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Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) vs Symantec Privileged Access Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Identity Services Eng...
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
139
Ranking in other categories
Network Access Control (NAC) (1st), Cisco Security Portfolio (1st)
Symantec Privileged Access ...
Average Rating
7.8
Number of Reviews
50
Ranking in other categories
Privileged Access Management (PAM) (22nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) and Symantec Privileged Access Manager aren’t in the same category and serve different purposes. Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) is designed for Network Access Control (NAC) and holds a mindshare of 29.9%, down 31.4% compared to last year.
Symantec Privileged Access Manager, on the other hand, focuses on Privileged Access Management (PAM), holds 1.8% mindshare, down 1.8% since last year.
Network Access Control (NAC)
Privileged Access Management (PAM)
 

Featured Reviews

Adarge Ekholt - PeerSpot reviewer
Aug 3, 2023
The ability to see what devices are online for a particular user helps a lot with our troubleshooting
Another big benefit for us is definitely security in terms of wireless user activity. We spent a lot of time looking at live logs and user logs to figure out where they've been in the network and in which buildings. We can get rogue granular with locations of where people are and where they're experiencing issues. We have definitely saved time since using ISE when it comes to building some of the policies around the types of users, like library users versus student union or even admin users. The policy building is complicated, but after a while, it's pretty straightforward in terms of repeatability of staff turnover, and things like that. It's not the learning curve that's hard for continuous maintenance.
Muhammad Baber - PeerSpot reviewer
May 6, 2022
Allows IT and consultants to access the infrastructure environment but needs more security and better support
Initial setup was very straightforward. It's basically a hardware appliance. It's a software appliance, but it's a hard-coded appliance. It's just a black and white screen, and it has everything inside. BeyondTrust is a Windows-based server, and they usually harden the machine and have their own patches on it, even though it's a Windows machine, so we can easily log into it. With the current solution, it's very difficult to log in. It's just a black and white screen, and you need a support account to log in onto it. It feels more secure. It's a shell, and the database is embedded. But with BeyondTrust, it's SQL-based and Windows-based, so it's vulnerable. When we first set up the solution, it was only a few endpoints to give access to the vendors. Now, it's around 400-500 machines. It required a lot of maintenance. There were a lot of new patches and new versions of the appliance, and then the appliances would move out of support very quickly, which is another reason we are moving to BeyondTrust. At the moment, we are using the version which is very stable, but it is out of support within six to seven months. They keep asking you to upgrade to the new version, which is challenging. Once we upgraded, we had a lot of issues that support couldn't fix.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"It's easy to change and add policies."
"For device administration, all devices have multifactor authentication in collaboration with IT, so it secures access to all of our devices. For guest and wireless access, it's a matter of a lowly manager who we give access to the portal and he can assign access to the guests, so it's a very simple process now. It keeps the IT focusing on their work, and gives the business people the right access."
"So far, we have had no issues with the stability."
"The access policies, and all of the policies in Cisco ISE, are important to us."
"It's scalable."
"Authentication is the most valuable feature because it puts our company at another level of security."
"The policy sets give us more granular groups for end-user access."
"In terms of scalability, you need to factor in your licenses. With a virtual platform, the scalability is more than sufficient. We have over one thousand users."
"It's easy to use and easy to configure."
"One of the key things for us about the product is around its simplicity. Being able to put in the technology that allows the business to remove complexity and also allow the security improvements."
"The two factor authentication, and the single most important capability was it supported PIV and CAC as one of the two factors. That was pretty huge for us."
"The product is very scalable in terms of concurrent sessions that it can handle at a time, number of device it can support, accounts that it can manage, or number of nodes that you can deploy in a cluster."
"It will provide us with more security."
"Whoever built it from the ground up, they understand how an organization is laid out."
"You can do A2A integration. You can have your own script, which can then run outside of PA to retrieve the password and perform other tasks."
"It reduces the viral attacks on my website. It also allows certain users access to see what happens daily."
 

Cons

"I'm frustrated by the resource consumption and how many resources it needs to run. It takes a lot of RAM. It takes a lot of space and a lot of IO power. It's frustrating to do upgrades because it takes a long time."
"The policies could be adjusted to make them more easily implementable."
"Cisco ISE is complex. The deployment and design of networks with it is so complex. If it could change it would be better."
"In an upcoming release, it would be nice to have NAC already standard in the solution."
"It would be ideal if Cisco could provide some short training videos or documentation to customers to help them understand how to use the product."
"In order to make it a ten, it should be more user-friendly. You need somebody who is knowledgeable about it to use it. It's not easy to use. We have to rely heavily on technical support."
"I believe that Cisco can improve the way its policies are built because it's a little complex."
"Troubleshooting and multi-ISE can be challenging with the solution."
"Instead of just giving passwords to the user based on job function, from auditing perspective, turn that cycle around. That would really help from an auditing standpoint."
"It's difficult to locate the reports, there are limits on what reports can be run from the GUI, and the report formats are lacking."
"They should include some assignments in the test environment to explore the product's features."
"The service account management functionality needs to be extended to application pools, SQL database, PowerShell scripts, service account discovery, etc."
"What I hope happens with the new product CA PAM is to keep all the useful features that exist in PA, but what I’ve noticed with many new products is the UI gets polished but systems lags stability and performance or it adds additional complexity instead of simplifying the user experience."
"They need to do a little bit more on the mainframe side.​"
"Bring more technology into the portfolio and being able to collapse those products into a much more integrated way."
"An improvement for this solution is that it should not be constantly based on user name and password. There should be a condition to edit and update your username."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing is complicated."
"The SMARTnet technical support is available at an additional cost."
"Being fully honest, the Cisco licensing model right now is really confusing. We don't know what licenses we have where. We have Smart licensing, but the different levels are way confusing."
"Cisco ISE is not inexpensive, but the solution is well-built and worth the expense."
"It costs around 50,000 baht in the first year, but I'm unsure about the second year."
"It has a fair price. It is better than it was before."
"Cybersecurity resilience has been very important to our organization and has been a big factor. We've had issues in the past, but one of the things I like about ISE is its logging features. Security wise or information wise, it really has been a powerful tool."
"This solution requires an annual license and it is a bit expensive than competitors."
"The licensing is simple and scalable."
"They offer per-device, per-user, or monthly and yearly licensing models."
"Don’t go with an agent model. Don’t go with a model that has you buying a thousand different parts. Go with PAM that gives you everything, or you’ll just be paying costs of implementing another tool that PAM would have just given you up front."
"Appliances are relatively cheap, don’t skimp. Make sure you have redundancy, high availability, and enough appliances to manage the concurrent workload."
"Pricing is fair compared to other top vendors."
"Cost-wise, CA was better compared to others in the market. ​"
"It is more expensive than other solutions on the market."
"The version we are using is affordable compared to BeyondTrust, which is maybe three to four times as expensive, but it depends on the features."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Educational Organization
25%
Computer Software Company
16%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Computer Software Company
19%
Financial Services Firm
17%
Manufacturing Company
16%
Government
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

Which is better - Aruba Clearpass or Cisco ISE?
Aruba ClearPass is a Network Access Control tool that gives secure network access to multiple device types. You can adapt the policies to VPN access, wired, or wireless access. You can securely ...
What are the main differences between Cisco ISE and Forescout Platform?
OK, so Cisco ISE uses 802.1X to secure switchports against unauthorized access. The drawback of this is that ISE cannot secure the port if a device does not support 802.1x. Cameras, badge readers, ...
How does Cisco ISE compare with Fortinet FortiNAC?
Cisco ISE uses AI endpoint analytics to identify new devices based on their behavior. It will also notify you if someone plugs in with a device that is not allowed and will block it. The user exper...
What do you like most about Symantec Privileged Access Manager?
We can check the activities in the server for fragile files and documents in case of any issues.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Symantec Privileged Access Manager?
The product's pricing depends on the agreement. They offer per-device, per-user, or monthly and yearly licensing models.
What needs improvement with Symantec Privileged Access Manager?
There should be some training platform similar to Microsoft and IBM. We can't find useful documentation or YouTube videos to learn about the process. They should include some assignments in the tes...
 

Also Known As

Cisco ISE
CA PAM, Xceedium Xsuite, CA Privileged Access Manager
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Aegean Motorway, BC Hydro, Beachbody, Bucks County Intermediate Unit , Cisco IT, Derby City Council, Global Banking Customer, Gobierno de Castilla-La Mancha, Houston Methodist, Linz AG, London Hydro, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Molina Healthcare, MST Systems, New South Wales Rural Fire Service, Reykjavik University, Wildau University
NEOVERA, Telesis, eSoft
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco, HPE Aruba Networking, Fortinet and others in Network Access Control (NAC). Updated: September 2024.
801,634 professionals have used our research since 2012.