Cisco Secure Client (including AnyConnect) Reviews

We use the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for remote user access.

Our use case is primarily for users to connect to the network while at home or for those who are traveling.

It is for users to work remotely.

It is easy to use.

Configuration policy, posture assessment, and other things can be done in great detail.

I believe that the authentication component may be enhanced. SAML, more specifically user authentication. 

For instance, to sign in to Windows, you must provide your login and password. When you log in and want to use SAML authentication, it should be able to use the credentials you give Windows and send them along, saving you from having to enter your credentials multiple times. That is something I would like to see them improve on.

I have been using the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for ten years.

We are working with version 4.7.

Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client works well, and it is stable.

People have occasionally complained that it is slow, but it could be anything. It could be their home network or anything else.

The only other option is to go into architecture and decide how you want to use it, which I do not recommend. 

Given how people access, remote access, and work from home, I don't recommend simply repairing the gateway in your home frame data center.

It should be stored in the cloud. Even if you are using it on-premises, you should be able to use Cisco Connect Plus or some kind of SaaS, Zero Trust network to offload your internet or head into the cloud if you have cloud services, and not just strictly VPN. Where everyone connects to your data center's VPN Gateway. And you make the decision.

Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client scales well.

We put the DNS Load Balancer in the cloud and the VPN Gateway in different data centers for redundancy and low selling, among other things. As a result, people only hit one DNS entry, one host, and I could be accessing the gateway in a different data center. I can easily scale.

This product is used throughout my entire firm. At any given time, I would estimate that we have between 1,500 and 2,000 users.

The initial setup is fairly straightforward. It's pretty easy.

When you are set up and working, there is not much to maintain. 

The only thing to note is that if you set up that policy to scan your PC, you need to stay up to date on what your desktop team is doing. 

For example, you must be aware of your Windows version, or your antivirus, and address the policy accordingly.

The initial cost is the ASA and other items, but after that, it is relatively inexpensive. 

You purchase an AnyConnect license. We have approximately 2,500 licenses, and they are not that expensive.  

I don't recall the exact figure, but it is approximately $2,000 or $3,000 dollars here. Alternatively, a 3,500 concurrent connection.

VPN is out of date. People are now more aware of and interested in Zero Trust Network. With Zero Trust Network, I have reviewed Palo Alto and Cisco, and I must admit that Cisco's products are lacking.

AnyConnect version and flavor offered by Cisco are inadequate. Therefore, sometime between now and next year, we'll probably migrate to Palo Alto for Zero Trust Network and do away with the use of VPN completely.

I would rate Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client a seven out of ten.

Our company installs the solution for clients needing remote connections to their work environments. 

The solution provides secure and easy access to corporate network resources. 

The solution could offer tighter integration with endpoint protection to make it easier to use when routing security applications from other vendors. 

The interface is minimalistic so it could be a problem for some users. 

I have been using the solution for twenty years. 

The solution is very stable and trustworthy when not monitored for periods of time. I have no worries when I step away for 24 hours and then reconnect remotely. 

Scalability is dependent on the security hardware or software appliance deployed in the environment but there are no limitations on the actual solution. Licenses are based on the number of users and can include 5,000-10,000 devices. 

I have not used support for this product but have for other Cisco products. Their technical support is the best available and I rate it a ten out of ten. 

Positive

The solution is easy to deploy once you spend a few hours planning and conducting security assessments to ensure they align with customer requirements. Deployment when customers already have Cisco Security hardware or software in place takes two or three hours with one hour of that time dedicated to installation and testing. 

Licenses are based on the number of users and scale easily. With remote work, every house functions as a small home office and the solution accommodates that scenario. Corporate licenses start at a minimum of 25 users. 

The solution is reasonably priced and costs $600 for a five-year license in our scenario. 

Our company compared the solution to Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Pulse Secure. 

We determined that Cisco was not the least expensive but was the most stable and provided the best support. 

I recommend the solution as a first choice to all customers needing a real-time product.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

I use the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client on my laptop to connect to the VPN.

The most valuable feature of Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client is the consistency, I have not had any issues with the performance.

When using Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client when my laptop goes into sleep mode the VPN wants me to enter the password again. I should not have to enter the information again. If the laptop is on and it is not switched off, the password should be in the VPN saved and secured.

In the next release, the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client should add fingerprint login authentication. Many of my other applications have it.

I have been using the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for approximately one year.

Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client has been stable.

The scalability of the solution has been good. Everyone in the organization is using the solution and we have not had any issues.

We have approximately 2,000 people in my organization that use Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client.

I have not used the support from Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client.

I have not used other solution because the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client works very well.

The setup of the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client was easy, it did not take a lot of time, approximately one hour.

I would advise others that a VPN is necessary because data should be secured. We all lose. A VPN is advised and I have not had any problems with this solution and I did not have the need to try another one. 

I would recommend Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client to others.

I rate Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client an eight out of ten.

We are using the solution to accommodate working from home. We need to connect with our office server so that we can use the work network. This allows us to connect each team member from their personal computer. We also use a firewall to provide a set of rules that the organization chooses in terms of access. We use AnyConnect to connect everyone to the office server and the services. 

It's great that this product is providing a virtual cloud-based service. With it, we have some servers in some other places, and we are able to connect with our local network provider. We are able to connect to those office servers and that's important to me.

The initial setup is very easy.

The solution is stable. 

You get up to 12 hours of connectivity in one session. 

It will not allow anybody to use my credentials to access my machine. There's two-factor authentification and good security. 

I haven't found there are any shortcomings in the product. For how I use it, it works well. 

I have been using the solution for about four and a half years now. 

It's a stable product. I have a good connection. In India, we have 200 to 300 Mbps and that seems fine. It offers up to 12 hours of connectivity in one go.

I'm not aware of the scalability. It's not an aspect of the product I've tested.

There are more than 5,000 people in my company right now. That's in India and around the world. About 50% of the people are doing work from home. Therefore, a good number of people are using this product regularly.

We have our own support in the company that we can reach out to if we have issues. We do not directly contact Cisco. My understanding is they have a good, strong backup team and a second team that can provide installations. 

It is simple to set up the product. It's not overly complex or difficult for me. 

In this particular organization, it came pre-installed. However, I had installed it. That was at another company. I just got the application and installed it on my local server, and used the documentation provided to handle the process. 

It took about 15 to 20 minutes to deploy the product. It's very fast.

You do need to pay to use the service. However, I don't deal with payments or licensing. I can't speak to the exact price. 

We're a customer and end-user.

I'd recommend the product. It's quite secure, and Cisco provides good services. If you need to connect on a regular basis to your organization, AnyCOnnect is quite useful. The VPN on AnyConnect is easily modified. Nobody will be able to look into your system if you are using AnyConnect. It's better than any free options on the market.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. The current technology is very good. 

We need Client software installed on our laptop. The Client has to be configured with the VPN server IP address. When it connects, it will provide a private IP address. It will ask for the location, and credentials will be checked on the server if the server is created with the Active Directory. It will check if you are authorized. If you are, you will be authenticated, and you will get connected to the VPN.

The best feature is the Cisco IPsec. That is the encryption. It's providing integrity for your data. 

You can use it from anywhere. You just need to have the Internet. That is the best part, the availability.

The initial setup is very simple. 

It is a stable solution. 

You can scale the product.

Every time you need to key in the credentials, it'll generate an OTP, and you need to check the OTP and need to key in the OTP. It's work to connect to VPN. That could be improved.

If you're just turning on your laptop, it should connect automatically without keying in the credentials. There should be an option to right-click and enable the VPN to connect. There might be some inherent risk, however, there must be a way to have it easier and to connect while keeping the process safe.

We've used the solution for around three or four years at this point. 

Based on my experience, the solution has been stable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There are no bugs or glitches. It is reliable. 

Cisco AnyConnect can be configured on the Cisco ASR or VPN Concentrator. There, you can have multiple contacts you can create. It is scalable.

More than 1,000 people use the solution currently.

I have never been in contact with a Cisco engineer. 

The solution is easy to set up. It's not complex or difficult. Configuring it and everything might only take about one to two hours. 

We do have to pay a yearly licensing fee. I am unsure of the exact costs. 

We are a Cisco gold partner.

I'm not really sure which version of the solution we're using. 

It is a good option for people. I would recommend the product.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We primarily use the solution for VPN purposes. 

Earlier, my teams used to use it very occasionally; however, right now, almost a hundred percent of the time, my teams are connecting over VPN and working.

It's a very good solution. My teams are currently distributed all over the globe and leading the software engineering work and for business purposes. In both cases, we found that it's a very secure solution. When we combined it with Microsoft View, it gives a multi-factor authentication, plus a few other things, which makes it quite useful when we move to this remote way of working a couple of years back. 

Depending on the business needs, it's able to scale. When we were a small team of only 20 people working remotely. We were able to use a much slower configuration, and we were able to work based on the business needs. However, once when the pandemic happened, we had to scale up. We had to put in multiple teams working and building solutions. It was able to quickly add on software storage, memory, and other resources to be able to scale it. This software is able to scale to our needs. It's pretty heavy, intensive network usage that our company does, and in the face of that, it works quite well.

I'm more of a user than an admin. For me, it is very simple to use. I just double-click and there is a multi-factor authentication that happens, and I'm able to quickly login. I integrate it easily with our active directory. Using my single sign-on for my organization, I'm able to switch a profile, and I'm able to switch to a customer's plan. It's pretty convenient in terms of usage.

It does not slow down anything, unlike other solutions. It just puts a tunnel in place.

Most organizations are using Microsoft Active Directory, and it integrates well.

They are a market leader, and their security is quite good. 

I'm not noticing any missing features. 

Most of the organizations are currently using Microsoft's Stack or Google Stack, so I don't think they need to build another product to do that.

The solution is stable. We are doing software engineering remotely and the whole day we are working. Some of my team members are working from home, and they are using it without issue.

We have 500 plus people across five continents using the solution.

The solution easily scales to meet your needs.

I've not needed technical support. We have our own infrastructure team within our organization and they're able to handle it. I've never needed actually to reach out to Cisco for their support.

I've used other VPNs like RSA and Juniper and all that before, and those are a little cumbersome. They were quite glitchy and heavy work was not possible.

I'm an end-user.

I'm not sure of which version number we are on. However, we do keep the solution up-to-date. 

Originally, we had done it on-prem. Now, we have deployed it on the Microsoft Azure Cloud.

Almost all the custom companies that I'm working with are currently using Cisco AnyConnect. These are tier one products used in military-grade environments.

I'd rate the solution around an eight out of ten. Since I started using Cisco AnyConnect maybe five years back, it's been pretty stable. 

I'd advise potential users to use it with multi-factor authentication. Just in a business environment, if you don't set it up with multi-factor authentication, it can tend to be misused. Originally, a few years back, I would see situations where multiple people were using the same VPN and sharing IDs. In the current way of work, way of configuration, it configures to your Microsoft View and actually does authentication to ensure it's a unique user. As a business with security needs, I would recommend to an organization ensures there is no VPN or ID sharing. 

I use the solution to connect to a VPN for remote work. 

The solution provides seamless connectivity to the VPN without delay when you have a good internet connection. 

The solution should not rely on tokens from the mobile application for logins. If you don't have your phone handy, you can't log in. Email notifications or another single sign-in method would resolve this issue. 

I have been using the solution for three years. 

The solution is stable with no technical issues. 

The solution is scalable to a wide range of users. Our company has 3,000 users and many worked remotely during Covid without any issues. 

Our internal IT support team handles most issues but the solution's technical support is good when needed. 

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The solution was implemented in-house. 

When researching options, it is important to assess compatibility, the number of users, and the time it takes to implement a solution.

I rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

We primarily use the product as a VPN. 

It is useful for connecting with the client network. We use it, and once we are connected, then we use RDC, the remote desktop, where I need to log in to production and other processes.

I'm just using it for like a Remote Desktop Connection, I'm not using it for any other purposes. For that task, it works well. 

It is stable. We haven't had issues so far. 

Sometimes if we're always having some network issues, or maybe the client is having some network issues, we might get disconnected. Other than that, it works well. 

I've used the solution for the past year. 

So far, we haven't had issues with stability. It's been good overall. 

I've never tried to scale the product. 

From my area, we have 23 people on the solution. It might be more widely used elsewhere. 

We do have plans to increase usage.

If there is any issue with Cisco, I'm going to raise a ticket with my entire team. They will take care of it. It's not my product to develop as I'm not using it in that way. I'm using it only to connect to the client network. 

Previously, I used GlobalProtect to connect to VPN. I might have used it for around four years. We switched due to the organization's policy change. 

I'm not handling the setup process. In this organization I don't have access to that. I have very limited knowledge in that area. I use it simply for connecting to the client network.

I'm not sure about the licensing cost. I'm just an end-ser. I don't handle costs. 

I don't know the exact version of the solution I am on at this time. 

I would rate the solution ten out of ten. It has worked well so far.