I appreciate the uniformity of being able to push the policies out with Cisco Secure Firewall. That was one of the reasons we acquired it, so we could push the policies out everywhere.

We did consider other solutions before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall. We considered all the big vendors such as Palo Alto, Check Point, Fortinet, and others. Cisco won because it has the best IPS model on it, and that's the reason why we chose this firewall.

Before selecting Cisco Secure Firewall, I considered other solutions such as Palo Alto. That was about it. I was mainly looking at layer seven firewalls. When comparing Cisco Secure Firewall to Palo Alto, what stood out positively was the FMC, which you can buy as either a physical or virtual appliance, allowing for the tying of all your firewalls to it, whereas Palo Alto lacks such functionality or the availability to do deeper analysis such as snort, making it clear that Cisco Secure Firewall wasn't really a competition.

We were using Palo Alto, but we decided to go with Cisco because of its ease of use. We were a Cisco shop, and there's a micro facility where you can migrate all the ASA to the firewall.

The main difference between Cisco and Fortinet is that Cisco will have more flexibility. It's just a matter of being able to put together the flexibility that we require versus what Cisco can provide at this time.

We considered Palo Alto before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall, and we do have some Palo Altos on the network to compare. We're mostly using Cisco products in general. I'm aware Palo Alto is a strong competitor when it comes to firewalls.

Prior to adopting Cisco Secure Firewall, I was also using previous Cisco firewalls, and before that, we had Fortinet and Juniper. The factors that led me to consider the change to Cisco Secure Firewall were actually price, as Cisco's was a very competitive price, and we received a very good deal.

Before selecting Cisco Secure Firewall, I considered Fortinet, which was probably one of the bigger competitors, and SonicWall. We thrive in the Meraki policy. What stood out to me in the evaluation process, compared to other options, was the ease of deployment, the dashboard, being able to manage everything in one place, and Meraki support.

I prefer Cisco since it has been here for a very long time, we have a good relationship with the sales team and Cisco representatives, and the support is pretty good, providing us with 24/7 support, which makes me pretty happy.

What stood out to me about Cisco Secure Firewall that made me choose to use it is that it is intuitive, but I feel it could be improved further in terms of intuitiveness.

Familiarity was the biggest reason for staying with Cisco; everybody knows how to use the Cisco CLI, so it wasn't worth the effort to swap out, as there were no big benefits from other solutions.

When hiring, I find it beneficial that most network engineers are familiar with Cisco, whereas I might question the expertise of those trained with Palo Alto or Fortinet. Performance-wise, Cisco seems to be the best. For instance, my sister company uses Palo Alto and Juniper and reports a high RMA rate. In contrast, we have only RMAed one Cisco Secure Firewall in six years, indicating stability and dependability.

Competitively, Checkpoint is the best, but considering pricing and everything else, Cisco Secure Firewall is also the best product. Cisco Firewall is better in terms of cost and is cheaper; unlike other products, if the license expires, no features work, but Cisco isn't that way. Most of the time, they have perpetual licenses, so that's the best solution customers are looking for.

Before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall, I considered some competitors, as we have other firewalls from different vendors. It is beneficial to use firewalls from different vendors because if someone can overcome one firewall, there is the other firewall for protection.

Before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall, we have a complete Cisco network, so we tried to keep the network together, completely Cisco. Therefore, there were no other solutions, as we did not use one before and we did not consider different options.

The only real benefit I realize from using Cisco Secure Firewall in this use case is that it's a different vendor, so a different attack vector.

I evaluated basically the new solution from Pulse Secure, which is now called Ivanti. The reason we chose Cisco Secure Firewall was more or less politics because Ivanti didn't have the hardware, and they will not have the hardware in the foreseeable future. So we went with the only one who was able to provide it to us.

We did consider another solution before selecting Cisco Secure Firewall. However, we did not want to have that many vendors in the enterprise.

Cisco Secure Firewall excels on the perimeter; however, the biggest area where you can see the difference between Cisco and other vendors is actually in the data center. One of the main features I appreciate is the cloud management, which we have had for approximately one year.

I chose Cisco first of all for the partner and then second of all for the pricing. The pricing was good enough to convince me to go ahead with Cisco because Cisco is a well-known brand all over the world, which I couldn't say from other OT vendors such as Moxa or Teltonika. That is why I chose Cisco.

I don't think there is anything competing on the market at the moment. There is nothing competing on the market, so I have given Cisco Secure Firewall an overall rating of ten.

Cisco Secure Firewall's use case in our organization is justified because we operate in the financial industry where security best practices require multi-vendor products. We are running other vendors' solutions as well, and since Cisco is a prominent and one of the best vendors in the market, we opted for Cisco Secure Firewall. Both solutions serve our security requirements effectively.

They picked Cisco Secure Firewall mainly for the FTD and superior Cisco support, which was the main deciding factor.

"If you want to incorporate FTD with another Cisco product, then you need to go with Cisco to have the full ecosystem. Since we do not have that requirement, we are going to another vendor, which is definitely easier to handle."

Companies are always looking for security. If needing to have a secure firewall with high throughput and heavy-duty devices, we always have to choose Cisco devices because the reality of these devices may be better than any other vendor. Other vendors are very good also, but sometimes Cisco is more flexible than others.

The simplicity of using these features is the key point. The URL filtering and threat prevention features in Cisco Secure Firewall are very nice, simple, and easy to configure and apply to our network.

Some differences from a technical standpoint are that Cisco is more professional in creating and applying rules on devices and integrating with other infrastructure, particularly routers. If I wanted to integrate access points and switches with Sophos or FortiGate, I would have to purchase the same brand name from those vendors and not integrate with others. This is a significant limitation. With Cisco, I do not have to purchase everything from a single partner and can mix between providers to take advantage of each product's benefits.

Generally, where it sits in my network, there are other vendors as well, but Cisco Secure Firewall is a better product and easier to manage than those alternatives. It does more of the features that I want it to do to be more secure, and I will move the other vendors into Cisco Secure Firewall.

Cisco has been in existence for a while compared to other firewalling devices, which makes it more expensive. It is very easy to use, especially when you have hands-on experience with any of Cisco's devices before. You do not even need to probably take higher professional courses before you can manage it, especially if you can learn easily.

I switched to Cisco Secure Firewall to get very good IPS signatures and next-generation IPS; that is a market leader from Cisco.