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Cisco Secure Workload vs Illumio comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

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...
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Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security
5th
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
4th
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
110
Ranking in other categories
Vulnerability Management (6th), Container Security (3rd), Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) (3rd), Cloud-Native Application Protection Platforms (CNAPP) (3rd), Compliance Management (2nd)
Cisco Secure Workload
Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security
7th
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
14th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.7
Number of Reviews
15
Ranking in other categories
Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (9th)
Illumio
Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security
2nd
Ranking in Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP)
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
Microsegmentation Software (3rd)
 

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 Cisco Secure Workload is 14.0%, up from 12.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Illumio is 25.2%, up from 21.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Cloud and Data Center Security
 

Featured Reviews

Andrew W - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Raj Metkar - PeerSpot reviewer
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
Alark Singh - PeerSpot reviewer
Visual traffic interface aids in network micro-segmentation while a streamlined update option enhances process efficiency
The strongest aspect of Illumio is the visual traffic interface, which allows us to see all traffic that communicates with our servers and allied companies. We can write rules that can be embedded into the IP table, making it easy to handle. Illumio enables us to see network flows, traffic sources, and destinations. The policy generation and enforcement capabilities are valuable, allowing for selective enforcement. Illumio helps in audit purposes by saving data and showing blocked traffic, ensuring no outside traffic is allowed.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Singularity Cloud Security offers autonomous response capabilities, automatically remediating threats and restoring affected files without manual intervention."
"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."
"The visibility PingSafe provides into the Cloud environment is a valuable feature."
"Visibility is the most important aspect."
"There's real-time threat detection. It can show threats and find issues based on their severity and helps us with real-time monitoring."
"The most valuable aspect of Singularity Cloud Security is its unified dashboard."
"Cloud Native Security offers attack path analysis."
"We mostly use alerts. That has been pretty good. If we use the alert system from Amazon, it is much costlier to us, so we use PingSafe."
"It's stable."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."
"The most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility."
"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."
"The product provides multiple-device integration."
"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."
"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."
"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."
"The product provides visibility into how the applications communicate and how the network protocols are being used."
"I would recommend Illumio to all sizes of companies."
"The strongest aspect of Illumio is the visual traffic interface, which allows us to see all traffic that communicates with our servers and allied companies."
"The tool helps with my company's security posture."
"The solution helps to maintain logs and monitor activities. It also helps us with access management. The tool helps us to secure organizational data that include files."
"The dependency map is most valuable feature."
"The flexibility of the solution is its most valuable feature."
"The features that I have found most useful is the ability to centralize all the rules and then distribute them across various locations. However, I've encountered challenges related to tagging policies, which can be complex to devise. It's a matter that requires careful consideration and stakeholder involvement before implementing such policies."
 

Cons

"I request that SentinelOne investigate this false positive, as SentinelOne has a higher false positive rate than other XDR solutions."
"With Cloud Native Security, we can't selectively enable or disable alerts based on our specific use case."
"One area for improvement could be the internal analysis process, specifically the guidance provided for remediation."
"I would like PingSafe's detections to be openly available online instead of only accessible through their portal. Other tools have detections that are openly available without going through the tool."
"We repeatedly get alerts on the tool dashboard that we've already solved on our end, but they still appear. That is somewhat irritating."
"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."
"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."
"Whenever I view the processes and the process aspect, it takes a long time to load."
"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."
"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."
"Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it."
"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."
"It has an uninviting interface."
"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 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."
"We need more details on areas where there is an error or a traffic blockage. I would like the tool to offer a more detailed view."
"The product’s agents don't work very well in OT environments."
"Illumio Adaptive Security Platform could improve by supporting more operating systems. For example, Cisco and Apache appliances."
"The interaction we've had with the support team hasn't been ideal. Technical support should be improved."
"Some of the features that can be improved is offer additional guidance on creating an effective and risk-free tagging policy would be highly beneficial."
"I have not had the chance to experiment deeply with it."
"There should be an option to upgrade from the console to the latest version instead of performing manual upgrades."
"The solution is very basic and doesn't do anything other than the orchestration of layer four endpoint firewall rules."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SentinelOne is quite costly compared to other security platforms."
"The tool is cost-effective."
"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is costly."
"Its pricing is constant. It has been constant over the previous year, so I am happy with it. However, price distribution can be better explained. That is the only area I am worried about. Otherwise, the pricing is very reasonable."
"PingSafe is fairly priced."
"SentinelOne is relatively cheap. If ten is the most expensive, I would rate it a seven."
"Singularity Cloud Workload Security's licensing and price were cheaper than the other solutions we looked at."
"We found it to be fine for us. Its price was competitive. It was something we were happy with. We are not a Fortune 500 company, so I do not know how pricing scales at the top end, but for our cloud environment, it works very well."
"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."
"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."
"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 cost for the hardware is around 300k."
"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."
"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
"There is a subscription needed to use Illumio Adaptive Security Platform and we pay every three years. Overall the solution is expensive."
"The product's pricing is around 10,000-15,000 USD. The pricing is on a yearly basis."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Government
5%
Computer Software Company
26%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
8%
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
15%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Government
7%
 

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...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?
It is cost-effective compared to other solutions in the market.
What needs improvement with PingSafe?
SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is an excellent CSPM tool, but its CWPP features need improvement, and there i...
What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?
The product provides multiple-device integration.
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...
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?
We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...
What do you like most about Illumio Adaptive Security Platform?
The features that I have found most useful is the ability to centralize all the rules and then distribute them across...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Illumio Adaptive Security Platform?
I do not have specific knowledge about pricing details as it is handled by upper management. I know that Illumio is t...
What needs improvement with Illumio Adaptive Security Platform?
There should be an option to upgrade from the console to the latest version instead of performing manual upgrades. Th...
 

Also Known As

PingSafe
Cisco Tetration
Illumio Adaptive Security Platform, Illumio ASP
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
Plantronics, NTT Innovation Institute Inc.
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Workload vs. Illumio and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.
849,190 professionals have used our research since 2012.