Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) Reviews

Our company uses the solution for data functions in banking. It is a backend solution in the server center. 

We analyze traffic and adapt configurations or customize policies to the environment of the IPS itself. 

The solution very effectively provides malware protection and signature-based anomaly detection. We don't need to use any separate tools. 

The end delay layer was recently improved so it is much faster for service functions, training, and workflows. 

Recent improvements to the OS and firewalling are good. 

The solution could always enhance detection for zero-day attacks, SQL injection, and signature-based anomalies. 

I have been using the solution for 15 years. 

The stability needs improvement so is rated a four out of ten. 

Technical support is rated a six out of ten. 

The setup is pretty normal but might be slightly more complicated than Fortinet. If you are familiar with the interface or have a technical background, then you won't have issues with the setup. New engineers might find the setup a bit complicated until they get used to it. 

We implement the solution in-house. Deployment time depends on the environment itself. You also have to consider migrations and preparing the environment. In the learning phase, you determine any impact on protection or policy and adapt accordingly. 

A large network will take longer to implement than a small one. Integrations can take some hours to many days, can take minutes to a month. 

The solution is a good product so I rate it a six 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. 

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. 

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.

It's a cheap way of terminating internet circuits so that you don't use expensive routers.

It's mainly deployed on-premises.

The cost is the most valuable feature.

The GUI could be improved. The pain point is really only focused toward the security engineer who configures it and the operation engineer who manages it. Those are the guys that have the pain points because the GUI is so bad.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It's stable.

It's not scalable on a single device. If you need to scale up, you have to buy another one.

For any of these devices, this is the irritating part. A customer comes to me and says, "I need a gig of internet access at a location." If I see a Firepower that handles up to a gig, I'm not buying it because I can't scale. If the customer comes back to me six months later and says, "We're packing that gig, and I need two gigs," then he's going to get angry at me for undersizing his firewall, so I need to go to a four gig model. 

If I absolutely need to lock down somebody's network in the most secure manner, I'm going to use Palo Alto.

The initial setup was extremely complex for a firewall that did nothing but accept traffic and filter it. It provides IPS, IDS, and it provides URL filtering, which isn't as good. The categorization leaves a bit to be desired. That leaves you to do extensive whitelist blacklisting.

I would rate the ROI 2 out of 5. You have to take into account the number of hours you pay an engineer to set it up and the number of hours you have to pay an engineer to manage it. You're spending more money on engineering and less money on a firewall. So, your return on investment is going to take significantly longer than with a competitor.

I would rate the pricing 4 out of 5.

I would rate this solution 4 out of 10.

Take into account how long it's going to take you to perfect the configuration and how long it's going to take you to find a problem before you buy this product.

Some of our customers are having DDOS attacks and ransomware attacks.

Earlier in July 2019, I noted that there was an attack. To mitigate future attacks from the ransomware in Columbia Bank and other similar situations, we at Cisco Talent, which is responsible for security intelligence, provided updated security rules. We offered intrusion policies and codes through signatures to help overcome such situations.

It's a good solution.

The solution is not that bad. Next-generation firewalls work from my experience, they work. 

The URL filtering feature and the new locations feature are both valuable additions to the solution.

While the Management GUI and FMC could be improved, the devices themselves function well.

I have been using Cisco NGIPS for more than five years.

I provided support for version 6.4, but in our company, we do have Firepower version 7.0.

Cisco NGIPS is a stable solution.

Cisco has great support.

I would rate Cisco NGIPS an eight out of ten.

We have NGIPS deployed at the edge and use it to filter the point of presence to the Internet or other offices.

NGIPS lets you map web requests to a specific user to determine who is downloading files and what they are accessing. You can use it to identify users downloading malware or track time wasters using Facebook or something like that. It gives you visibility into what your users are doing on the Internet. 

The price is a little high. It's hard to find solutions that are easy on the budget and strike a balance between affordability and features.

I have used NGIPS since 2015.

NGIPS is quite stable. 

NGIPS is scalable. It has well-defined stacks for how much traffic it can handle. You can fully inspect traffic or use SSL decryption.

I rate Cisco support 10 out of 10. We get everything we need from them. 

Positive

I rate NGIPS nine out of 10 for ease of setup. The process was smooth and straightforward. After deployment, it requires some maintenance like updates and creating or changing the policies. We have more than a hundred policy categories now. 

We had help from professional services.

I rate Cisco NGIPS nine out of 10. We always find stuff that could be done better or that we want more of. For example, we've had some issues creating specific rules, and it's challenging to create exceptions or tweak the rules as your business evolves. It's tricky to order the rules to follow the business policies you want. You have to balance security with getting work done. You need to watch how many rules you make because you can get overwhelmed.

Our primary use case is as a firewall segregating networks and defending the perimeter.

I would consider this to be a medium product in its field across the board.

Some features, for instance, are a way for the management console to be able to manage each specific firewall, for instance. Because if we have more than one firewall configured in the management center, we cannot delegate administration, just one of the equipment. I think the part of IPS and everything else needs to be better equated to the real needs or current needs of the business compared to the other manufacturer, because it is not straightforward, a way to configure it compared to the other competitors.

I have been using Cisco NGIPS for one year.

It is more or less stable. Sometimes I have some issues normally when we need to upgrade it to newer versions. I think it does the job. The hardware does the job, and the current models do the job.

We have around four thousand users and that would be an example of its scalability.

Technical support is good. If you open a case about the support, it is good. Compared to the other manufacturer, it is very good.

The initial setup was complex and the upgrade took a lot of time with a very big image to download and everything else. We had many versions and patches that had to be installed. The deployment took between two and three hours.

In this case, we did it in-house and I was the integrator.

I think we have to have a good knowledge of the product. It is not easy to set up from the beginning. And I am also using the comparison with the other manufacturer. You need to have very good training before managing the product. I would rate Cisco NGIPS a seven on a scale of one to ten.