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 #6 with an average rating of 9.5. Akamai holds a 25.0% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco’s 13.6% 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: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload

January 2025

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Helped 838,640 peers since 2012

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 February 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 1.3%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is 25.0%, up from 19.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 13.6%, up from 12.5% 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

"It is fairly simple. Anybody can use it."

"The user-friendly dashboard offers both convenience and security by providing quick access to solutions and keeping us informed of potential threats."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has improved our security posture."

"The most valuable aspects of PingSafe are its alerting system and the remediation guidance it provides."

"It's positively affected the communication between cloud security, application developers, and AppSec teams."

"Singularity Cloud Native Security provides us with a platform to scan instances when they are getting created, and the dashboard helps us to identify the critical issues."

"PingSafe offers comprehensive security posture management."

"PingSafe has a dashboard that can detect the criticality of a particular problem, whether it falls under critical, medium, or low vulnerability."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"The real bonus is the fact that we can secure applications, all the way down to the individual services, on each host. It's actually more granular security than we can get out of a traditional firewall."

"The most valuable features of the solution are the maps and ring fencing that help monitor events."

"I found the solution to be stable."

"Its deception features are great, providing a rich telemetry of lured origins, and are a great resource for any active defense strategy."

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

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

"The most valuable feature is the visibility of processes and connections."

"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."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pros

"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."

"The only use case I can see that makes sense is micro-segmentation. I think there are other use cases for it. The main purpose of the product is to do micro-segmentation by collecting IP. That could be done by installing an agent, and then you have all the communication coming in and out. You could also use some flow sensors installed in the network that receive a copy of the traffic and then report that back to the system."

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

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

"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"In terms of ease of use, initially, it is a bit confusing to navigate around, but once you get used to it, it becomes easier."

"Once all components, including the cloud piece and container runtime piece, integrate further and incorporate an AI layer for better comprehension, it will greatly enhance the utility of Singularity Cloud Security."

"The application module focuses on the different codes and libraries that can be run on the machines. It is very important for Singularity EDR to detect what type of codes and what type of libraries can run in the machine. If they can implement a white list or a black list of codes or libraries that can be used in the machine, it would be very helpful. They can focus more on the application module."

"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."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has limited legacy system support and may not fully support older operating systems or legacy environments."

"In some cases, the rules are strictly enforced but do not align with real-world use cases."

"When we get a new finding from PingSafe, I wish we could get an alert in the console, so we can work on it before we see it in the report. It would be very useful for the team that is actively working on the PingSafe platform, so we can close the issue the same day before it appears in the daily report."

"For vulnerabilities, they are showing CVE ID. The naming convention should be better so that it indicates the container where a vulnerability is present. Currently, they are only showing CVE ID, but the same CVE ID might be present in multiple containers. We would like to have the container name so that we can easily fix the issue."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"In our version, when using the terminal server, we cannot exclude user tasks for each session."

"Customers would want to see the cost improved."

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

"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."

"Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it."

"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."

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

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation cons

"The interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly."

"There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."

"The product must be integrated with the cloud."

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

"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."

"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."

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

"It is highly scalable, but there is a limitation that it is only available on Cisco devices."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its pricing is okay. It is in line with what other providers were providing. It is not cheap. It is not expensive."

"PingSafe is affordable."

"I am not involved in the pricing, but it is cost-effective."

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

"Singularity Cloud Workload Security's licensing and price were cheaper than the other solutions we looked at."

"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."

"PingSafe falls within the typical price range for cloud security platforms."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is costly."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."

"The pricing is too high."

"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 customer would complain about the cost."

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

"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."

"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."

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

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pricing and cost advice

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

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

"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."

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

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

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

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

18%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

27%

Financial Services Firm

12%

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?

SentinelOne is relatively cheap. If ten is the most expensive, I would rate it a seven.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

From my personal experience, the alerting system needs to be faster. If something happens in our infrastructure, the ...

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 25% of the time

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 22% 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 6% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

Illumio vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 42% of the time

VMware NSX vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 11% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 4% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 4% of the time

Cortex Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation Competitors

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 18% of the time

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 16% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 12% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 10% of the time

Cortex 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

January 2025

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

February 2025

Download Akamai Guardicore Segmentation product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

February 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

January 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: January 2025.

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