Cisco Secure Endpoint Reviews

We use this solution to protect our IT environment. We use it to secure our user endpoints.

It gives awareness of our users' security posture.

The console feature gives a centralized management of what's going on, and if something happens, it gives you an alert. That's the most important feature for me.

Compared to other products, Cisco Secure Endpoint has some limitations and issues, it is still catching up with competition. For example, protection for USB is fairly recent and it is still limited to Windows platforms, and there are significant differences in the product packaging and distribution for Windows and MacOS platforms.

Another area of improvement is stability.

I have been using Cisco Secure Endpoint for two years.

We had a couple of deferred releases this year.

I rate the solution’s stability a seven out of ten.

Our deployment is very small. We only have a few dozen endpoints. So I can't really say if it scales well to a large number of endpoints. However, it seems like it could scale well so, the solution could be easy to scale up as needed.

The customer support team solves the problems, but it takes a while to contact them. 

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We have it installed on all our workstations and servers. Primarily, we started with it after we were hit with a ransomware attack about five years ago. We looked for something that would give us a bit more visibility as to what was going on the network, where the weak points were, etc. We had an antivirus solution (FireANT) back then, which obviously wasn't good enough on its own. So, we went looking for something that was going to be a little more granular in how it gave us visibility on the network.

We have the Cisco AMP for Endpoints Connector on our workstations, which is all done in the cloud. We have Windows Server, Windows 10 workstation environment, and on-premise servers at the moment with some cloud. I guess we would call ourselves a partly hybrid business, with some stuff in the cloud, and all our access points have Cisco AMP on them. This currently includes work-from-home devices, because we have a lot of people still working from home with the coronavirus thing going on, even home users have Cisco AMP as well.

Our operating systems, whether they be Linux, Windows, Mac, or Google Android, are well-protected.

We now have gained more visibility into what's going on. We had an incident four or five years ago where a member of our staff had a Tor Browser installed on his workstation in the office. I discovered it by chance while doing some work on his workstation. At that time, we had no way of knowing what was going on. Now, between our two Cisco products, we have the capability to see and block that sort of thing going on from the network side. From that point of view, it's straightaway. It has given us the security aspect of not having to deal with people putting Tor Browsers on their workstations to access stuff on the dark web. We have been able to lock that down straightaway, which is good, because that's obviously a big threat to any business. If you don't understand what's going on in and out of your office, whether physically or virtually, then you have no idea what's going on and where your risks are going to be. 

It gives us visibility with minimal intrusion. We don't have an on-premise sort of interaction with it, though. It's just a connector that sits on the workstations and servers, then interacts with the workstations or servers through to the cloud. It has very minimal impact on us in terms of performance. They have recently improved the updating of the program. It no longer requires a reboot after a connector update, which is always a handy thing. From that point of view, the impact is better on the business. I can roll out an update to all devices and not have to worry about having reboots, particularly for servers. Thus, the impact has gotten better on the business over time.

The solution makes it possible to see a threat once and block it everywhere across all endpoints and the entire security platform. It has the ability to block right down to the file and application level across all devices based on policies, such as, blacklisting and whitelisting of software and applications. This is good. Its strength is the ability to identify threats very quickly, then lock them and the network down and block the threats across the organization and all devices, which is what you want. You don't want to be spending time working out how to block something. You want to block something very quickly, letting that flow through to all the devices and avoiding the same scenario on different operating systems.

The solution simplifies endpoint protection, detection, and response workflows, such as security investigation, threat hunting, and incident response. We have policies and procedures in place now at the HR user level and also at the machine level to make sure that certain procedures are followed and those procedures are put in place. From that point of view, the Cisco gives us confidence. We don't have to worry too much about threats. This means we can focus a lot more on doing the work we are being paid to do rather than spending time trying to protect the business too much. The fact that we are very quickly able to see what's going on is good in terms of how much time it takes to work through any issues. 

We now have a standard rollout of devices with procedures in place. The shared nature where Cisco AMP gets installed on all our devices means we are benchmarking our risk at a level that we're comfortable with. We don't have to deal with managing that risk day-to-day, as the risk level is fairly low in terms of what we're expecting from day-to-day operations. From that point of view, this means we can focus more on the business at hand rather than worrying incessantly about threats to the business.

You can see what's going on. It detects a lot of stuff, which is benign, but still detects it as a potential threat or IoC. It has a lot more visibility than traditional antivirus, anti-malware programs. From that point, I feel comfortable that we are seeing everything that is going on. There is a lot of stuff that you don't need to do too much with as it may be a case of some poorly written software executing a potential flag as something of concern. However, at the end of the day, it's nothing to worry about. Therefore, I feel fairly comfortable that we're getting full visibility as best we can on what's going on, and it is better to know what's going on (than not).

Our webpage/portal records all instances of programs accessed on the computer, everything accessed on the internet, all the system processes, and any programs that are running. It then scans them for potential issues. If we installed some software that has a potential issue, we will flag that and have a look to decide whether we want to allow that through or whether to block it.

It shows a lot of stuff going on in the workstations, and to a lesser extent, the servers. Cisco AMP allows us to see within a process what the potential threat may be, for example, on a workstation. That threat may be benign or may be more serious. But, it gives us the opportunity to see those threats, evaluate them, and rate them how we see fit, then do something with them, if necessary. It is now less of an inconvenience on the business from a rebooting aspect.

The console is there running in the background all the time. I can just tap on the console at any point to see what's going on. I usually do this a couple times a day. It allows visibility at any point in time because it's doing this in real-time. There is very little lag. If there are any issues, I get a notification. Then, we can then jump in straightaway, have a look, and assess it. 

The tools provided by the solution to investigate and mitigate threats are very comprehensive. Sometimes, they're almost too comprehensive. You can get caught up delving very deep into things that you potentially don't need to. The integrations set it above your traditional antivirus, console-type applications in relation to visibility. It's very high-level in terms of how it works and what it can do.

Cisco AMP offers user access and device protection in a single endpoint security solution. In combination with Cisco Umbrella, it is looking at attacks from a different point or source. It's good enough with these two products to do the job. We don't see a need another particular third-party security software. 

The biggest area where I liked seeing improvement is in the interface and its interaction with the customer and portal. Since these things are quite technical, it's important that you can find your way around the console quickly without having to remember where things are. I think the interface has improved quite a lot in the last couple of years, which is good, but also the integrations are starting to be incorporated a lot more too. We can see more value in the product as time goes on. It's a different product to what it was when we first got it in terms of visibility and also its user interface.

You need a certain level of technical experience because the console is not the easiest thing to look at. It's very in-depth and there's a lot going on. It does a lot of stuff. I often compare that to our antivirus console, which is pretty self-explanatory, but it is not really doing a lot in terms of its visibility. It will do similar remediation work, but AMP has the visibility. You can see where it's going and what processes are running. Everything that it's tracking can be overwhelming to some people so you need a level of IT and technical experience to understand what it's doing and your way around the console. It's a very high-level product in that respect. Therefore, it might scare a few people off if they're not up to that level. However, if you have someone who can handle it, then it's fine.

There are some features with the integrations that I'm not using because I haven't gotten my head around how they integrate and how best to integrate them into what we're doing. It is just a matter of giving me some time to sit down with a Cisco rep and working through it to understand exactly what these things are doing, then implementing them. I am not one to pay for something that we're not going to use. However, from what I can see, everything that comes with the product is worth doing. Obviously, the threats out there now in the internet world are only getting more complex. Therefore, it makes sense that we keep up with all the technology and software that comes with it.

About four years.

I have had a couple of instances in the time that we have had the solution: 

• It got too smart for itself and detected an Adobe Reader update as malicious, blocking all PDFs. They remediated that fairly quickly. 
• There was an issue with a connector merging at the start of the coronavirus when we were going into lockdown and sending people to work from home. This caused some issues, but they found that very quickly and were able to remediate it. We were able to roll the connector back. 

These issues do pop up from time to time. With any software, there can be upgrades and issues that cause problems. 

Overall, the stability of the program and software have been very good.

The product has improved considerably over the last 12 to 18 months. They have done a lot of updates to the console and connector. The connector interaction with the workstation has been minimized. The visibility inside the console has improved. 

Typically, we have about 120 devices, but we have an extra 60 work-from-home devices at the moment. The scalability is good because we were able to go from 120 devices to 180 very quickly. Therefore, we are able to push devices out very quickly, as needed. There are no issues from my point of view.

We have used the solution as much as we can because we have it on every device that we are using. From that point of view, we have maxed out our utilization because we are using it on every device. On every new device that gets bought in, the first thing that gets put on it is the Cisco products before they touch the Internet and the network, just as a precaution.

Our rep in Sydney is a certified Cisco supplier and provider. The company is Outcomex. The rep was involved in the setup of the whole thing. We are still using the company for our Cisco products, which is good. 

Outcomex is very good. They have looked after any issues we've had with AMP and Umbrella along the way. There might have been some configuration issues that we've had. We have had a few instances where we have needed a bit of external support, and they have been able to give me support very quickly with a fast turnaround.

There have been a few changes to the software, such as the threat intelligence, Threat Grid and a couple of other packages/integrations. I must admit that I haven't had a lot of time in the last couple of months to really delve into them. It's something I was going to go and talk to my Cisco rep over in Sydney to get more of an idea of how they work and how we can integrate them. I see a lot of tools coming out now, along with a lot of integration tools working with the products, which look very good. I just haven't quite got my head around the implementation and how to get the best outcome out of those tools.

There was a case when our provider said, "You best talk to Cisco directly on that." I think that was only once, but the support was very good. That support request was attended to very quickly.

Fortunately, our ransomware attack was way back in the very early days when no one really knew anything about it. However, I had done a bit of reading on it and knew the first thing to do when you see one of those things is to disconnect the machine from the network that is causing the issue. I knew which one it was straightaway, so I managed to disconnect it from the network. Then, the proliferation stopped straightaway. We were able to get stuff from the backup fairly quickly because we have good backup regimes in place, but it was purely by chance that I came across the ransomware as a threat. Although I didn't understand to what extent it went, we were able to mitigate it.

The ransomware attack took probably a good two days of my time fixing and getting things back to normal. It impacted some people in the business world because of where the ransomware got into the network. That was the wake up call, to say, "Hang on. We need something that's going to flag these issues and give us visibility." Our antivirus software was completely benign to it at that time. It had no idea and didn't pick anything up. That's what made us go looking for something. We came up with FireAMP (Cisco AMP). We decided to trial it for a few months and got an idea of exactly what was going on in the network. We did an audit on the network (to start with) and realized that we had some issues. While all stuff was mostly benign and just sitting around the place, it gave us the ability to quickly see what was going on. That was when we decided to go down the path of getting something that would give us that visibility.

The firewalls did their job to some extent. Since then, we have changed our Internet providers and now have a managed firewall. This takes a bit of pressure off me, but we've left AMP in place since we assume that the firewall will let through various things. So, we take the position that we use both Cisco products to protect us from anything that gets through. It is not a matter of just relaxing a bit because we have a managed firewall in place with a lot more security than we probably had five years ago. We still take the view that we need to protect inside the network, assuming something gets through the door, because there are always ways around these things. That's how these things start: They get ahead of a security software before the security software can catch up.

The initial setup was pretty straightforward. 

We pushed the deployment out in a day. Once we had the connector configured and policies configured to how we saw best at the time, it was a fairly straightforward rollout. Because it was pushed out through the portal in the cloud, all the devices were rolled out pretty quickly.

The connector updates are very easily done now, and that's improving. Previously, the connector had an issue, where almost every time it needed to be updated, it required a machine reboot. This was always a bit of an inconvenience and a bug. Because with a lot of software now, you don't need to do that and shouldn't need to be rebooting all the time.

The connector updates happen every six to eight weeks. Now, it's just a matter of me saying, "Push out the update," and off it goes. There is minimal time involved, as it's just a matter of me pushing it out. However, I don't push them out automatically. I always hold back a little bit on updates, like Windows updates, because quite often updates come with more problems than they solve. I usually wait a week or so before implementing them.

We did a two-week audit of it to assess what threats we had. That was done with our Cisco rep. He put a device in that sniffed out all the traffic on the network and produced a report to show where our weaknesses were and what we had on the network sitting there benignly. That gave us a benchmark to configure the product in its initial stage before implementing. The rollout was quite easy.

The deployment was done with a Cisco rep and me.

Because I was able to get on top of our ransomware attack fairly quickly, I was able to restore stuff from backups. Disruption is time, and we are a time-based business. We have done the numbers. If we had 100 technical people at X amount of dollars per hour charge-out rate, then that gives us an hourly cost as a very rudimentary way of working out hourly cost. Therefore, if we're down for half a day, or even a day, then we can very quickly work out how many dollars we will lose every time we get taken down by an this type of attack.

We haven't paid any ransoms because we didn't need to and we wouldn't do that. However, the other side of that is the downtime, assessing the damage, fixing it up, and then all the subsequent tidying up that goes on afterward, which can go on for a while. It would probably be a couple of days of lost productivity, which is not a huge amount in terms of time, but dollar-wise for a small to medium-businesses, it can be quite substantial in a month.

We haven't had to spend time dealing with too many threats. That time is minimized in terms of how much we need to spend.

The solution has decreased our time to remediate. We do a lot of stuff automatically, but we can manually go in and apply remediation straightaway on devices at a device and policy level. We can apply this throughout the business, which is what we want. If we see a threat at some particular level, we can make a decision to go in straightaway and tackle that threat through manual intervention because you can't blindly put your faith into something and expect it to do everything for you. You have to manage it and be proactive at all times. However, the amount of time spent doing the manual intervention is minimized.

The pricing and licensing are reasonable. The cost of AMP for Endpoints is inline with all the other software that has a monthly endpoint cost. It might be a little bit higher than other antivirus type products, but we're only talking about a dollar a month per user. I don't see that cost as being an issue if it's going to give us the confidence and security that we're looking for. We have had a lot of success and happiness with what we're using, so there's no point in changing.

There is also the Cisco annual subscription plus my management time in terms of what I do with the Cisco product. I spend a minimal amount of time on it though, just rolling out updates as they need them and monitoring the console a couple of times a day to ensure nothing is out of control. Cost-wise, we are quite happy with it.

We did look at another solution. At the time, there wasn't a lot of software for small to medium-businesses.

I was looking for something with a business name reputation behind it that would give us a good level of security. That's why we went with the Cisco solution. We initially went with Cisco based on its name in the industry, and we have been very happy with it.

Cisco AMP comes with an in-built antivirus, but we have another antivirus that we use. Though AMP works whether you use their antivirus or not, it doesn't matter, we thought, "If we use a separate branded antivirus, they may have some extra sort of pickups that the AMP antivirus may not," to spread the risk a little. We have some other systems in place internally in terms of how we protect file installations and macros running on the network. Therefore, we do add extra layers of security that we feel that we need. However, we are confident that this will pick up most of this stuff along the way.

At the start, we realized how much we didn't know what was going on in the network and where all the endpoint weaknesses were. That opened eyes up straight away to the risk that was involved. Then, we did the numbers, and said, "For us, risk is downtime, and time is dollars." We just did the sums very quickly and worked out what it would cost us if we didn't have any idea what was going on in the network and got hit by something that we should have been aware of. Because if the software is out there and gives you this type of visibility, you should be using it. 

We do use it with another Cisco product, Cisco Umbrella, which is a DNS-level content-filtering, web-filtering software. That has had an impact on the business world in terms of restricting a lot of stuff which may have come in for some web pages or websites that may not have been secured. We have seen a reduced impact on the business because we're using the two Cisco products together.

I would give Cisco AMP a nine (out of 10). It is as good as anything out there. I can't see any reason why we would look elsewhere for a product. It does the job it's meant to do and is improving all the time. We have been very happy with it.

AMP was purchased for our organization in response to continued threats that we had from malware and malicious activity on our endpoints. We received AMP for Endpoint and also AMP for Networks as part of our Cisco Security ELA. The solution has made a huge impact on the visibility of what has actually been transpiring at the process level on our servers and workstation endpoints as well as being able to look in detail on those processes to see whose executed those processes and what the trajectory was for those processes.

AMP for Endpoints is Software as a Service. It's a subscription service. You do download a connector onto the endpoint. Then, there is the option to run it to an air gap mode where you connect to a local server that does back out to the AMP Cloud. However, that's not the deployment we have in our case, we have it connecting back directly to Cisco Cloud Security.

While I can understand from a theoretical standpoint how some organizations may not want a cloud connection, it increases the processing and detection because of ETHOS and SPERO detection. Throughout all the other Cisco security products, it is able to add this detection into the threat analytics through Threat Grid and Threat Response for other customers who have the same type of hash in their environment. There are the options: If you want to submit a file to be removed after submission and also for it to be submitted anonymously.

We tie AMP into our SIEM so we are receiving alerts through the SIEM. I also have AMP independently send me alerts. I have these alerts finely tuned so I'm getting the right severity level on events where I am being notified. If you choose to receive a notification on all events, potential malware, or potentially unwanted applications, you're going to have an overload of information. Therefore, AMP allows the ability to go through and fine tune the alerts, both in the console and remotely, so you get a proper level of notification to make actionable requests and executions.

In our organization, we have about 95 percent Windows operating systems. Then, we have about five percent Mac OS. Therefore, Cisco AMP covers a 100 percent of our endpoints. It's totally comprehensive.

I had a conversation with my CIO about a week ago. We are seeing more security incidents in our organization. However, we believe these events have always occurred, and that we are more aware of them now. For example, last Thursday we had an incident where a device tried to go and reach out to a malicious website. Because of the integration we have with Threat Response between Umbrella with WSA and AMP, we were able to stop that malicious activity. That's something we wouldn't been previously aware of: If we had an endpoint out there trying to reach out to a malicious site. Until it hit our perimeter security, we wouldn't have been aware of that. You don't always want to rely on your perimeter security for everything, as it won't catch everything all the time. Therefore, you want a multilayered approach, and having Cisco AMP and Cisco Threat Response helps us to accomplish that.

There are several valuable features that AMP offers:

• Application blacklist
• Threat Response
• Cognitive Threat Analytics
• Threat Grid
• Orbital
• Endpoint Isolation. 

We regularly use all these features on a daily basis. E.g., if we have an alert stating exploit prevention was detected on an endpoint, we will look to see what the hash for that executable/application was, then we can add it to a simple blacklist. Then, everyone else in the organization with AMP for Endpoint running that device can prevent it from running. This is really useful in the event that you have some type of malware incident or event where something is trying to propagate. You can squash it then and there. 

There is also the ability: If you have one device that is running something that's really malicious. You can go ahead and put that in isolation mode to prevent any further spread or damage.

I have used Orbital for searching and taking a bit of a deeper dive. It provides detail on assets, users logged in, the IP address, and architecture. It also helps with going through posture assessment, threat hunting, and forensics. 

The room for improvement would be on event notifications. I have mine tuned fairly well. I do feel that if you subscribe to all the event notification types out-of-the-box, or don't really go through and take the time to filter out events, the notifications can become overwhelming with information. Sometimes, when you're overwhelmed with information, you just say, "I'm not going to look at anything because I'm receiving so much." I recommend the vendor come up with a white paper on the best practices for event notifications.

As far as reducing the attack surface, Orbital really doesn't decrease that surface.

I have been using Cisco AMP for about 18 months.

With most applications, whether it's AV or some type of IDS/IPS running on an endpoint, you will have some type of performance hit or degradation of the endpoint's performance. Out of all the devices that we've put AMP on, which is around a 1,000 devices at this point, we have only had one device that had a problem with performance using AMP. So, we were able to go through and tune the policy from the AMP console for that one endpoint. The overall view of AMP's performance is very good.

You have the same deployment process and methodology for 10 to 10,000. Therefore, it scales very well.

I have never had to use tech support for this solution.

Threat Response is integrated with AMP and all the other Cisco security products. That has really helped to decrease the troubleshooting time. Back in the legacy days of AV and Endpoint Protection, the typical workflow would be, "Okay, I have a machine over here that has been infected. I have to figure out all the files which touched it." It was almost impossible retroactively to go back and see what everything it touched and where it all went.

You had to witness the malware in the wild (in real-time) to figure out what it was doing. With Threat Response, you are able to see its executables and trajectory across your network, then where it tried to reach the outside world. All of this helps to mitigate our threat response from days or hours to just a few minutes.

Prior to Cisco AMP, we used Sophos Intercept X, which we still do use, and we also used Carbon Black.

The initial setup was extremely straightforward. I performed the initial install, and I maintained it ever since.

The deployment took about 30 minutes.

The deployment plan was to get the console and policies configured. Once the policies were configured, we started with the servers first because the servers were easier for us to get our hands on and ensure that the connector was installed. Secondarily, we went out to the workstation level endpoints and installed there.

There is Cisco documentation on best practices for your specific endpoints. My recommendation would be to get with your Cisco support team or account manager and obtain the most recent iteration of that document to ensure that your deployment goes as smoothly as possible. While the deployment will go smoothly, the main thing that this document does ensure is you have the correct policies configured per endpoint type. E.g., you have a different type of policy for a workstation versus a server.

We have seen ROI, but it's hard to calculate that return on investment in terms of actual dollars because it's more man-hours. Time spent on other projects is possible because of the optimization and performance that we have by utilizing AMP.

AMP for Endpoints simplifies endpoint protection, detection, and response workflows. It continues to decrease the man-hours needed to perform tasks, such as threat hunting and incident response.

It has decreased time to detection by 95 percent. A lot of the time, prior to having AMP, even with our traditional AV protection, we weren't aware of any type of malicious activity until it had an impact on the organization.

We had a 97 percent reduction in time to remediation, because it's almost instantaneous. In the 18 months that we've had AMP, there has not been malicious activity on an endpoint that we weren't able to resolve immediately.

In our organization, Orbital definitely does save time. Anything that we can do in our organization to save time is crucial, as we have a small IT staff. Therefore, we really need to find force multipliers.

For each incident which occurs, whether it's an exploit prevention or malware detected, Orbital is saving us five to eight hours per incident. In one week, it could save eight hours, and then another week, it could save 32 hours. It just depends on the malicious activity for any given week.

Whenever you are doing the licensing process, I would highly advise to look at what other Cisco solutions you have in your organization, then evaluate if an Enterprise Agreement is the best way to go. In our case, it was the best way to go. Since we had so many other Cisco products, we were able to tie those in. We were actually able to get several Cisco security solutions for less than if we had bought three or four Cisco security solutions independently or ad hoc.

In our case, it is a straightforward annual payment through our Enterprise Agreement.

We evaluated Carbon Black before going with Cisco AMP. The reasoning behind going with AMP over Carbon Black was we already had other Cisco security products in our organization. Therefore, AMP was a native integration versus something like Carbon Black where you're looking at a third-party integration. Also, Carbon Black was a bit more cumbersome when it came to performing a lot of the tasks that AMP performs. Carbon Black was first to market with things like endpoint isolation. However, after speaking with our Cisco account reps, we did realize that, "Okay, Endpoint Isolation is coming to AMP. It's just not there yet." That did come to fruition, so there wasn't an advantage to using Carbon Black over AMP. Plus, there were several advantages to using AMP over Carbon Black. That's what led to our decision.

Integration is a key selling factor for Cisco security products. We have a Cisco Enterprise Agreement with access to Cisco Email Security, Cisco Firepower, Cisco Stealthwatch, Cisco Talos, Cisco Threat Grid, Cisco Umbrella, and also third-party solutions. This is key to our security and maximizing operations. Because we do have the Email Security appliance and it is integrated with Threat Response, we have everything tied together. Additionally, we are using the Cisco SecureX platform, as we were a beta test for that new solution. With SecureX, we are able to pull all those applications into one pane for visibility and maintenance. This greatly maximizes our security operations.

Orbital just went from beta to production recently, so I haven't had the opportunity to go through and do a complex search on anything yet.

Biggest lesson learnt: How impactful proper tool utilization in an organization can be to the overall efficiency.

I would rate the solution a 10 (out of 10).

We're using it in a handful of ways. We initially bought it to provide endpoint protection against malware and the like on our laptops that were mobile and off our network the entire time. We eventually moved it onto all of our desktops, and we have now integrated with Umbrella, so we have a full protection suite for all of our clients across our enterprise. 

The most valuable thing about the solution is a feature that's not in the actual product set itself. It's peace of mind. We take a look at security holistically, multilayered. We start from the edge and perimeter and work all the way down to the client. I feel we've deployed best-of-breed in each of the slices of the security layer. For the endpoint, Cisco gives us good clarity about what our endpoints are actually doing. So when we get bad actors into the network, we get quick visibility into which devices are compromised.

We've really subscribed to the whole security stack from Cisco. AMP feeds into that whole Threat Grid for us. We're able to see hashes, and the like, all the way down to the client and we get that visibility because of AMP. As AMP reports back into the Threat Grid, we can see the hashes running on the actual endpoint, and whether they are malicious, and what those things have done. If malware has infected a certain laptop, we get all the forensic evidence around that laptop and, if it's jumped, where that bad stuff has jumped to and what it's done. All that visibility is possible because of AMP.

Even as a standalone product, you get peace of mind having AMP running on something. So if you open up an attachment and it's doing things that it's not supposed to, because your endpoint gets security updates it is protected. Whether it's connected to the network or not, whether it's connected to the internet or not, it is protected. It does its job very well.

The fact that the solution offers cloud-delivered endpoint protection simplifies our security operations. We don't have to worry about updates or signature updates. It takes care of itself in the background, so it frees my guys up to do more meaningful work.

The quality of alerts that actually percolate up for us to take action on are on point. There aren't a lot of false positives so my security team is able to spend its time more effectively. They're not on a wild goose chase. They're chasing actionable things to take care of.

In addition, the security stack that we have in place allows us to see a threat once and block it everywhere, across all endpoints and our entire security platform. If one piece of bad malware gets through, the entire network will self-heal. It makes us more efficient. Standardizing on one pane of glass is the dream that you're after. So even though Cisco doesn't have just one management console for its entire security suite, the pieces plug in properly. With help from Cisco and their security experts, having this deployed the right way lightens the load on my team. We become much more effective. I don't have a team of 15 security experts running around our network, facing down bad guys and preventing them from ever touching our core pieces of data or IP assets they would be after. AMP and the rest of the security stack from Cisco give me peace of mind that the network is taking care of itself and that the endpoints are protected. As long as we are not careless with the pieces that we control, we can rest reasonably well at night knowing that Cisco is doing the heavy lifting that keeps the bad guys at bay.

AMP has decreased our time to detection and to remediate, without a doubt. It's gone down by 100 percent. We're able to detect, real-time, bad or malicious software and mitigate it, not quite in real-time but pretty darn close. If you go back to when we first deployed it, there was no time measurement, so I'm comfortable saying it has sped things up considerably. Now, we're only chasing real threats.

It doesn't impact the devices. It is an agent-based solution, and we see no performance knock on cell phones. That was a big thing for us, especially in the mobile world. We don't see battery degradation like you do with other solutions which really drain the battery, as they're constantly doing things. That can shorten the useful life of a device. We're really happy about that. That's why we decided to go full-steam-ahead on that. And of course, on laptops and desktop, there's no performance hit whatsoever. We have Windows, Android, and iOS, and deployment of the agent is very easy, and is done with no user interaction.

The other thing that we really like, from the agent standpoint, is that our end-users are not capable of turning the tool off. That was very critical for us.

The integration of the Cisco Threat Response feature with products such as Cisco Email Security, Cisco FirePOWER, Stealthwatch, Talos, Threat Grid, Umbrella, and third-party solutions means it plugs right in. We use that entire stack, with the exception of email protection. Talos is out there as the guiding force, applying visibility from around the globe, and the insights that it gains, and then feeds back into all the security platforms. Threat Grid lets us see and track hashes with the forensics that we get. It is just out-of-bounds crazy what we're able to do in a very short period of time. That's all dependent on the stack working together. That's where Umbrella and AMP come into play, and having those agents out there running on endpoints and feeding it all the way back up the stack and giving us visibility into all our north-south traffic through the network. That is important.

We use FirePOWER on our firewalls to try to prevent bad guys from getting in. The thing we're really impressed with there is that even if questionable hashes that get through, we're able to say, "Oh, something bad got through," and we're able to track it back and remove it from the network after it's proven to be malicious. We see that on a constant basis. That's a very useful tool. The ability to extract that malicious software automatically is a cross-function of AMP, ISE, and FirePOWER. Using that entire stack, we're able to automate that entire process, with my guys not having to do anything. It just happens.

If it could physically go out and slap the end-user to keep him or her from doing the bad thing initially, that would be great.

But seriously, maybe there is room for improvement in some of the automated remediation. We have other tools in place that AMP feeds into that allow for that to happen, so I look at it as one seamless solution. But if you're buying AMP all by itself, I don't know if it can remove malicious software after the fact or if it requires the other tools that we use to do some of that.

We've been using Cisco AMP for Endpoints for well over five years. Aside from firewalls, it was our first security software product from Cisco that resides on the desktop. It goes on laptops, desktops, the whole shootin' match. Recently we started to deploy it on mobile devices and we're excited about that.

It's rock-solid. I don't think there's more to say there. It's just a rock-solid solution.

We have about 800 endpoints that we protect with it and that number is growing, because around the end of 2019 we started playing around with deploying AMP onto cell phones, both Android and iOS. We kicked that tire for a few months and during [COVID] quarantine, we finally figured out how to make it all successful. We've now started rolling that out and we have close to the same number of smartphones out there as other endpoints. We're rapidly deploying it out to all of our Apple and Samsung devices.

We're a baby user, even at 800 endpoints. We get great value out of 800 endpoints. I've talked to peers of mine who run much larger IT organizations who have it scaled out to tens of thousands of endpoints, with the same ease. It scales very well.

Their tech support, overall, is best-in-class. If you ever have a question, TAC gets the answer for you and helps you work through the solutions. 

One thing that we are working on is trying to integrate AMP with AnyConnect. We have our image or our "build." We install AMP, and then we install Umbrella, and then we install AnyConnect. Now Umbrella and AnyConnect have integrated together, and AMP is coming. We've been working with customer support to build all of it into AnyConnect in one deployment model. They've been fantastic to work with.

I don't think it's quite ready for release, yet. We're on the beta side of things. They asked us to kick the tires to get some feedback from a medium sized enterprise on ease and scale. They're trying to make it as simple as possible so that you can just punch in a little bit of configuration info and away it goes.

We've been an AMP customer for a very long time. We've always had antivirus on the desktops; that's what everybody needed to do. Then, I went to a security conference and Cisco was talking about AMP and about how ineffective antivirus really was and that you needed something more. This was when they were bringing AMP to market. I seized on it immediately and said, "That is well-priced, well-positioned, and exactly the gap that we need to fill."

It definitely helps us minimize security risks. We were probably aware of those risks, but may have just been limited in the tool sets available to us. AMP came to market when there weren't a lot of tool sets out there. Before AMP, we made our best efforts in educating and the like, in the hope that nobody would click on bad things. But then we were able to plug AMP into the environment and know that we had a piece of software so that if somebody did click on something bad, we had tools in place to prevent it from doing anything totally out of bounds, and business-shattering.

Malwarebytes was probably about the closest that we had to a solution that was comparable to AMP, but they are definitely not direct competitors. That was a tool that we used on a one-off basis if we thought a computer was infected with malware. Once we deployed AMP, we no longer had a need for that tool.

The initial setup was straightforward. I've been at Per Mar Security for over 20 years and there are a handful of solutions that just work the way they're supposed to, out-of-the-box. AMP's startup guide was on point. I'm the one that deployed it, and I still do some of the technical stuff, day in, day out. I was able to go through their Quick Start Guide and we were able to deploy it out to over 800 endpoints in a matter of two weeks, and that was mostly due to how we roll software out. We probably could have deployed it all in one day if we really wanted to. But we have 30 offices, so we just went office-by-office. It was easy-peasy.

We've seen ROI, absolutely, in more efficient use of my team's time.

The visibility that we have into the endpoint and the forensics that we're able to collect give us value for the price. This is not an overly expensive solution, considering all the things that are provided. You get great performance and value for the cost.

This is a mature product for Cisco. They've been in this space for a while. There are a lot of competitors out there and, since we deployed AMP, we've had some of the competitors to AMP take runs at us and say, "Hey, look at our little widget. We think we're better. We catch more things at a higher hit rate." Every once in a while we'll get bored we'll take a look at one of these tools. We'll say, "Hey, pretty cool tool." And then we see the pricing and, after they perform CPR on you and resuscitate you and you get back to living, you're like, "Holy cow, that is way overpriced compared to what I'm paying for AMP." AMP is very well-priced. 

When I look at different solutions, I always go back and compare them to AMP. I'll tell the others, "Hey, here's what we're paying for AMP, per user. You guys can't be any more than that, because here's everything we get from AMP. You guys are only doing one thing or two things, and AMP's doing all these other things for us."

AMP's pricing is the gold standard that I compare all other pricing to, from antivirus to other security tools. That's how well-priced I think AMP is.

Take a holistic view of your security stack. If you can only focus in on the endpoints, I understand, but if you take a longer view on where you want your cyber security posture to be over the course of time and over the course of budget, this is a great building block. I took a step back half a decade ago, evaluated where we were and where we needed to be, and I started taking baby steps. We started with AMP; we quickly added Umbrella. And that was a great little solution to endpoint protection. We knew where our people were going on the internet. We could block them from bad sites. We had the power of Talos protecting us.

Over the course of time, and as budget constraints allowed, we were able to add on more layers. I would rate our cyber security posture as very mature. You're always growing, you're always evolving, as the threat landscape does, but I think that we have the fundamentals in place to be able to adjust rapidly to an evolving threat landscape. 

That didn't happen overnight. We didn't just open up the checkbook and write a $10 million check to say, "Hey, we have cybersecurity." We took a very methodical approach over the course of time, trying to plug in the right pieces as they fit and as our business grew and matured. Our fundamental building block was AMP. We started there and then built out from it. Just recently, this past fall, we finished up building security into the core of the data center. We built from the endpoint up to the perimeter and then into the data center. Now, we have good visibility into our north-south traffic, where AMP plays and, with the recent project that we just finished up, we now have great visibility into east-west traffic out of the data center. AMP plays into that, too.

At the end of the day, AMP will feed both data feeds and give you good visibility into all your traffic, whether it's leaving your network, coming into your network, or going across your network.

We're very confident about the security alerts that pop up on Threat Grid. And we use another tool that's not Cisco-related, another SIEM tool, that will alert us for different things. We cross-correlate the two platforms — it's like a check-and-balance, if you will. It makes sure Cisco's doing everything it's supposed to, and that this other tool is doing everything it's supposed to do.

Being the primary AV/IDS within the enterprise, we have the solution deployed across multiple platforms including workstations, servers and Operating Systems.

The solutions conveniently integrates with other existing on-prem and cloud application will relatively minimum to stand up, using APIs and security best practices.

Most out-of-the-box features are either being utilized or pipelined to be deployed going forward, including MAP, ETHOS, SPERO, Exploit Prevention, SecureX, and Tetra which serves as an offline definition repository for workstation who are unable to pull definition updates using the default Cisco AMP cloud route.

It has been effective as the primary AV tool.

The visibility, dashboard and the navigations gives pretty decent insights into threats, IOCs and endpoint events to help with proactive monitoring. Deployment and connector upgrades are straightforward with available technical documentation for most scenarios.

AMP simplifies endpoint protection, detection, and response workflows, like security investigation, threat hunting, and incident response. By using the solution, we've been able to divert attention towards of the tasks, saving us significant time and effort. It has also served as a one stop shop for endpoint anomaly detection and proactive protection, thwarting the need to gathering inputs from various applications and having to compile that data into one relevant result. It has obviously minimized security risks to the entire business, most importantly, endpoints, servers and other crown-jewel assets. 

Recently, we have engaged the vendor regarding optimization, bug detections and extended features. Identity persistence, a feature request that was recently granted for instance gives virtual and physical devices deployed using gold image the ability specify an Identity Synchronization option. This persistence feature can apply by MAC address across business, by MAC address across policy or by host name across business.  

Speaking of scalability, integrating with other Cisco products, secure email, network, SIEM, API, open source and a number of selected proprietary applications have been encouraging.

Of all valuable features, these are worth mentioning:

- CI/CD pipelining and feature prioritization by actioning on user requests/ identified bugs, releasing connector upgrades, and deploying console upgrades for better usability

- Subscription functionality where console administrators able to Subscribe to receive immediate alerts(digest) on specific or group of monitored workstations

- Identity and access management capability within the console that allow administrators the ability to drill down user visibility on a Role based access control, limiting access to policies, groups, exclusions, and other controls

In terms of operating system compatibility, the coverage is almost in its entirety. Integration and deployment to Windows workstations, Windows servers, Mac, Linux and mobile is seamless

Being a unified AV engine, AMP conveniently delivers both Intrusion detection systems (IDS) and Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) capabilities with a specialty in cloud-delivered protection, next-generation antivirus, endpoint protection platform (EPP), and advanced endpoint detection and response (EDR)

Like any other security tool, there's always rooms for improvement. Some of the ways the product can be improved are:

- Vendor needs to understand a one-size-fits-all approach will not work with addressing TAC cases and service requests. For "once in a blue moon" cases, most approach still sound like the engineers are acting off of a runbook. In this case the recommended solutions will not totally align with the scenario

- Since customers do not have the ability to allow or decline console updates, there have been a number of instances where the console GUI appear buggy and functionalities do not work correctly after an upgrade. This can be improved by informing customers prior to the upgrades.

Other additional features that should be improved in next releases include:

- The dashboard is great for quick visibility prior to deeper dive, however, making the dashboard more customization will improve interaction, grant the ability to filter out irrelevant outputs and encourage personalized drill-downs based on daily requirements

- Integration with enterprise monitoring applications and ticketing systems that differentiates noise, forwards events, generates tickets and have them automatically assigned to application owning group.

I have been using Cisco AMP for Endpoints for about three years, this is inclusive of my prior assignments before being the SME for the application within the firm.

Stability is below average. There have been several issues with frequency of release, feature release and wait time for overhanging time-bombs. 

From a customer stand-point, these released are aimed at fixing known bugs from last release and introducing new features either in beta or live versions. However, this means that an enterprise  running 50K+ endpoints need to go through the rigors of setting up test/dev/qa/pilot then production for iteration, so as to limit the blast radius. 

This can be tasking if as the frequency increases.

Long story short, Cisco AMP is scalable. Having used the product as a 'demanding' customer, I can attest to the availability of proper technical documentation and seamless integration with existing application, infrastructure and appliances 

- Vendor needs to understand a one-size-fits-all approach will not work with addressing TAC cases and service requests. For "once in a blue moon" cases, most approach still sound like the engineers are acting off of a runbook. In this case the recommended solutions will not totally align with the scenario. Also escalations can be more flexible, for instance, certain case priorities (P2, P1) require phoning in, which can be fuel to an already burning bush. 

Neutral

From my understanding, initial setup was tasking with various gray areas. For a new customer trying to set up AMP, there is room for improvement. 

The initial deployment happened prior to me joining the organization, based on my interactions with the application deployment team, the effort took months.

Customers can get better during product's initial setup if vendor provides documentation that suggest important objectives like naming convention, default config and collection of product's best practices

In-house

AMP is worth the money. In recent years, we have spent less time/money and require lesser  human resources for task completion. On the higher level, this has saved the firm the need to hire more security engineers to manage the application, reducing overhead cost.

A discrepancy with  the number of assets per license should be reviewed to apply based on preference or number of endpoints versus ranges.

Compared to other competitors, there's a significant price difference, although different applications tend to focus more on different cybersecurity functionality

It's been really interesting working with the application, going from 5.X.X connector versions up until 7.X.X. As previously highlighted, there are numerous ways to improve the products. Working with the engineers in previous cases, there is the zeal to improve and an attitude that embraces change

We are using it for remote users, and that's our main reason for using it. We have a lot of colleagues who work outside the organization, and they need to connect to the local, on-prem resources for file sharing and other things that we have in our data center. That's it.

It helped to free up our IT staff's time. We don't need to manually check everything in the compliance area. Everything is automated, so we don't need to check all the time. I don't know how much time it has saved, but it helped us a lot.

The VPN is most valuable. It's the best thing in the market today. We can use two-factor authentication with another platform, and we can authenticate with two-factor.

Logging could be better in terms of sending more logs to Cisco Firepower or Cisco ASA. That's an area where it could be made better.

We've been using this solution for five or six years. 

We do not have any challenges, and we are fine with it. We are using it only for external endpoints, and we are very comfortable with it. 

We don't see any difficulty there.

It's very nice. You get feedback very easily. I'd rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

We were using another solution before. We switched because we have Cisco everywhere, and the best way is to go for Cisco for everything. That's our strategic plan.

Its initial setup is straightforward, but I have been working with Cisco products for about 10 years. I have knowledge of how to use it, and it's very easy for us to implement.

The process of migration was easy. We have our own tools to migrate from the old one. In our environment, everything is on-prem, and we also have redundancy for the central equipment.

We implement it ourselves. The number of people required depends on how big the organization is. We are not so big. We are a middle-sized organization, and for our use case, three or four people were involved in the planning and implementation.

We have not seen an ROI.

We had faced some license issues, but it has been improved. At the beginning of the implementation, we faced a lot of licensing issues, but now, we have EA licensing, which gives us an opportunity to grow.

If you have a Cisco environment inside, it's best to have a Cisco solution for the outside. You don't need to use multiple vendors because it can be difficult for them to communicate with each other. Sometimes, there can be difficulties when you have different vendors.

Overall, I'd rate it a seven out of ten.

AMP 4 Endpoints protect our workstation (ca 300), our VDI environment (ca 250), and our servers (ca 50).

The old product was from Trend Micro and was just a simple antivirus solution. It was ok, but it was just an antivirus. We needed something more than just an antivirus that is used by every end-user. We were looking for a tool can we trust, and something that can schedule some things, implement scripts, analyze malware, perform advanced scans, etc. Our company, as an ISP for many customers, has to be protected from vulnerabilities.

First of all, we performed a PoV (Proof of Value) together with our Cisco partners, and we tested about a few months the efficacy and complexity of this product.

After the evaluation of the cost and security that AMP 4 Endpoints could offer, we decided to replace the old solution with AMP 4 Endpoints. The implementation was performed, with support from Cisco partners, in a few hours. In the following days, AMP 4 Endpoints found many things that the old antivirus solution missed. That was a very huge advantage for us.

Since we booked the Premier License, the most valuable features, in my opinion, are

• Secure Threat Hunting to have a specialized team to support in analyzing complex attacks. That could help us to learn about new technics
• Threat Grid with the ability to observe the sandboxing, analyze, and perform investigations of different malicious files. Nobody wants to run a dangerous file in his network, for that Threat Grid is important for us.
  
• Threat Response that offers the possibility of help on logs, IPs, domains, etc. to perform investigations into our and global infrastructure. Sometimes we want to see if a malicious file was run in our network, for that Threat Response take this job to search and save us alot of time.

Actually, we don't need others features or improvements of this product. It is a complex product and offers us exactly what we need - security and trust.

We chose Cisco because we wanted security and trust. That is what we needed from Cisco, and what our customers expected from us.

We are using many Cisco products, and, with every new product, every new feature, the trust in Cisco security is growing.

We think that Cisco covers all of the security aspects on the market. They continue to innovate in the right way.

We have been using the AMP 4 Endpoints in the Test Environment since November 2020 and implemented them in the production environment since March 2021.

We used Trend Micro and when we tested AMP 4 Endpoints we saw its value immediately.

I'd advise users to book the premier license and to have access to all the features that AMp 4 Endpoints has on offer.

There was no other option; we wanted the Cisco solution immediately.

Everything is working fine.

We needed an endpoint security product and this was the one that we chose. We also use Cisco Umbrella, which fits in neatly with the endpoint as endpoints are moving, more and more, out of the office now. Traditionally, it's slightly harder to manage that, so we use Cisco AMP and Umbrella on those endpoints to secure them.

It's almost entirely on-premise. Although there are some small cloud installations where we use it.

The fact that the solution offers cloud-delivered endpoint protection makes it simpler to use. Historically, Cisco's appliances have been relatively expensive and that has been a block to Cisco getting into the SME space, which is our particular focus. Having it cloud-based, where there's no cost, as such, to get the deployment running, has made it easier to sell to small businesses. We've got AMP installations with as few as two users. In the past, with Cisco, we would never have been able to deliver into that size of business without some sort of cloud for delivering it.

It also has a neat web interface that allows us to access it simply and therefore more people are able to manage it, rather than it being a specialist product. We're able to give it to more junior people on the helpdesk and they're able to determine quite quickly and simply what the state of the environment is and, if needed, escalate it to more senior people if they believe there's an issue. That's worked well for us.

We had quite a large client that had a partial AMP installation only covering key assets, and they were hit by ransomware. It was only Cisco AMP that showed where the problems were. The rest of the antivirus that they had across the estate was completely ineffective. AMP was intact and it gave the engineers the vital information they required to remediate the problem. With all attacks what we're interested in is knowing what was "patient zero," where the problem came in, and where it's spread. That can be a challenge sometimes when you've got multiple devices in a network and you're looking across a large number of PCs to work out who was compromised first and, therefore, what the course of action is.

It has decreased our time to remediate. In the scenario of the client that was hit by ransomware, effectively, none of the endpoints were compromised. We were able to detect what the issue was via the AMP client, which discovered and alerted us to what the actual problem was. We then had to do a cleanup process on the remaining. It certainly showed its value to us and the client in that particular incident. It is hard to say how much time it saved us, because in that particular incident they only had a limited deployment. It actually took six man-days to solve the problem, but it didn't affect any of the AMP clients. It arguably could have taken even longer, had they not had AMP deployed on at least some of the assets. It's very simple: If they had had AMP on all of them, they would have probably avoided the problem in the first place. And they certainly wouldn't have needed six days to actually resolve the issue.

Cisco Threat Response accelerates Cisco Umbrella security operation functions. The abilities of Talos are definitely one of the reasons we bought into this as a product. It enables us to react more quickly. We're relying on Cisco providing that updated information in a timely fashion, and that obviously has a knock-on effect on our ability to support our clients if they've been compromised. That ability to push information automatically into Talos and their environment and then prove it's a problem or otherwise, and then update the system automatically, saves us an enormous amount of time. It gives us a lot of confidence in what we do, because Cisco is able to update things and do that part of the function for us, rather than our relying on in-house skills to try to determine what is good and what is bad.

We use it internally, in our business, to secure us, as we are an MSP, which means we are at particular risk. Obviously, we have a duty of care for our clients to ensure that we take the utmost responsibility and steps to secure our businesses and, in turn, secure our clients' businesses. The Cisco suite of security solutions definitely gives us a great deal of comfort that we are doing that. Relying on Cisco for those updates certainly takes a load off my mind, knowing that we've got the backing of Talos across the suite of products. We feel, with all the steps we have taken, that there are very few gaps in our security.

The solution has also made our team more effective by being able to focus on high-value initiatives. We have it integrated into our helpdesk system where it alerts us of things that are of particular concern. That minimizes the amount of time that we're looking at non-threatening situations. A lot of these systems can throw up an awful lot of information and you can end up spending an awful lot of time looking at things that aren't an issue — false positives. If we're able to target things more accurately, it helps us focus that high-cost engineering resource more accurately. It does save time and money.

Cisco AMP has definitely decreased our time to detection, relative to where we were with previous products. Before this type of next-gen solution, we were relying on things like antivirus, which is pretty poor and didn't produce much in the way of protection, certainly around ransomware and other things. We were relying heavily on perimeter protection, like firewalls. That was, of course, completely ineffective when people took their laptops home. The risk was great and we saw more people bringing problems back into the business. The AMP and Umbrella combination has made life a lot more secure and enables us to deliver consistent policy, which is the other important thing. When people are in our building, we've got a reasonably consistent policy because we have greater control. But the minute a person leaves the building and connects via a phone or at an internet cafe, we lose most of the traditional protection we had. The endpoint becomes everything.

The decrease in time to detection has been significant. It's very hard to put a percentage to it because, before it, we were often blissfully unaware that devices had a problem at all. It's given us visibility and we are much more effective. I'm guessing in terms of what it saves time-wise, because it's given us visibility that we otherwise didn't have, but I would say 80 percent, if I had to put a figure on it.

It has a number of valuable features. One of them is its ability to look across the estate. If somebody has been compromised, the question always is: How has it affected other devices in the network? Cisco AMP gives you a very neat view of that.

It has worked well where there have been compromises of clients and the software has automatically sent a sample to Cisco. Cisco has very quickly turned that around and an update has been issued and therefore, within an hour, all the devices are protected against it. We've been quite impressed with that.

We're a Cisco-centric organization. We use things like Cisco FirePOWER, the Next Gen features, as well as Umbrella portal and AMP. We've got a SIEM solution and we see all the events. It gives us a very good overall view of what's going on, very quickly.

We get all the alerts fed in centrally and it enables the security team to act upon them quickly. The alerts seem to be high-quality. We don't get an awful lot of false positives. With the dashboards it's clear, and you can understand quickly where the issues are, with instant responses.

The tools provided by the solution to help you investigate and mitigate threats are very helpful too. I'm the person who manages the engineers, so I don't use it on a day-to-day basis. I use it to get an overall view of, and a feeling for, where our various clients are in terms of issues: How secure they are, whether the engineers have been acting upon threats, etc. But our engineers like the product very much. The ability to detonate a particular problem in a sandbox environment and understand what the effects are, is helpful. We're trying, for example, to determine, when people send information in, if an attachment is legitimate or not. You just have to open it. If you can do that in a secure sandbox environment, that's an invaluable feature. What you would do otherwise would be very risky and tedious.

All our engineers have been very impressed with the features that it delivers and the fact that it has been low impact on the endpoints. It hasn't caused us any problems with performance. Generally, it's a very well-liked product amongst the engineering team.

Some of the dashboards don't always populate with data. Most of them do, but some of them don't. 

Another issue for me, that would be the greatest value of all, would be to make the security into a single pane of glass. Whilst these products are largely integrated from a Talos perspective, they're not integrated from a portal perspective. For example, we have to look at an Umbrella portal and a separate AMP portal. We also have to look at a separate portal for the firewalls. If I could wave a magic wand and have one thing, I would put all the Cisco products into one, simple management portal. If I were Cisco, that would be my greatest focus of all because it would be of such great value if I could give one pane of glass to an engineer and he could look across all the Cisco products. 

The other thing I would say to Cisco is they need to move more to a consumption model like Office 365, because I want to be able to sell it and deploy it by just adding things on to a particular client.

For example, you set a client up on the AMP portal, which I'm looking at as I speak. I have X number of clients. If I need to sell or deploy Umbrella, I've got to go through a completely different process and enter exactly the same sort of thing. I've got to create the client somewhere else, I've got to put the information somewhere else, and I've got to run the deployment from somewhere else. Whereas with the Office 365 model, I'm able to upgrade packages and add features and functionality all from the one place. That is an incredibly powerful selling tool.

The other area for improvement is to make billing simpler. The billing process for us is hard where we've got those two users. We've got to create a separate bill for those clients and we have to create a separate report to Cisco to say that we're billing those clients. Anything they could do to make that billing process more seamless would be of great value. If they could almost automate it, so that it is something that links in with accounts packages to make the billing process neater, it would help promote the sale of it and make it more profitable to sell. If someone deploys AMP For Endpoints on a client, at the moment that process is very disjointed. We've got to do a check once a month to see how many deployments there are relative to last month and, if we had to add one, we not only have to bill an extra one but we also have to buy an extra one from Cisco. And all that is manual.

I have been using Cisco AMP for Endpoints for three years, maybe more.

The stability is very good. We've had no issues with performance or things crashing. That aspect has all been very positive. When doing as much as these products are doing, it can create quite an overhead and take a toll on the performance of PCs, but we have had none of that kind of experience.

We are predominantly a Microsoft environment. I'm aware that it supports Mac, but I don't think we have any installations across Mac environments at the moment. From a Windows standpoint, it works very well. It hasn't caused instability. It hasn't affected performance in a negative way. All those things are really positive, given what it's actually doing.

Without any question it's scalable. We've got it on as few as two, and as many as 250 or so clients. We don't have any questions about scalability.

I've not personally used any support around this solution. I don't think we have needed to from an implementation perspective. It's all gone smoothly.

We used Sophos in the past. We're replacing it, so when the renewals come up we replace Sophos with AMP, wherever possible.

The initial setup is quite simple. We needed a method of delivery and that's the hardest part. But the deployment and the actual tuning of it are relatively minimal, so that has been a good experience. We didn't have to mess about with performance tuning, whereas with other products we have to do quite a lot for excluding this, that, and the other directory, to make sure the performance is reasonable.

If it's a small environment, it's quick to set up because we've got closer management. But in bigger environments, we bump into the challenge — and this is not an AMP issue or an installation issue — of people who are away, or people who haven't restarted their machines. Those sorts of little things tend to be the things that are a little bit more of a pain to get the final installation done. But the rollout of AMP, per se, is quite straightforward. The setup time of AMP isn't an issue and it is quite acceptable. These types of problems would exist with whichever product was chosen.

In terms of an implementation strategy for this product, our security team is very comfortable with rolling it out. The sales process is that we define the client's needs, the number of devices that they intend to secure, and that goes to the security team to coordinate and roll out. That's a reasonably templated process now for us.

In our company, the security team is comprised of four people, and they are the people who primarily look after and manage the products. We also have a deployment team, another three or four people, who are the people that would ultimately push the client out to the various devices that need it.

Certainly, from a protection standpoint, we have seen ROI. It's doing what we want it to do and it's protecting us and the clients who have it installed. Neither they nor we have been compromised and that's the greatest testament of all.

We use the MSP model, so we're able to pay as we go. We report usage based on the actual usage, which is very handy. The old model of Cisco doing it was dated and archaic, and that goes for most of their products. The previous way they did it, which was that you bought something upfront for a certain period, was terrible because of the actual process of updating it. It wouldn't scale down and it was very hard to scale up. When you added users to the system, it wasn't easy to then add licenses to that particular agreement. It was really difficult, in fact; difficult to the point where we stopped selling it in that model, because it was just too problematic.

For example, if we had a user with 10 devices and they bought some more devices, so it went to, say, 15, getting an extra five licenses within their agreement was immensely hard. To me, the only way forward is the MSP model.

We looked at a number of different solutions: Carbon Black, Cylance, Sophos Intercept X and we liked the Cisco AMP solution over those products because it fit in neatly with the rest of the Cisco portfolio. We believe that the management of the various security products fit better with one manufacturer, rather than picking various manufacturers to try and manage a security solution.

The integration of Cisco Threat Response with Cisco Umbrella is getting a lot better. What we like, across the board, is that the solutions are backed by Talos, and Talos is the largest, independent, security-research and threat-hunting organization in the world. We like the fact that the protection is spread across the Cisco environment. That's where this set of products wins when compared to other vendors. It's not that other vendors, like Carbon Black and Cylance, aren't delivering good products. They're just not doing the whole suite. They're not providing the firewall, they're not providing the CASB solution like CloudLock. I'm not sure if they're doing DNS filtering yet; a lot of vendors are catching up on that. But effectively, when you get a known issue, Cisco have the ability to roll it out across a suite of products and therefore you get protection very quickly. So if you discover a problem in Cisco Umbrella, they can update that threat, where need be, in AMP. That's quite a unique selling point for Cisco.

It's very simple to deploy, doesn't cause much in the way of management overhead, and does what it suggests. I would have no hesitation in recommending it. We obviously do, as we're selling it and have been using it for a number of years.