Cisco ASA Firewall Reviews

The ASAs are a defense solution for companies. Many of them use the AnyConnect or the VPN licenses. They also use it to have a next-generation firewall and to be compliant with GDPR.

The majority of our usage of the solution is on-prem or hybrid. The culture, here in Portugal — even knowing that the future is full cloud, in my opinion — is to only be on the way to full cloud.

All the features are very valuable. 

Among them is the integration for remote users, with AnyConnect, to the infrastructure. All the security through that is wonderful and it's very easy. You connect and you are inside your company network via VPN. Everything is encrypted and it's a very good solution. This is a wonderful feature. You need to make sure your machine has the profile requested by the company. That means having the patches updated. Optionally, you should have the antivirus updated, but you can decide whatever you would like in order to enable acceptance of the end-device in the enterprise network. That can be done with AnyConnect for remote/satellite users, or with ISE for local users.

The intrusion prevention system, the intrusion detection, is perfect. But you can also integrate Cisco with an IPS solution from another vendor, and just use the ASA with AnyConnect and as a firewall. You can choose from among many other vendors' products that the ASA will integrate with. Now, with Cisco SecureX, it's much easier than before. Cisco used to be completely blocked from other vendors but with SecureX they are open to other vendors. That was a massive improvement that Cisco probably should have made 10 years ago or seven years ago. They only released SecureX three or four months ago. 

Cisco ASA also provides application control. You can block or prevent people from going to certain applications or certain content. But the ASA only acts as a "bodyguard." It doesn't provide full visibility of the network. For that, there are other solutions from Cisco, such as ISE, although that is more for identity. Stealthwatch or TrustSec is what you need for visibility. They are both for monitoring and providing full visibility of the network, and they integrate with ASA.

Also, all of Cisco's security products are supported with Talos. Talos is in the background, handling all the improvements, all the updates. If something happens in Australia, for example, Talos will be aware of it and it will update the worldwide Talos network for all Cisco products. Within two minutes or three minutes, worldwide, Cisco products will be aware of that threat. Talos belongs to Cisco. It's like a Cisco research center.

My concern in the 21st century, with ASA, is the front-end. I think Cisco missed the mark with all the configuration steps. They are a pain and, when doing them, it looks as if we're using a very old technology — yet the technology itself is not old, it's very good. But the front-end configuration is very tough. They probably still make a good profit even with the front-end being difficult, but it's not easy. It's not user-friendly. All the configuration procedures are not user-friendly.

Also, they launched the 1000 series for SMBs. They have all the same features as the enterprise solutions, but the throughput is less and, obviously, the price is less as well. It's a very nice appliance. However, imagine you buy one, take it out of the box to connect it and the device needs one hour or two hours to start up. That is a pain and that is not appropriate for the 21st century. They should solve that issue.

Another issue is that when you integrate different Cisco solutions with each other, there is an overlap of features and you need to turn some of them off, and that is not very good.  If you don't, and you have overlap, you will have problems. Disabling the overlap can be done manually or the solution can identify that there is already a process running, and will tell you to please disable that function.

For today's threats, for today's reality, you need to add solutions to the ASA, either from Cisco or from other vendors, to have a full security solution in an enterprise company.

I've been using Cisco ASA NGFW for almost two years.

The stability of the ASA is perfect. There is no downtime. And you can have redundancy as well. You can have two ASAs working in Active-Passive or load balancing. If the product needs a restart, you don't have downtime because you use the other one. From that point of view it's very robust.

You can go for other models for scalability and sort it out that way.

My suggestion is to think about scalability and about your tomorrow — whether you'll increase or not — and already think about the next step from the beginning.

Cisco's technical support for ASA is very good. I have dealt with them many times. They are very well prepared. If you have a Smart Account, they will change your device by the next business day. That is a very good point about Cisco. You have to pay for a Smart Account, but it's very useful.

The initial setup is very complex. You need to set a load of settings, whether from the CLI or the GUI. It's not an easy process and it should be. That is one of the reasons why many retailers don't go for Cisco. They know Cisco is very good. They know Cisco does ensure security, that it is one of the top-three security vendors, but because of the work involved in the implementation, they decide to go with other solutions.

There are two possibilities in terms of deployment. If we go to a client who is the ASA purchaser and they give us all their policies, all their permissions, and everything is organized, we can deploy, with testing, in one full day. But many times they don't know the policies or what they would like to allow and block. In that scenario, it will take ages. That's not from the Cisco side but because of the customer.

One person, who knows the solutions well, is enough for an ASA deployment. I have done it alone many times. After it's deployed, the number of people needed to maintain the solution depends on their expertise. One expert could do everything involved with the maintenance.

When it comes to security, pricing should not be an issue, but we know, of course, that it is. Why is an Aston Martin or a Rolls Royce very expensive? It's expensive because the support is there at all times. Replacement parts are available at all times. They offer a lot of opportunities and customer services that others don't come close to offering. 

Cisco is expensive but it's a highly rated company. It's one of the top-three security companies worldwide.

I can see the differences between Cisco and Check Point. 

Cisco has a solution called Umbrella which was called OpenDNS before, and from my point of view, Umbrella can reduce 60 percent of the attack surface because it checks the validity of the DNS. It will check all the links you click on to see if they are real or fake, using the signature link. If any of them are unknown, they will go straight to the sandbox. Those features do not exist with Check Point.

Cisco ASA is a very robust solution. It does its job and it has all the top features. If you have a solution that is creating a script and you need to deploy many implementations, you can create a script in the device and it will be the same for all. After that, you just have to do the fine tuning. It lacks when it comes to the configuration steps and the pain that that process is. You need to spend loads of time with it at setup. Overall, it does everything they say it does.

It's a very good solution but don't only go with the ASA. Go for Cisco Umbrella and join them together. If you have remote employees, go for AnyConnect to be more than secure in your infrastructure.

You cannot do everything with Cisco Defense Orchestrator. You have a few options with it but cannot do everything from the cloud if you are connected with the console of a device. You don't have all the same options, you only have some options with it. For example, you can manage the security policies, all of them, from the cloud. However, not all the settings and all the things you can do when in front of the device are available with CDO. What you see is what you get.

Most companies using ASA are big companies. They are not SMB companies. There are very few SMB companies using it. There are the banks and consulting companies, the huge ones. Usually the ASAs are for massive companies.

Our reality in Portugal is a little different. I was at a Cisco conference here in Lisbon and the guy said, "Oh, we have this solution," — it was for multi-factor authentication — "and we have different licenses. We have a license for 40,000 and for 20,000 users. And I was thinking, "This guy doesn't know Portuguese reality. There are no companies in Portugal with 40,000 employees."

Large companies who do use ASA use various security tools like IPS and Layer 7 control. From my experience, and from common sense, it's best to have solutions from different vendors joining together. The majority have defense products for the deterrent capacities they need to achieve security. Our clients also often have Cisco ISE, Identity Service Engine. It's a NAC solution that integrates perfectly with ASA and with AnyConnect as well.

As for future-proofing your security strategy, ASA is the perfect solution if you integrate other Cisco solutions. But the ASA alone will not do it because it does not handle some of the core issues, like full visibility of the network, the users, the machines, the procedures, and the applications, in my opinion.

Remote access through the VPN wasn't available in the old firewall that we used, so that was a value-add. That's one way Cisco ASA has impacted our company. Also, from an administrator's perspective, newcomers have a shorter learning curve working with the ASA firewalls.

Also, when we deployed it on the data center firewalls, we did some microsegmentation using different subnets for the whole environment, including UAT and production. We didn't have segmentation before, but with the growing security needs, we segmented the servers. For each of the subnets we made different gateways on the firewall. That helped us achieve the requirements of the latest standards.

Thanks to the IPS, the malicious traffic has dropped. Initially, when we deployed the IPS, it gave us some problems. But after a week or two, it worked very well. I used a balanced security policy when I integrated it with the FMC server. On the FMC, the GUI gives me a very good, extensive view of what traffic is getting dropped and at what time. It gives me all the visibility that I need.

• The normal firewalling features are very good. You can easily create objects and work with them. 
• The AnyConnect software for remote VPN is an added feature on the firewall that works very well in our environment.
• The IPS is another important feature that I use. It doesn't impact the overall performance of the ASAs.

All of these features work fine.

Cisco ASA works very nicely from an administration perspective. The management of the device is very nice. The ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager) is the software that we use and it is very easy to configure using the GUI. If you are familiar with the ASDM software, it's very easy for anyone to handle. The CLI isn't different from other Cisco CLIs, so that makes it easy as well.

Also, the visibility when doing packet inspection on the ASA, using the ASDM GUI, works well. You can go to the monitoring part and see the live logs, the syslogs. All the traffic events are displayed in the syslog. You can filter on whatever event you are interested in and it is visible to you in no time. It provides a real-time display of the traffic. Troubleshooting issues is very easy using ASDM. 

In addition, if you want to do some captures at the interface level, there's a packet tracer, a tool within the ASDM and the ASA, which is available on both the GUI and the CLI. That is on the newer firewalls as well and it's very nice. It shows you the life cycle of a packet within the firewall, from entry to the exit, and how many steps it goes through. It really helps while troubleshooting. I'm very satisfied with that.

The operation of the ASA is good but the problem is that whenever you require an upgrade, there are multiple pieces of software that you have to upgrade. Extensive planning is required, because if you upgrade one piece of the software it has to be compatible with the others as well. You always need to check the compatibility metrics.

For example, if the ASA Firewall's software has to be upgraded, it has to be compatible with the IPS software—the FireSIGHT software. So that has to be upgraded as well, in addition to the ASDM software that you use to manage the firewall using the GUI. Besides that, if you are using the remote VPN part of the firewall, there is the AnyConnect hidden software that also requires an update.

So upgrading is a very extensive exercise, both when you're planning it and when you are doing it. The upgrades are very lengthy. Then Cisco introduced FTD as a unified approach, and that was a leap forward, but it has its own issues.

I've been working as a Cisco partner for about four years. Before that, I was using Cisco firewalls as a network admin. I've been engaged with Cisco firewalls since 2015.

On the FTD (Firepower Threat Defense) model, I've been working with version 6.7. I haven't tried the latest 7.0 version.

The robustness of the ASA is very good. Whenever you upgrade it, it does very well. There are no hiccups or hitches, post-upgrade.

Cisco's TAC provides very good support. If you have any issues, you can contact them and they provide assistance. You need a subscription for that. The subscription comes with a notable cost but you get great value from it. I'm very satisfied with it. 

The tech support of Cisco is unparalleled if I compare it to any other product that I have used. I've been using Citrix, Juniper, and even Palo Alto, but the support that I get from Cisco is very good. It's easy to get support and the engineers get engaged. Sometimes they provide more than you need. For example, if there are design-level issues, they will tell you that it isn't implemented well and that there are things that need to be corrected. That's not their responsibility but they'll provide that feedback.

I consider Cisco support to be the industry standard.

Positive

I've seen Cisco deployed for five to seven years. The product life cycle is good and they're continuing to support things. If you add more features and utilize it to the maximum, using the remote VPN and the like, it becomes more cost-effective. 

Having the IPS part within one box also saves you on costs. Back in 2015, the IPS was a different box that had to be deployed separately. At that time, it cost more if I had to buy another IPS and a box.

Before ASA, we were using Juniper. It had a GUI, but the CLI part of Juniper was difficult. The network administrators required a little bit of a different type of expertise. Juniper was very good, but its CLI wasn't as simple as Cisco's. When somebody new comes into the company to work on the firewall, the Cisco learning curve is relatively short and easy.

Nowadays, everybody is working with Cisco. Juniper has almost been phased out. Some people use Juniper for certain reasons, but there's a very specific clientele for it.

We went with Cisco because it is very easy to operate. It provided next-generation firewalling when it came out with ASA plus Sourcefire IPS. That was very effective at that time, compared to the others.

These days, Palo Alto is matching Cisco and, in some ways, Palo Alto is better. From 2015 to 2018/19, Cisco was considered to be the best. The security leaders are always preferred and Cisco was a leader. That's why we preferred it.

We were also always happy with Cisco support. It was very convenient to get to Cisco support, and it was very prompt and effective. They really solved our problems.

The Nextgen firewalls have a good IPS, but that IPS part wasn't very configurable using the ASDM. Later, they introduced the FMC (Firewall Management Center) and we could integrate the ASA with the FMC and get the IPS configured from the FMC GUI. That was good, but you needed two things to monitor one box. For the IPS you needed an FMC server, and for the firewalls, you needed the ASDM or the CLI.

In terms of integration with other solutions, it is a simple firewall that is integrated with the syslog servers and the SNMP monitoring from the NMS. Those types of simple things work very well. I haven't worked with much integration beyond that. You can't attach that many feeds to it. That's more a function of the Next-Generation Firewall with the IPS and FMC.

SecureX is a relatively new cloud-based solution. It's been around for one or two years. It's offered for free if you have any Cisco security solution. It encompasses ADR and NDR. The clients I work with in Pakistan are mostly financial institutions. Because it's a cloud-based security solution, they are not interested. They want on-prem solutions.

The first time I deployed Cisco ASA was for one of our clients. This client had a Palo Alto firewall and he wanted to migrate. He bought an ASA 2505, and he wanted us to come in and deploy it and, after that, to put in high-availability. We deployed it and the high-availability means that in case one fails, there is a second one to take over.

I have deployed Cisco ISE and, in the same environment, we had a Cisco FTD. In that environment, we were using the ASA for VPN, and we were using the FTD like an edge device. The ASA was deployed as VPN facilitator and for the wireless part too, so that the wireless network was under the ASA firewall.

If we look at the Cisco ASA without Firepower, then one of the most valuable features is the URL filtering.

Also, it's easy to integrate ASA with other Cisco security products. When you understand the technology, it's not a big deal. It's very simple.

When it comes to threat visibility, the ASA is good. The ASA denies threats by using common ACLs. It can detect some DoS attacks and we can monitor suspicious ICMP packets using the ASA. It helps you know when an attack is detected.

Cisco Talos is good. It provides threat intelligence. It updates all the devices to be aware of the new threats and the new attacks out there, so that is a good thing. It's like having God update all the devices. For example, even if you have FTD in your company, malware can be very difficult to detect. There is a new type of malware called polymorphic malware. When it replicates, it changes its signature which makes it very difficult for a firewall to detect. So if your company encounters one type of malware, once, it is automatically updated in your environment. And when it is updated, Talos then updates every firewall in the world, so even if those other firewalls have not yet encountered those particular types of malware, because Talos automatically updates everything, they're able to block those types of malware as well. Talos is very beneficial.

When it comes to managing, with FMD (Firepower Management Device) you can only manage one device, but when you work with FMC (Firepower Management Center) you can manage a lot of sensors, meaning FTDs. You can have a lot of FTDs but you only have one management center and it can manage all those sensors in your company. It is very good.

One area where the ASA could be improved is that it doesn't have AMP. When you get an ASA with the Firepower model, ASA with FTD, then you have advanced malware protection. Right now, threats and attacks are becoming more and more intense, and I don't think that the ASA is enough. I think this is why they created FTD.

Also, Cisco is not so easy to configure.

I have been using and deploying Cisco ASA for two to three years. 

Cisco ASA is stable.

It's scalable. You can integrate AD, you can integrate Cisco NAC. You can integrate quite a lot of things so that makes it scalable.

When you configure the ASA, there is already a basic setup there. Based on your environment, you need to customize it. If you understand security and firewalls very well, you can create your own setup.

For me, the initial setup is easy, but is it good? Because from a security perspective, you always need to customize the initial setup and come up with the setup that fits with your environment. So it's always easy to do the initial setup, but the initial setup is for kids in IT.

The time it takes to set up the ASA depends on your environment. For a smaller deployment, you just have the one interface to configure and to put some policies in place and that's all. If you are deploying the ASA for something like a bank, there are a lot of policies and there is a lot of testing to do, so that can take you all night. So the setup time really depends on your environment and on the size of the company as well.

When it comes to Cisco, the price of everything is higher.

Cisco firewalls are expensive, but we get support from Cisco, and that support is very active. When I hit an issue when I was configuring an FTD, as soon as I raised a ticket the guy called me and supported me. Cisco is very proactive.

I had the same kind of issue when I was configuring a FortiGate, but those guys took two or three days to call me. I fixed the issue before they even called me.

I have used firewalls from Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Check Point. To configure an ASA for VPN, there are a lot of steps. When it comes to the FortiGate, it's just a few clicks. FortiGate also has built-in templates for configuring VPN. When you want to create a VPN between FortiGate and FortiGate, the template is already there. All you need to do is enter an IP address. When you want to configure a VPN with a third-party using the FortiGate, and say the third-party is Cisco, there is a VPN template for Cisco built into the FortiGate. So FortiGate is very easy to configure, compared to Cisco. But the Cisco firewall is powerful.

Check Point is something like Cisco but if I have to choose between Cisco and Check Point firewalls, I will choose Cisco because of all the features that Cisco has. With Cisco you can do a lot of things, when it comes to advanced malware protection and IPS. Check Point is very complicated to manage. They have recently come out with Infinity where there is a central point of management.

Palo Alto has a lot of functionality but I haven't worked on the newer models.

Cisco firewalls are not for kids. They are for people who understand security. Now I know why people with Cisco training are very good, because they train you to be competent. They train you to have ability. And when you have ability, their firewall becomes very easy to configure.

When Cisco is teaching you, Cisco teaches you the concept. Cisco gives you a concept. They don't focus on how to configure the device. With Fortinet, for instance, Fortinet teaches you how to configure their device, without giving you the concepts. Cisco gives you the concepts about how the technology is working. And then they tell you how you are going to configure things on their box. When you are an engineer and you understand the technology from Cisco, it means that you can drive everything, because if you understand Cisco very well, you can work with FortiGate. If you understand security from Cisco, it means that you can configure everything, you can configure every firewall. This is why I like Cisco.

When it comes to other vendors, it's easy to understand and it's easy to configure, but you can configure without understanding. And when you configure without understanding, you can't troubleshoot. To troubleshoot, you need understanding. 

I'm a security analyst, so I deal with everything about firewalls. I'm talking about ASA firewalls, and I'm talking about ASA with Firepower, FTD, and Cisco Meraki MX. When it comes to security tools I am comfortable with Cisco and everything Cisco.

One of our clients was using Cisco ASA. They got attacked, but I don't think that this attack came from outside their company. They were managing their firewall and configuring everything well, but they were still getting attacks. One of their employees had been compromised and his laptop was infected. This laptop infected everything in the organization. So the weakest link can be your employees.

We use the Cisco firewall for a number of things. We've got VPN tunnels, IPsec tunnels. We also use it for basic network layer filtering for our internal service, because we have a number of services that we offer out to clients, so that is the first device that they come across when they get into the network.

We have a network of six remote sites and we use proxy to go to the internet, and from the internet Cisco is the first line of defense. We have internet banking services that we offer to our clients, and that also makes use of the Cisco firewall as the first line of defense. And we've got a number of servers, a Hyper-V virtual environment, and we've got a disaster recovery site.

We had VAPT (vulnerability assessment and pen testing) done by external people to see our level of security from inside and outside and they managed to find some deficiencies inside. That's when they recommended that we should put in network access control. By integrating the ASA with Cisco ISE, that is what we are trying to achieve.

The whole idea is to make sure that any machines that are not on our domain should not be able to connect to the network. They should be blocked.

We also have Cisco switches deployed in our environment. All our active switches are Cisco. The ASA is integrated with them. This integration was done by a combination of our Cisco partner and in-house, because we did this at the time of setting up the infrastructure in 2016.

The benefits we see from the ASA are connected to teleworking as well as, of course, having the basic functionality of a firewall in place and the prevention of attacks. The VPN is also helpful.

Among the most valuable features are the reports which are generated according to the rules that we've put in place to either block traffic or report suspicious attempts to connect to our network. They would come standard with any firewall and we're always monitoring them and taking any corrective steps needed.

We have the ASA integrated with Cisco ISE for network access control. The integration was done by our local Cisco partner. It took them about a month to really get the solution up and running. I would like to believe that there was some level of complexity there in terms of the integration. It seems it was not very easy to integrate if the experts themselves took that long to really come up with a working solution. Sometimes we had to roll back during the process.

Initially, when we put it up, we were having issues where maybe it would be barring things from users completely, things that we wanted the users to access. So we went through fine tuning and now I think it's working as we expect.

We have been using Cisco ASA NGFW since 2016, when we launched.

The ASA is utilized 100 percent of the time. It's up all the time as it's a perimeter firewall. It's always up. It's our first line of defense. It's quite robust, we've never had issues with it. It's very stable.

We haven't maxed it out in terms of its capacity, and we've got up to about 200 users browsing the internet at any given time. In terms of throughput, we've got an ASA 5525 so it handles capacity pretty well. There aren't any issues there.

We have a Cisco partner, so if ever we did have issues we'd go through them, but up until now — this bank has been open for four years — we've never had an issue with the Cisco firewall.

We went with Cisco because it's a reputable brand and we also have CCNP engineers in our team as well. It's the brand of choice. We were also familiar with it from our past jobs.

The ROI is the fact that we haven't been attacked.

It's a brilliant firewall, and the fact that it comes with a perpetual license really does go far in terms of helping the organization in not having to deal with those costs on an annual basis. That is a pain point when it comes to services like the ones we have on FortiGate. That's where we really give Cisco firewalls the thumbs up.

From the point of view of total cost of ownership, the perpetual licensing works well in countries like ours, where we are facing challenges with foreign exchange. Trying to set up foreign payments has been a challenge in Zimbabwe, so the fact that we don't have to be subscribed and pay licenses on an annual basis works well. If you look at FortiGate, it's a good product, but we are always under pressure when renewal time comes.

Where Cisco falls a bit short is because of the fact that, if I want IPS, I have to buy another license. That's why I have my reservations with it. If I want Cisco AnyConnect, I have to buy another license. That's where we have challenges. That's unlike our next-gen FortiGate where everything comes out-of-the-box.

My advice is "go for it," 100 percent. If ever I was told to implement a network, ASA would definitely be part and parcel of the solution.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using the product is about the rapid growth of the product's offerings.

In terms of the maturity of our organization's security implementation, I would like to believe that we are about midway. We still need to harden our security. We need to conduct penetration testing every two years and, resources permitting, maybe yearly. The guys out there who do cyber security crimes are becoming more and more advanced, so there is a need for us to also upgrade our security.

We have a two-layer firewall setup, which is what is recommended as the standard for the payment card industry. We probably need solutions linked with cloud providers from the likes of Cisco, and to put in some bank-grade intrusion detection solutions. Because we have already adopted two technologies, Cisco and FortiGate, we might be looking at solutions from those two providers.

We're also looking at end-point security solutions. We've been using the one which comes with our Office 365 and Microsoft product, Windows Defender. We are going to be trialing their new end-point management solution. We are trying to balance things from a cost point of view and providing the right level of security.

In addition to Windows Defender and the firewalls — ASA and FortiGate — and the network access control, we also have SSL for the website.

As for application visibility and control, currently we're just using logging. We don't have the Firepower installed, so it's just general logging and scheduled checks here and there. As for threat visibility, for us the ASA is a perimeter firewall. Behind that firewall we have an IDS and an IPA. We actually have the license for Firepower but we haven't implemented it; it was just an issue of priorities at the time.

We primarily use it for our clients. We have one or more at each client site - or multiple locations if they have multiple locations.

Typically our clients are up to about 500 users. Most of them are smaller than that, but they go as large as 500. They're using the solution for the full next-gen firewall stacks - intrusion protection, URL filtering, advanced malware protection, or so-called AMP. Those are the three subscription services that Cisco sells. All of our clients have those subscription services enabled at their main location. Typically, they're just protecting users that are behind the firewall. We also use it for site-to-site VPN, and we use it for client-to-site VPN.

In terms of our clients, security is one of those things that, ideally, nobody notices. It improves the functioning in the sense that you don't get hacked. However, from a noticeable, management point of view, the URL filtering is a pretty significant enhancement. People are able to block access to various websites by category. It isn't revolutionary. Lots of products do this. However, it's a nice sort of add-on to a firewall product.

At the end of the day, the solution offers good productivity enhancement to a company.

Cisco's support is great. 

For experienced users, they are pretty much able do anything they want in the interface with few restrictions.

The command-line interface is really useful for us. We script basic installations and modifications through the command-line, which is considered sort of old school, and yet it allows us to fully document the changes that we're making due to the fact that we can save the exact script that was applied and say, "Here are the changes that we made." 

We can have less experienced people do initial takes on an install. They can edit a template, and we can have a more experienced person review the template, and then apply it, and we don't have to worry about whether anyone inexperienced went into certain corners of the interface and made changes or whatever.

Everything is all documented in the file or in the command line script that gets uploaded to the device. It gives us great visibility.

I would say that in inexperienced hands, the interface can be kind of overwhelming. There are just a lot of options. It's too much if you don't know what you are looking for or trying to do.  

The GUI still uses Java, which feels out of date today. That said, it's an excellent GUI.

The biggest downside is that Cisco has multiple firewall lines. The ASA line which is what we sell, and we sell most of the latest versions of it, are kind of two families. One is a little older, one's a little newer. We mostly sell the newer family. Cisco is kind of de-emphasizing this particular line of products in their firewall stable. That's unfortunate. 

They have the ASA line, Meraki, which is a company they bought some years ago where all the management is sort of cloud interface that they provide rather than a kind of interface that you manage right on the box. They also bought Snort and they integrated the Snort intrusion detection into the ASA boxes. In the last couple of years, they've come out with a sort-of replacement to Snort, a line of firewalls that don't use IOS.

It's always been that the intrusion prevention and the based firewalling features had separate interfaces within IOS. They've eliminated IOS in this new product line and built it from the ground up. We haven't started using that product yet. They have higher performance numbers on that line, and that's clearly the future for them, but it hasn't reached feature parity yet with the ASA. 

The main downside is that it feels a little bit like a dead end at this point. One needs to decide to move to one of these other Cisco lines or a non-Cisco line, at some point. We haven't done the research or made the plunge yet.

What I would like to see is a more inexpensive logging solution. They should offer either the ability to maintain longer-term logs right on the firewall or an inexpensive server-based logging solution. Cisco has logging solutions, however, they're very high end.

We've been using the solution for 20 or more years. It's been well over two decades at this point.

The solution is solid. It's a big advantage of choosing Cisco. There are no worries about stability at all.

The scalability of the solution is good. Within our customer base, it is absolutely scalable. You can go very large with it. However, if you really want the highest speeds, you have to move off of the IOS ASA line and onto the newer stuff.

Typically our clients cap out at 500 employees.

Technical support is excellent. They are extremely knowledgeable and responsive. It'd rate the ten out of ten. We're quite satisfied with the level of support Cisco provides.

We did use Juniper's NetScreen product on and off for a while. We stopped using it about ten years ago now.

We had previous experience with the Cisco gear, so we were comfortable with it, and Juniper bought the NetScreen product and sunsetted it. You had to move into a different firewall product that was based on their equivalent of IOS, something called Juno OS, and we didn't like those products. Therefore, when they sunsetted the Juniper products, we looked around and settled on Cisco.

Due to the fact that we're experienced with it and we've scripted the command line, it's extremely simple for us. That said, I think it's complex for somebody that doesn't know the IOS platform.

We're Cisco resellers.

We're always on the latest version. I don't actually keep track of the version numbers myself, however, part of what the service that we provide for our clients is updating their firewalls to the latest version.

We use multiple deployment models. We use both on-premises and cloud versions. They are also all different sizes, according to the requirements of the company.

I'd advise other companies considering Cisco to be sure to factor in the cost of the ongoing security subscriptions and the ongoing SmartNet into the purchase price. Those things, over the years, represent more than the cost of the firewall itself - significantly more. However, I'd advise others to get the security subscriptions due to the fact that it really dramatically increases the security of the solution overall.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate them at an eight. We love the product, however, we feel like it's not Cisco's future direction, which is the only reason I would downgrade its score. To bring it up to a 10, they'd have to make it their main product line again, which they aren't going to do.

We are primarily using the solution for VLAN implementations and also for remote VPN capability - basically it's used for connecting to remote offices securely.

After implementing tools, including Cisco ASA, unauthorized access comes down a lot. We are not facing asset issues as of now. We are not facing an issue related to malicious traffic or any bad activity in our network.

The solution can allow and block traffic over the VLANs.Some of the unauthorized actions and malicious traffic can also be blocked effectively, as we are following PCI DSS compliance. We are a card industry. We are using cards as a payment method, and therefore we need to follow the compliance over the PCI DSS. That's why we chose one of the best products. ASA Firewall is very secure.

It's always easy to integrate Cisco with the same company products. If you are using other CIsco products, there's always easy integration.

Cisco is one of the most popular brands, and therefore the documentation is easily available over the internet.

They are best-in-class.

The remote VPN feature is one of the best features we've found. 

We like that there is two-factor authentication on offer.  We can integrate a Google authenticator with Cisco ASA so that whenever a person is logging on to any network device, they need to enter the password as well as the security code that is integrated by Google. It's a nice added security feature.

Cisco ASA provides us with very good application visibility and control. The Cisco CLI command line is one of the easiest we found on the market due to the fact that the GUI and the user interface are very familiar. If you're a beginner, you can easily access it. There's no complicated UI.

When compared to other products available, the cost is pretty similar. There's no big gap when you compare Cisco pricing to other products. 

There are multiple features in a single appliance, which is quite beneficial to us.

Support that is on offer 24/7. Whenever we face some technical issue, we can reach out to them easily.

We have not had any security breaches. 

They provide a helpful feature that allows us to configure email. 

We are getting a lot from the appliance in real-time.

There's an upgraded version of the 5500 that has come to the market. It offers the latest encryption that they have. If they want to add better features to the current Cisco ASA, they can start by increasing the encryption. That is the only thing they need to improve. The rest is good.

We've been using the solution for about five or more years at this point. It's been a while. 

The stability and availability are very good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. it's a reliable solution. 

We have it in our infrastructure for around 15 plus users, including Fortinet sites.

We have found that whenever the traffic spikes at peak times, the product automatically scales up to the requirement. We have also implemented the single sign-on it, and therefore, it automatically scales up. We haven't felt any limitations. Currently, we are using it for 1500 plus users. At any given time, there are around 700 plus users available in the office. It's a 24/7 infrastructure. We have tested it for up to 750 plus users, and it's perfectly fine.

Technical support is excellent. they are always available, no matter the time of day, or day of the week. We are quite satisfied with their level of support. They are quite helpful and very responsive. I'd rate them at a ten out of ten. They deserve perfect marks.

We did not previously use a different solution. When the office was launched we implemented Cisco as a fresh product.

We are using a Cisco ASA Firewall, as well as Sophos at the remote sites. We are using another product is for log collecting. There are three solutions that basically cover us for security purposes. Those, at least, are the physical devices we are using as of now. The rest are cloud solutions such as Nexus. 

That said, I personally, have used Sophos XG as a firewall in the past. Sophos is good in terms of traffic blocking and identifying interruptions to the traffic. The features are better on Cisco's side. For example, there is two-factor authentication and a remote VPN. The only benefit I found in Sophos was the way it dealt with the traffic. 

The initial setup was not overly complex or difficult. It was quite straightforward and very easy to implement. 

Deployment takes about 20 to 25 minutes. 

In terms of the implementation strategy, at first, we put up the appliances in the data center. After that, we connected it with the console. After connecting the console, we had an in-house engineer that assisted. Cisco provided us onboarding help and they configured our device for us. We have just provided them the IP address and which port we wanted up. Our initial configuration has been done by them.

While most of the setup was handled in-house, we did have Cisco help us with the initial configurations.

The ROI we are getting from Cisco ASA is higher availability, which we are getting all the time. On top of that, it's good at blocking traffic and protecting us from cyber-crime issues.

The pricing is pretty reasonable. it's standard and comparable to other solutions. The maximum difference between products might be $20 to $40. It's not much of a difference. 

We did not evaluate other solutions. We trust Cisco. It's a very good product and well known in the market.

We are a customer and an end-user.

We are using physical Cisco appliances.

We use a lot of Cisco products, Cisco router (the 3900-series routers), and Cisco switches.

In the next quarter, we will implement SD-WAN. Once the SD-WAN is implemented, then we will go with an automated policy and DNS kinds of tools. We are in the process of upgrading to Cisco ASA Firepower in the next quarter. We have not integrated Cisco ASA with Cisco's SecureX solution.

I'd recommend the solution, especially for medium-sized or larger companies and those who are looking for long-term solutions (for example those with a user base of around 2,000 plus users in and around 20 plus applications). It's reliable and offers users a lot of features. This helps companies avoid having to rely on other third-party solutions.

If you are new to Cisco, you should take advantage of the education they have on offer. Cisco provides access to training and it's worth taking advantage of this.

Overall, I'd are the solution at a nine out of ten.

We are a Cisco partner and we implement solutions for our customers who are generally in the banking sector and other private sectors.

They are using it as a data center firewall and to secure their internet connections. Our customers usually integrate the firewall with ISE, with a Firepower module for IPS, and there are some NAC solutions.

The solution enhances the performance of the network. It blocks most of the threats and it updates attack signatures so it protects customer data better. The loss of data would be a crisis for any customer. With the deep inspection and analysis and the threat updates, it gives you more protection and safety.

Our clients use automated policy application and enforcement. For example, when you have a very big deployment or a bank needs to deploy more branches, this saves a lot of time when doing the implementation. Similarly, when you add more users or you add more devices, when you create a profile of the policies, they will be available in a matter of minutes, regardless of the number of branches or users or applications. It reduces the time involved in that by 75 percent.

The traffic inspection and the Firepower engine are the most valuable features. It gives you full details, application details, traffic monitoring, and the threats. It gives you all the containers the user is using, especially at the application level. The solution also provides application visibility and control.

The integration between the ASA and Cisco ISE is very easy because they are from the same vendor. We don't face any integration problems. This is one of the valuable points of Cisco firewalls. They can be easily integrated with different Cisco security products.

Our clients also use other products with Cisco ASA, such as Aruba ClearPass and different NAC solutions. The integration of these other products is also easy with Cisco. 

It integrates with email security and Firepower. For example, if you have an attached file infected or you have attacks through email, the traffic will be forwarded to the email security and it will be blocked by the firewall. It gives you a clear view of the file and it can be blocked at every stage, protecting your network from this threat.

One of the best parts is the traffic management and the inspection of the traffic packets. The Device Manager is easy to use to supervise things, and the Firepower application gives you clear threat detection and blocking of all threats. Cisco also provides a better analysis of the traffic.

In addition, Talos is an enhancement to Cisco firewalls, and provides a better view.

The device management options, such as Firepower Device Manager (FDM), Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC), or Cisco Defense Orchestrator (CDO) add a lot of enhancements in the initial deployment and configuration. In migrating, they can help to create the migration configuration and they help in managing encryption and automation. They add a lot enhancements to the device. They make things easier. In the past, you had to use the CLI and you could not control all this. Now you have a GUI which provides visibility and you can easily integrate and make changes.

When I deal with other firewalls like Palo Alto or Fortinet, I think there is some room for performance tuning and enhancement of the ASA. I'm not saying there is a performance issue with the product, but when compared to others, it seems the others perform a little bit better.

There could be enhancements to the cloud part of the solution. It's good now, but more enhancements would be helpful.

Finally, security generally requires integration with many devices, and the management side of that process could be enhanced somewhat. It would help if there was a clear view of the integrations and what the easiest way to do them is.

I have been using Cisco ASA NGFW for more than 10 years.

The ASA is stable. There may be some small stability issues, when compared to others, but it is a stable product. There could be enhancements to the ASA in this area when compared to other vendors, but it is not a problem with the product.

It is scalable, with virtualization and other features.

In terms of future-proofing our customers' security, we recommend the ASA. We have tested it in large environments and it's working well. The lesson I have learned from using Cisco ASA is that Cisco's research is continuous. They provide enhancements every day. It's a product for the future.

Technical support is a very strong point in Cisco's favor. I would rate it very highly. The support is excellent.

The setup is of medium difficulty. It is not very complex. Generally, when working in the security field, things are a little bit complex because you are integrating with many vendors and you are defending against a lot of different kinds of attacks.

The amount of time it takes to deploy the ASA depends on the complexity of the site where it is being set up. On average, it can take about a week. It could be that there are many policies that need to be migrated, and it depends on the integration. For the initial setup, it takes one day but the amount of time it takes beyond that depends on the security environment.

Our customers definitely see return on investment with Cisco ASA because when you protect your network there is ROI. If you lose your data you have a big loss. The ROI is in the security level and the protection of data.

The value of the pricing needs to be enhanced from Cisco because there are a lot of competitors in the market. There is room for improvement in the pricing when compared to the market. Although, when you compare the benefits of support from Cisco, you can adjust the value and it becomes comparable, because you usually need very good support. So you gain value there with this device.

My advice is to take care of and monitor your policies and be aware of the threats. You also have to be careful when changing policies. When you do, don't leave unused policies around, because that will affect performance. You should have audits of your firewall and its policies and follow the recommendations from Cisco support.

Among the things I have learned from using Cisco ASA is that integration is easy, especially with Cisco products. And the support helps you to integrate with anything, so you can integrate with products outside of the Cisco family as well.

We were using ASA 5585 without firepower. We were using it just as a stateful firewall. We also had an IPS module on it. So, we were also using it for network segmentation and network address translations for hosting some of the services or giving access to the internet for our end users.

Initially, it was good. At the time we bought it, usually, IPS was in a different solution, and the firewall was in a different solution. You had to kind of correlate between the events to find the attacks or unwanted behavior in the network, but it had everything in a kind of single platform. So, the integration was great.

Our bandwidth was increasing, and the number of services that we were hosting was increasing. Our old solutions couldn't catch up with that. Cisco ASA was able to handle a lot of traffic or concurrent connections at that time. We had almost 5 million per week. We didn't have to worry about it not having enough memory and stuff like that. It was a powerful machine.

The configuration was kind of straightforward from the command line and also from the ASDM. It was very easy to manage by using their software in Java. 

High throughput, high concurrent connections, easy site-to-site VPN were also valuable. It also had the capability to do double network translations, which is really useful when you are integrating with other vendors for site-to-site VPN.

When we bought it, it was really powerful, but with the emerging next-generation firewalls, it started to lack in capabilities. We couldn't put application filtering, and the IPS model was kind of outdated and wasn't as useful as the new one. For the current state of the network security, it was not enough.

One thing that we really would have loved to have was policy-based routing. We had a lot of connections, and sometimes, we would have liked to change the routing depending on the policies, but it was lacking this capability. We also wanted application filtering and DNS filtering.

We have been using it for around eight years.

Its stability is really great. It is very stable. We didn't have to worry about it. In the IT world, every time you go on holiday, you think that something might break down, but that was not the case with Cisco ASA.

Initially, we had just a single firewall, and then we moved to high availability. Even when it was just one hardware without high availability, we didn't have any problems. Apart from the planned maintenance, we never had any downtime.

We feel we didn't even try to make it scalable. We had 30,000 end users.

We haven't interacted a lot with them because we have our own network department. We were just handling all the problem-solving. So, there were only a couple of cases. Initially, when one of the first devices came, we had some problems with RAM. So, we opened the ticket. It took a bit of time, and then they changed it. I would rate them an eight out of 10.

Our bandwidth was increasing, and the number of services that we were hosting was increasing. Our old solutions couldn't catch up with that. We had some really old D-link firewalls. They were not enterprise-level firewalls.

After our IPS subscription ended, we couldn't renew it because Cisco was moving to the next-generation firewall platform. They didn't provide us with the new license. Therefore, we decided to move to Palo Alto. The procurement process is taking time, and we are waiting for them to arrive.

It was straightforward. Cisco is still leading in the network area. So, there are lots of resources where you can find information. There are community forums and Cisco forums, where you can find answers to any questions. You don't even have to ask. You can just Google, and you will find the solution. Apart from that, Cisco provides a lot of certification that helps our main engineers in learning how to use it. So, the availability of their resources was great, and we just followed their best-case scenarios. We could easily configure it.

The deployment took around two or three weeks because we had different firewalls. We had a couple of them, and we migrated all to Cisco. We also had around 30,000 rules. So, the data input part took a lot of time, but the initial installation and the initial configuration were done in a matter of days.

It took us one week to set up the management plane. It had different ports for management and for the data. After finishing with the management part, we slowly moved segments to Cisco. We consolidated the rules from other firewalls for one zone. After Cisco verified that it was okay, we then moved on to the next segment.

We did it ourselves. We had about five network admins for deployment and maintenance.

We definitely got a return on investment with Cisco ASA. We have been using it for eight years, which is a long time for IT. We only had one capital expenditure. Apart from that, there were no other costs or unexpected failures. It supported us for a long time.

When we bought it, it was really expensive. I'm not aware of the current pricing.

We had problems with licensing. After our IPS subscription ended, we couldn't renew it because Cisco was moving to the next-generation firewall platform. So, they didn't provide us with the new license.

I am not sure about it because back then, I was just an engineer. I didn't have decision-making authority, so I wasn't involved with it.

We recently have done pilots with Check Point and FortiGate for a couple of months. They were next-generation firewalls. So, they had much more capability than ASA, but because of being a pilot, we didn't get full-scale throughput like big enterprise-level firewalls. The throughput was not enough, and their memory cache was always filling up. They were smaller models, but both of them had the features that ASA was lacking. Traffic shaping in ASA is not as good, but these two had good traffic shaping.

I wouldn't recommend this solution because it is already considered to be a legacy firewall.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a strong eight out of 10. It is powerful, but it lacks some of the capabilities.