewall traffic. I hope that in future releases, these problems will be solved.

In general, the ASA level features are working very well in Cisco products, but when it comes to the Next-Generation product, it has been somewhat unstable. To remedy this situation, Cisco needs to make the software more stable, easier to manage, and easier to update (possibly with an auto-updating mechanism). The small intricacies of the software product make the system more complicated than it needs to be for our engineers and our customers. 

I have used Cisco NGIPS for four years.

Cisco's stability issues have caused several of our customers to complain directly to the vendor, and if these issues persist into the future I will not be able to continue recommending Cisco NGIPS to our customers. In terms of cost, security, compatibility, and flexibility, there are a lot of products doing better than Cisco, so why would customers keep buying Cisco if they can get better products with more stability? Cisco has to think of their global market first and foremost and fix their issues based on their findings. In our country, Cisco has a good name because they got here first, but a lot of customers have shifted, in terms of security, to other products such as Fortinet and Palo Alto, which have their own Next-Generation firewalls.

Cisco NGIPS is not that easy to scale, in my opinion. However, it can be upgraded, depending on the design. When you propose a design to customers, you have to check their expansion capability in terms of various factors such as how much time and how much employees would have to be involved.

When it comes to the VM products, some of them might not be scalable unless you upgrade your product to the latest version, in which case you have to upgrade the versions one by one. For example, your current version might 5.1 and you are aiming to upgrade to version 10.1. In this case, you would have to upgrade each intermediate version until you reach 10.1.

Cisco's tech support is very good and it was a pleasant experience whenever we used them. They tend to reply immediately, although when it comes to the technical capability of the support you might not get an appropriately skilled engineer to help you right away. However, they do have escalation procedures such that the junior staff will escalate any unsolved issues to higher management.

The ease of installation depends on the engineer. If they aren't trained in Cisco NGIPS or they aren't skilled enough, it's not easy to implement. You have to implement with a highly skilled engineer because it's not simple to deploy Cisco products.

We had one project where we implemented Cisco NGIPS along with a few other products and it took perhaps a week to fully deploy. 

The annual licensing tends to be expensive, but in terms of implementing the licenses, it's a very uncomplicated process and as easy as copy-paste in its straightforwardness.

Regarding the affordability of the licensing, if you buy licenses on a yearly or quarterly basis, you might not find much return on investment, but at the same time you will have a better product with regular upgrades and less network interruptions, so this has to be weighed against the costs.

I have decided not to update our use of Cisco NGIPS unless they can solve their issues related to software stability, and thus I cannot fully recommend Cisco NGIPS to other customers at this time.

I would rate Cisco NGIPS a seven out of ten.

We have deployed Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) for intrusion detection and prevention in our financial sector. It protects our public-facing systems, especially in the DMZ zone, ensuring high security for servers involved in public transactions.

Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) performs exceptionally in Trojan detection, especially at the network level. We used a Next Generation Firewall on that aspect, which is amazing. Cisco products are also very good at integration with third-party tools.

It's better to strengthen the AI feature of the IPS. Considering different attack vectors, using AI to understand the behavior or features of network-level intrusions and protecting against zero-day attacks would be beneficial.

I have been working with Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) for about two to three years.

I find Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) stable.

The solution is good at scaling.

Before Cisco, we did not work with any other solutions for the IDPS.

I was not involved in the initial deployment or setup.

The pricing for Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) is quite high. They should consider revising the pricing strategies since there are other vendors in the market offering competitive pricing.

I would recommend Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) to others, although the pricing is high.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use the solution for cybersecurity purposes. The tool helps us to identify anomalies that come from internal or external networks. 

The attack patterns and payloads go undetected in Cisco. We would like to see a new solution with more effective detection of attack patterns. There should be more data analyzing patterns as well which provides useful information. 

I have been using the product for two years. 

I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. 

The tool's scalability is not an issue. We have a lot of people using the product even in our subsidiaries. We have a couple of thousand users for the solution.

We have residence engineers for support. We mainly use level two support. Cisco's support in the local region is up to the level. However, we have issue with country-level support.  

I use Darktrace simultaneously. 

The product's setup was smooth and easy. The implementation was not a big deal and took two weeks to complete.

A Cisco consultant helped us with the tool's implementation. They were competent, helpful, and confident. 

We get cut in price since we use other Cisco products. We have the whole bundle of Cisco solutions. 

I would rate the product a six out of ten. The solution is easy to maintain. We are looking for a solution that is powered by AI which gives enhanced protection and detection. 

We use Cisco as a firewall. It is an intrusion detection and prevention solution.

The malware detection, threat defense, sandboxing, VPN, and mail security have all been valuable features of Cisco NGIPS.

The performance of CISCO Firepower could be improved. 

We moved from Sophos to Cisco before the pandemic. During the pandemic, there was an increase in VPN connections. We had a layer of security within CISCO Umbrella, and now with Cloud. The firewall protects the internal system, but we needed to add another layer of security for the endpoints that are outside the local area network. We needed another product to cover this lack of security.

We prefer to have integration with the points that are outside our local area networks using the same brand using one single console. Because the firewall only protects the people inside the network, we required another solution.

I would like to see Cisco NGIPS include home office support in one single product.

Our organization has been using Cisco NGIPS for two years.

Cisco NGIPS is stable most of the time.

This solution is not easily scaled. I would like Cisco NGIPS to be easier to scale. With the increase in work from home, we needed to add another layer of security to ensure we can meet the demand of stability, high availability, and connection.

Our company has two layers of support with Cisco. One is the local support, which is very good. The second support is directly from Cisco. They are quick to respond and have quick solutions to the problems.

We moved from Sophos to Cisco Firewall because we were looking for better integration between all the appliances and data center. All of our core switches, our wireless system, and other tools are the Cisco brand, meaning that all our monitoring options are integrated under Cisco.

We hired a professional service to install this solution.

With the increase in work from home, companies may need more than just a firewall. I recommend anyone considering Cisco NGIPS evaluate all the demands from their in-home offices and determine if their solution needs to be bigger, or wider, for security and performance.

I would rate this product a 9 out of 10, particularly if you work in a LAN environment.

We predominantly use this solution to place the perimeter on the firewall, which helps us filter out inbound and outbound traffic.

Cisco is tightly engaged with threat defence called Talos, which has more threat intelligence. In addition, they are dedicated to working on updating their IPS signatures.

We have been using this solution for almost five years. It is deployed both on-premises and cloud, and we are using the latest version, Cisco 12.X.

It is a stable solution.

It is a scalable solution. We have over 100 clients.

The technical support is sound and clear.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward, and it's like a plug-and-play. The graphical user interface is understandable, and their documentations are clear. In addition, they have an SOP document that can be used as a guide.

There is an annual licensing cost. It is not a cheap solution, but it's cost-effective. Aside from costs, Cisco NGIPS provides great security. Cisco is providing more discounts to its end customers to survive in the security market.

I rate this solution a ten out of ten. I would recommend this solution. When you compare Cisco NGIPS to other solutions, it is salable and technically sound. Other solutions have very limited services and threat intelligence.

Regarding additional features, they should speed up their technology to the market because, compared with other security vendors, Cisco is a little behind on the Gartner and technical front. In addition, the integration can be more secure.

It is our main firewall. We use it for reporting and for firewall purposes to block unwanted inputs and outputs.

Its ease of use and its ability to block and allow ports in and out of our organization are the most valuable features.

It works very well. It gives us all the information that we need.

We don't like its licensing model. It has separate licensing for all the features. For instance, to get URL filtering, you need to buy another license. Every feature set seems to require another license. Unless you purchase them all upfront, you find some surprises and realize that you can't do that because you need another license. 

Its logging isn't quite as good as it used to be in our previous solution. We used to have Cisco ASA, and we could view the logs a lot easier than NGIPS (also known as Firepower). We saw real-time logging, but we don't see that as much in Firepower.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It has been very stable. I don't think it has gone down at all in two years.

It is very scalable. In terms of the number of users, we have 26,000 students and 3,500 staff members. Everybody in our organization goes through it and takes advantage of it on our system. We have about five people who are managing it, and they are from the network group, infrastructure group, and storage group.

We did have some engagement with the technical support people regarding the integration with Nexus Switches, and they were very good. They helped us out quite a bit.

We were using Cisco ASAs. They were going out of service. They were going out of sale and support. So, we decided to move to Firepower. We wanted to go to the Next-Gen IPS type of stuff, and ASAs didn't have that kind of feature set.

It was quite complex. It required some workarounds with other network components in our system. It could have been a lot less complicated. Nexus Switches that we had were a little bit older, and they didn't integrate as well with Firepower as they could have. So, we ended up having to buy some new switches. 

The deployment pretty much took about three weeks. It involved moving all of our stuff from our old firewall onto the new one. Rules were a little different, so we had to work on it for a while. Fortunately, we could run them in parallel, so it worked out okay.

We did it in-house.

It has definitely given us our return on the investment.

It is expensive. It has separate licensing for all the features, and every feature set seems to require another license.

Licensing is on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs besides the standard licensing fee.

I would advise others to make sure that the rest of their equipment is completely compatible with the newest Firepowers.

I would rate Cisco NGIPS an eight out of ten. It gives us all the information that we need. We've got to dig for it sometimes, but it is a good product.

I am currently working with Cisco NGIPS at home as an IPS device, so I can see what's hitting the firewall and look at the logs. I'm using it as a learning environment. 

The IPS functionality is useful if you have offices all over the place. It's nice to have centralized management instead of going to a separate ASA or FirePOWER device. 

The biggest problem with most Cisco products is that the interface is lagging behind the competition. The user interface could be updated and improved.

Cisco NGIPS is stable. 

Cisco NGIPS is highly scalable. We use it to cover 15 offices.

It requires some background in IPS and IT security to fully understand it, so it is somewhat complex to deploy.

I rate Cisco NGIPS eight out of 10. 

This product automatically blocks any form of threat in a network. Once a threat is detected, it will notify the IT team. It will show the full threat, the target destination, and perhaps a loophole that the intruder used.

What it reports depends on how you have configured it.

It's able to map the solutions that you have, detailing how they are connected. It gives you visibility in terms of what's happening without your network.

This is the leading Cisco solution across Sub-Saharan Africa.

The most valuable feature is that it is able to detect any form of infiltration. It does this in an automated fashion so that you don't have to do anything to it. Once it is properly configured, it will act on its own.

The visibility that it gives you is very good. You're able to know what has happened within your network.

The way it pushes policy rules is very good. It makes sure that your information is reliable, and that you have the right visibility and the right intelligence.

I would like to see a more user-friendly interface. This is true for Cisco in general, with many of the products that they have.

We have been selling Cisco NGIPS for approximately four years.

This is a very stable product. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it is used by every six or seven banks out of ten.

This solution is very easy to scale, depending on your organization's roadmap. I have had customers that are using it and scaling very fast, especially in the financial sector.

Being a clustered solution, you can have 500, 1,000, or 10,000 users. In fact, one of my customers has 20,000 users of NGIPS. I have another organization that has 1,200 users. The size of the solution is set based on the number of users.

The technical support from Cisco is good, and it is not expensive. Over the past couple of years, they have really improved when it comes to service delivery.

I have worked with a variety of security solutions. I have worked with products from Trend Micro, Cisco, and others.

This product is straightforward to install. A CCMP can complete the deployment in one day.

One skilled person is suitable for deployment.

This is a very affordable product.

This is a product that I can recommend anytime. I have sold millions of dollars of it, every year. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.