Cisco Secure Workload vs Symantec Data Center Security comparison

Cisco Secure Workload vs. Symantec Data Center Security

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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

Cisco Secure Workload

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

8th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (15th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (7th)

Symantec Data Center Security

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

10th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

4.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2026, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 9.9%, down from 14.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Data Center Security is 2.9%, up from 1.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cisco Secure Workload	9.9%
Symantec Data Center Security	2.9%
Other	87.2%

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

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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Muhammad Ejaz ul Hassan

CEO at a tech services company with 51-200 employees

Continuous server hardening has protected critical legacy workloads and simplified security control

Symantec is lagging on the reporting side. I have been working for 10 years and I have identified many gray areas. As a user protecting your infrastructure, you need to sell the value to your management. Management buys the tool for preventing threats, and it works for them. However, you cannot sell it because every solution needs to show what happened in the last few years or how you will be protected in the future. Reporting is the most important thing for the CIO level, not the admin level. I have seen Symantec really lag in this area. I am creating my own tool to build a dashboard to share with the CIO level because they want to know what happened last week, last month, and last year. These reports will tell you about activities. Symantec changed the licensing when Broadcom acquired the company. The question of who will provide support became unclear. Support has now changed and they are making money. I have seen that most of the time when you ask implementation questions, they do not answer you. If you have a problem, they give you a low-level engineer at the first level. This delays resolution. Support has to be better.

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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's stable."

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

"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."

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

"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."

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

"The solution is very user-friendly, which clients appreciate."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

"The most valuable feature is the centralized console, which can handle different products that we have."

"The advantage of Data Center Security is its ease of use and that it serves as a single unified platform, where I can apply all my security policies to protect that server."

"Good file integrity monitoring features."

"The most valuable feature is the endpoint protection system."

"The ability to finely control permissions and restrictions on servers or assets through a customizable rule set is a key strength."

"Symantec Data Center Security, as a name, represents the perfect solution if you want to harden your servers."

"The granularity of applying the policies is valuable."

"The file integrity monitoring features are the most valuable features of this product."

More Symantec Data Center Security pros

Cons

"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."

"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and there are few DC tools, it would be great to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

"The scalability of this solution needs to be improved."

"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."

"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem."

"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."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

"They need to develop a more flexible product that can be scaled such that it fits well into a small business or a bigger, enterprise-level solution."

"Adding more compatibility with common products like Microsoft would be a plus."

"Since the acquisition of Symantec, our customers have not been satisfied with this solution."

"A user or administrator making the policy in the DCS should have a very thorough knowledge of the operating system or policy making. You have to be very specific about the data structure."

"I think that technical support in general is not really capable of doing their work. They don't have enough knowledge to provide quick solutions, so we usually try to resolve problems within our team."

"It would be advantageous if Symantec or Broadcom, given the rebranding, could simplify the process, enabling users to leverage the antivirus functionality more easily."

"The support is very bad. They're not fast at all."

"Symantec is lagging on the reporting side."

More Symantec Data Center Security cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

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

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

"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 pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"It is notably more expensive when compared to other solutions."

"Compared to some other solutions, such as CrowdStrike, Symantec is more expensive."

"The product is a bit costly."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

Construction Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	2
Large Enterprise	5

Questions from the Community

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 discovery. This raises questions about the resources required to discover and write po...

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Workload?

When we onboarded Cisco Secure Workload, the usual use case was to discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map for Cisco ACI. As the network team, we chose to implement A...

What needs improvement with Symantec Data Center Security?

What is your primary use case for Symantec Data Center Security?

As a partner support, we handle all Symantec products for various clients. Currently, we work with DLP, Symantec Endpoint Protection, Data Loss Prevention, Data Center Security, Email Security, and...

What advice do you have for others considering Symantec Data Center Security?

I am still a Symantec partner. Price rating is five out of ten. Symantec Data Center Security is a perfect solution, but it needs to elaborate its functionalities and functions to the market. Peopl...

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

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Product Reports

Cisco Secure Workload

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Symantec Data Center Security

Download Symantec Data Center Security product report

Also Known As

Cisco Tetration

No data available

Overview

Cisco Secure Workload offers advanced auditing, micro-segmentation, and network visibility, automating policy presentation for improved security. It enhances application dependency mapping and provides comprehensive telemetry with strategic policy enforcement.

Cisco Secure Workload specializes in automating micro-segmentation, data center management, and traffic analysis. Its capabilities facilitate application dependency mapping and enhance internal micro-segmentation, providing invaluable network visibility. Users find its automation in policy presentation and strategic enforcement beneficial, along with granular control and scalability, despite needing improvements in scalability and integration capabilities. Enhanced notification features, troubleshooting options, and an efficient interface are desired for seamless deployment, along with stronger multi-tenancy, redundancy, and monitoring functions. Broader platform support and integrated cloud connectivity are desired for unified management across tools.

What are the most important features?

Auditing: Provides in-depth network analysis and security auditing capabilities.
Micro-Segmentation: Enhances network security by automating segmentation at a granular level.
Application Dependency Mapping: Visualizes connections and interactions between applications.
Network Visibility: Delivers comprehensive insight into network activities and dynamics.
Policy Discovery: Streamlines policy creation through automation and reduces manual intervention.
Comprehensive Telemetry: Offers complete coverage and insights for better security assessment.

What benefits and ROI should be evaluated?

Enhanced Security Measures: Offers robust features for network security improvement.
Automated Processes: Reduces manual efforts through automation, increasing efficiency.
Scalability: Adapts to growing network demands with flexible scalability options.
Granular Control: Allows detailed control over network policies and enforcement.

Entities in finance, gas, and oil sectors utilize Cisco Secure Workload for networking site management and compliance maintenance. It integrates into extensive Cisco infrastructure, aiding routers, switches, and endpoints, thus supporting auditors in network synchronization and auditing needs.

Cisco

Symantec Data Center Security provides comprehensive server protection with features like hard disk protection, file integrity monitoring, and centralized management, making it suitable for securing legacy systems and preventing unauthorized access.

Focusing on server integrity and data protection, Symantec Data Center Security delivers robust intrusion prevention, system lockdown, and specific control over server access. With a customizable rule set, it enhances server hardening by fine-tuning access controls without relying on IPS signature detection. While offering significant advantages for managing legacy infrastructure, it also requires improvements in platform metrics, compatibility, speed, and integration with third-party products. Users face challenges with false positives, policy complexity, and compatibility issues, particularly regarding Microsoft and virtualization improvements.

What Key Features Does Symantec Data Center Security Offer?

Built-in Hard Disk Protection: Safeguards data through advanced protection measures.
Centralized Console: Manages diverse product lines from a single interface.
File Integrity Monitoring: Ensures data integrity by tracking changes to files.
Efficient Endpoint Protection: Provides strong defense against endpoint threats.
Robust Intrusion Prevention: Prevents unauthorized access with advanced threat detection.

What Benefits Should Users Consider?

Enhanced Security: Offers comprehensive protection for critical data.
Customizable Rule Set: Provides flexibility to adjust security policies to specific needs.
Centralized Management: Simplifies operations and improves efficiency.
Improved Server Management: Enhances control over server access and permissions.
Comprehensive Integration: Complements other security components like antivirus and anti-malware.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and technology, Symantec Data Center Security is implemented to protect server integrity particularly in environments using Docker containers and legacy systems. It supports remote operations, enforces stringent access policies, and locks down systems while offering valuable audit capabilities for code changes, especially on Linux.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Information Not Available

Cisco Secure Workload vs. Symantec Data Center Security