Cisco ACI and Cisco Secure Workload compete in networking and security. Based on user reports, Secure Workload holds the upper hand in advanced security needs due to its superior security capabilities and flexibility, while ACI is noted for its comprehensive networking features.
Features: Cisco ACI is recognized for its scalable network fabric management, advanced automation capabilities, and seamless integration facilitating policy-driven workflows. Cisco Secure Workload is distinguished by its advanced security features, including micro-segmentation, application whitelisting, and threat prevention capabilities.
Room for Improvement: Cisco ACI needs enhanced integration tools, more intuitive configuration options, and improved analytics. Cisco Secure Workload's areas for improvement include analytics and reporting functions, system flexibility, and user-friendly interfaces.
Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco ACI offers detailed, yet complex deployment models requiring significant expertise with responsive customer service. Cisco Secure Workload provides a streamlined deployment process with generally positive feedback for ease of use, though customer service sometimes needs additional clarifications.
Pricing and ROI: Cisco ACI involves higher initial setup costs affecting budgeting, but users report a favorable ROI. Cisco Secure Workload tends to have more manageable initial costs, leading to quicker ROI perception, especially prioritized for security enhancements.
Cisco ACI automates data center networking, centralizing management and configuration of diverse network environments. It's used for micro-segmentation, replacing legacy networks, and deploying software-defined networking.
Cisco ACI enables seamless integration with cloud platforms and multi-site connectivity. It ensures high availability and redundancy, supports network-centric applications, enhances security, and facilitates agile service implementations across different regions and data centers. The platform offers high throughput, ease of configuration, centralized management, and programmability. Users find value in its single management interface, policy-based routing, Service Graphs, and simplified deployment. Cisco ACI also excels in scalability, automation, low latency, and supports data center expansion efficiently.
What are the key features of Cisco ACI?Organizations in industries such as finance, healthcare, and technology implement Cisco ACI to modernize data centers, improve security, and streamline network operations. Its capabilities support expanding infrastructure, integrating with cloud services, and managing complex network architectures with minimal effort.
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
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