Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall Reviews

My use case for Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall is managing my east-west traffic controlled through Cisco Firepowers, and I mainly control the traffic between and internally within my ecosystem.

I use Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall alongside other Cisco security products and capabilities, such as Cisco ISE and SDA, even though we do not have integration.

Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall has benefited my organization in a few ways. I am able to use the firewall to route the traffic internally, and I also use it for intrusion detection, providing key insights into malicious activities, and blocking L3 level traffic most of the time.

The overall value I get from using Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall together with other Cisco security products is mainly defense in depth. It helps me see traffic at every layer, and it allows for more control to see what is happening inside my network.

I would like to see improvements in Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall, especially regarding the UI and the CPU utilization, as we have had issues with a lot of elephant flows for a certain type of traffic.

I have been using Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall for the last seven to eight months.

Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall is mostly stable, although there have been times where we have had issues that we have worked on.

Regarding the downtime experienced, one of the main issues is with the complexity of my environment. With different types of traffic coming in, we have noticed issues with streaming-related traffic where some traffic gets pinned onto certain CPU cores.

I have worked with Cisco's customer support for the firewalls, and they are quite great.

My experience with Cisco's customer support is positive. As and when we need support, we receive it, and I have not had any challenges with the TAC or the support. It is good.

At the moment, I do not use Cisco AI Defense, but I may consider it later.

I am here to evaluate the potential addition of Cisco AI Defense, although it is somewhat outside my scope. I am primarily here to understand where Cisco is headed in the AI edge, while my higher-ups are here to evaluate.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I would rate Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall/Firepower an eight.

I rate it an eight because the product itself is great, but there are some limitations to it, and some features could probably be inherited into the firewalls. My recommendation to others reading reviews on PeerSpot is to understand that while the core product is excellent, you should evaluate whether the current feature set and performance characteristics align with your specific traffic patterns and infrastructure complexity.