Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

Akamai and Cisco are both solutions in the Cloud and Data Center Security category. Akamai is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.7, while Cisco is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.5. Akamai holds a 25.2% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco’s 14.0% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and Cisco Secure Workload compete in cybersecurity, offering network segmentation and workload protection. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has an advantage with its intuitive setup, while Cisco Secure Workload stands out for extensive features warranting its investment.

Features: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is known for micro-segmentation, real-time threat visualization, and intuitive management interface. Cisco Secure Workload provides comprehensive threat detection, automated policy management, and extensive integration capabilities.

Room for Improvement: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation could enhance its analytics capabilities, expand support for legacy systems, and simplify complex configurations. Cisco Secure Workload can benefit from improving user interface clarity, simplifying initial setup processes, and reducing dependence on Cisco ecosystem for better compatibility.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers straightforward deployment and responsive support, easing adaptation for small to mid-sized businesses. Cisco Secure Workload presents a steeper learning curve due to its comprehensive nature, yet provides supportive customer service throughout deployment phases.

Pricing and ROI: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation features a competitive initial pricing structure, providing good ROI by reducing breach costs. Cisco Secure Workload may involve higher setup costs, yet it delivers substantial ROI by enhancing security and reducing operational risks.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: February 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload

February 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 1.5%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is 25.2%, up from 20.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 14.0%, up from 12.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

Andrew W

VP - Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Tells us about vulnerabilities as well as their impact and helps to focus on real issues

Looking at all the different pieces, it has got everything we need. Some of the pieces we do not even use. For example, we do not have Kubernetes Security. We are not running any K8 clusters, so it is good for us. Overall, we find the solution to be fantastic. There can be additional education components. This may not be truly fair to them because of what the product is going for, but it would be great to see additional education for compliance. It is not a criticism of the tool per se, but anything to help non-development resources understand some of the complexities of the cloud is always appreciated. Any additional educational resources are always helpful for security teams, especially those without a development background.

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KlavsThaarup

Senior Security Consultant at Orange Cyberdefense

Offers micro segmentation capabilities and easy to setup

It's micro-segmentation The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature. There are always areas for improvement. It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud. So that could be improved. In future releases, I would like to see more integration with other…

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Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

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Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"Visibility is the most important aspect."

"It is pretty easy to integrate with this platform. When properly integrated, it monitors end-to-end."

"The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best features."

"The cloud misconfiguration feature and Offensive Security Engine, as well as their alerting process, are valuable."

"SentinelOne's behaviour analytics are valuable because they detect anomalies and malicious behaviour that signature-based solutions might miss."

"With PingSafe, it's easy to onboard new accounts."

"It gives me the information I need."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has saved up to 50 percent in engineering time."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"The interface and dashboard are amazing."

"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its visibility."

"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."

"The tool is a complete package that offers many features like visibility. You can get a graph with real-time workflows and visibility into server-to-server communication. We get visibility into many things happening within our environment."

"We like the centralized management of the firewalls. Until we installed Guardicore Centra, we managed all our firewalls individually, so making changes was complicated, difficult, and time-consuming."

"Application Ring-Fencing and Deception Server, which is basically like a honeypot, are pretty useful features."

"The solution is very scalable, especially when connected to the cloud resources."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pros

"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."

"Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time."

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

"It's stable."

"By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself."

"The product provides multiple-device integration."

"The most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"PingSafe takes four to five hours to detect and highlight an issue, and that time should be reduced."

"PingSafe filtering has some areas that cause problems, and to achieve single sign-on functionality, a break-glass feature, which is currently unavailable, is necessary."

"One potential drawback is the cost of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, which may be prohibitive for smaller businesses or startups, particularly those in regions with lower average incomes, such as India."

"If something happens in our infrastructure, the alert appears on the dashboard, but I have to log in to the dashboard and refresh it. I would prefer it to provide better alerting and notifications so that I can resolve issues on priority."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is an excellent CSSPM tool, but the CSC CWPP features need improvement."

"I export CSV. I cannot export graphs. Restricting it to the CSV format has its own disadvantages. These are all machine IP addresses and information. I cannot change it to the JSON format. The export functionality can be improved."

"We can customize security policies but lack auditing capabilities."

"In version 2, a lot of rules have been deployed for Kubernetes security and CDR, which makes a lot of issues of critical severity, whereas they are not critical or of high severity. There is a mismatch of severities. They need to work on severity management."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"It would be very helpful for beginners if the solution had more windows to help with the terms inside instead of going to the documentation."

"They can maybe improve their customer service just because they are kind of a small organization, and customer service isn't as big as others such as VMware."

"It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud."

"The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one... to then manage the policies and changes to those policies, going forward, through some type of automation process is not turning out to be really easy."

"I would rate the stability a six out of ten, where one is low and ten is high stability."

"The dashboard needs improvement. It should be more flexible so that I can easily see what I want or need to see."

"Clients would like to see that the security policies of GuardiCore can continue to be comparable to all the major firewall players out there."

"Guardicore Centra should incorporate automation so that we don't require to write custom scripts and APIs. The tool also has limitations on rules where it allows only sixty thousand rules. Our clients have also commented that there are too many manual clicks and effort to do changes. I think that the incorporation of automation can help our clients make changes with confidence and without the possibility of human error."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation cons

"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."

"The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."

"The product must be integrated with the cloud."

"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes."

"The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring."

"I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications."

"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."

"It has an uninviting interface."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It's a fair price for what you get. We are happy with the price as it stands."

"The pricing is fair. It is not inexpensive, and it is also not expensive. When managing a large organization, it is going to be costly, but it meets the business needs. In terms of what is out there on the market, it is fair and comparable to what I have seen, so I do not have any complaints about the cost"

"PingSafe is priced reasonably for our workload."

"Singularity Cloud Security by SentinelOne is cost-efficient."

"I wasn't sure what to expect from the pricing, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was a little less than I thought."

"It is not that expensive. There are some tools that are double the cost of PingSafe. It is good on the pricing side."

"PingSafe falls somewhere in the middle price range, neither particularly cheap nor expensive."

"Pricing is based on modules, which was ideal for us."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."

"The customer would complain about the cost."

"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."

"The pricing is too high."

"The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."

"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."

"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pricing and cost advice

"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."

"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."

"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."

"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."

"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."

"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?

The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

It is cost-effective compared to other solutions in the market.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

The documentation could be better. Besides improving the documentation, obtaining a professional or partner specializ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. I know other micro-segmentation t...

See all answers

What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?

Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?

When we have more than one interface, we can only have one policy for both interfaces. Normally, you have assets with...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?

The product provides multiple-device integration.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?

CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discov...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 24% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 20% of the time

AWS GuardDuty vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 8% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 7% of the time

Orca Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

Illumio vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 43% of the time

VMware NSX vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 11% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 4% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 4% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation Competitors

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 19% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 17% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 10% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 10% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 7% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

March 2025

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

April 2025

Download Akamai Guardicore Segmentation product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

April 2025

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore

Cisco Tetration

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security protects cloud workloads, offering advanced threat detection and automated response. It integrates seamlessly with cloud environments and secures containerized applications and virtual machines against vulnerabilities.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is renowned for its efficiency in mitigating threats in real-time. The platform integrates effortlessly with existing cloud environments, ensuring robust cloud security management with minimal manual intervention. Securing containerized applications and virtual machines, it excels in threat intelligence and endpoint protection. However, improvements are needed in performance during high workload periods, and more integrations with third-party tools and better documentation would be beneficial. Users often find the installation process complex, support response times slow, and the dashboard's navigation unintuitive.

What are the key features of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Real-time Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats as they occur.
Automated Response: Automatically responds to threats to minimize impact.
Ease of Deployment: Simple setup process with scalable options.
Machine Learning Insights: AI-driven insights enhance threat prevention.
Seamless Integration: Integrates with cloud environments for unified security management.

What are the primary benefits or ROI to expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Threat Mitigation: Improved security against real-time threats.
Reduced Manual Intervention: Automated processes save time and resources.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing security requirements.
Centralized Management: Manage security across platforms from a single console.
Advanced Threat Intelligence: Provides in-depth analysis and protection.

In specific industries, SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is implemented to safeguard critical data and infrastructure. Organizations in finance, healthcare, and technology depend on its real-time threat detection and automated response to protect sensitive information. Its ability to secure containerized applications and virtual machines is particularly valuable in dynamic environments where rapid scaling is necessary.

SentinelOne

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is a software-based microsegmentation solution that provides the simplest, fastest, and most intuitive way to enforce Zero Trust principles. It enables you to prevent malicious lateral movement in your network through precise segmentation policies, visuals of activity within your IT environment, and network security alerts. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation works across your data centers, multicloud environments, and endpoints. It is faster to deploy than infrastructure segmentation approaches and provides you with unparalleled visibility and control of your network.

Akamai

Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Cisco

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload

February 2025

Free Report: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload

Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload and other solutions. Updated: February 2025.

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