Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

Our main use case for Cisco Secure Firewall is helping clients who want to upgrade from an old firewall and move to a next-generation firewall. We also get a lot of clients who have a next-generation firewall provider, but the firewall is not up to the task. It doesn't have all the feature sets that they need, and Cisco Secure Firewall ticks those boxes.

Cisco Secure Firewall has improved our customers' security posture because it offers Next-Gen features, granularity, and reporting on the back of it. You can see the amount of users accessing Office 365, for example, and whether they're having a good or bad experience. You can see the threats that come into your network. You can see anyone who is compromised from within your network.

If customers already have Cisco solutions such as Cisco ISE, Duo, Umbrella, and Endpoint, Cisco Secure Firewall will integrate well with all of them. Our clients will be able to get more data and automate tasks. They can have Secure Firewall automatically shut things down if a threat is detected.

Without a doubt, the best features are the reporting and analytics. Some vendors provide the same feature set, but their product won't give you the power to figure out what's going on in your network. Whereas with Cisco Secure Firewall, especially with the management platform on top, you can have all of the analytics and see exactly what is going on. You can see not only the source and destination but also the application, the URL, the type of policy it's hitting, the specific rule it's hitting, and the amount of data transferred from it. Apart from that, you get all of the risk reports. You can see how much bad stuff is coming into the network at present and whether there's anything you need to act on immediately. That data is at your fingertips, and it's by far the best feature and the best selling point of Cisco Secure Firewall.

Cisco Secure Firewall has reduced our clients' mean time to repair because they are able to find possible issues quickly. The power of the reporting, the dashboards, and all of the analytics in the background also helps to alert and quickly act on the threat.

My impression of Cisco Talos is that it's well-regarded in the industry. Cisco is so well regarded that we know their security intelligence is up-to-date. Our clients have peace of mind because they have Cisco Talos in the background and know that Cisco Secure Firewall is up-to-date with the latest threats. They can be sure that they're acting on the best available data.

I would like to see more configurable feature parity with Cisco ASA, which is the legacy product that Cisco is moving away from. When configuring remote access VPN, not all of the options are there. You have to download another tool, which means that the configuration takes a little bit longer with Cisco Secure Firewall. Though it's getting there, there are still some features lagging behind.

We've been offering Cisco Secure Firewall since its first iteration 10 years ago.

We are resellers, and the value we add to our customers as resellers is our knowledge. We have 10 years' worth of experience deploying Cisco Secure Firewall. We can deploy it the correct way. We also know whether you would need the management platform, the level of licensing you may require, and the number of VPN licenses you may need. We add value by knowing how the solution should be deployed and installed in a network.

Secure Firewall's stability is good. I think the management platform needs a little bit of work. It's not as robust from a stability point of view. Deployment times of configuration have got better over the years, but there's still some work needed so that it deploys every time when you click that button.

The scalability of Cisco Secure Firewall is really good. That's down to the management platform and the way it structures your access policies, what allows traffic in and what allows traffic out. You can easily add multiple regions, locations, and types of firewalls to the management platform. As soon as you do, they get all of those policies. Previously, you'd have had to configure each one time and time again. With this version, you import it, and it's ready to go. Thus, for scalability it's easy.

Cisco's technical support across all their products is always good and reliable. If someone says they're going to get back to you in four hours, they do. They're always there with the right level of support. If we need a Secure Firewall engineer, that's whom we'll get. We won't get someone who's never seen the product before. As far as vendors go, Cisco's technical support is probably the gold standard. I would rate them at ten out of ten.

Secure Firewall is more complex to deploy than previous Cisco Firewall products. However, it's not so complex that it's not achievable. There are some products out there that require a lot of reading to be able to deploy them. Cisco Secure Firewall has not reached that level yet, but it is a complex product.

Our clients' Secure Firewall deployment models are edge firewalls, internal firewalls, and, most often, perimeter firewalls. Sometimes, our clients ask us to help them with deployment because we have the experience.

We've used the Cisco Firewall migration tool quite a few times to migrate to Cisco Secure Firewall. It has come on a long way, and it's a lot better than it used to be. When it initially came in, there wasn't as much trust that the tool would give you everything you needed, but where it is now is great. If you've got a firewall that you want to migrate, you'll feel confident using the Cisco Firewall migration tool.

We spend a lot of time developing our consultants and our sales staff to know the product and learn how to sell the product. As a result, our ROI is that we get more clients deploying Cisco Secure Firewall.

The licensing is not as complicated as that for some other Cisco products. There are a couple of tiers of licensing, but the price point is a little too high for the market. There are other vendors that come in lower and offer more for fewer licensing options. They may offer URL filtering or malware filtering with a single license rather than requiring two or three licenses. I think Cisco could do a bit more in this area.

I deal with a lot of other vendors who also offer the same features, but Cisco Secure Firewall stands out on the analytics. It is the best for analytics and getting the reporting data.

If you're a client evaluating Cisco Secure Firewall, my advice would be to put real-world data through it to get useful data out of it. You can't see the benefits of the solution if you just turn it on and look at the device as it is. It's when you see the traffic going through it that you'll see the power of the analytics and reporting and the event data that comes through. A technical team member will understand how much easier it's going to be to troubleshoot with this platform compared to that with any other platform they've had before. With regard to reporting, a report on how many malware attacks have occurred in a particular month takes one click to generate. That data can be stored for a long time.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten because of the feature parity. It's not quite there in terms of being able to do everything on the GUI platform. The price point is still a bit too high as well.

Our primary use case for Cisco Secure is through Cisco FMC, which we have automated using Cisco's Terraform provider for FMC. Our automation journey began with the Cisco ACI fabric, where we leveraged the Terraform provider for ACI. Eventually, we realized we could also automate firewalls and our HA clusters using the Terraform provider for FMC. This allowed us to create DMZ networks, specify IPS and IDS rules, and follow the infrastructure as a code concept. Our cross-common security team can review the repository in GitLab and approve it with a simple click of a button. This is the primary benefit we get from automation. Additionally, we can use the infrastructure as a code concept with the management center. Cisco FMC also has a great API, which makes it easy to integrate with our code, ACI, and other systems.

Cisco Security and Cisco Firewalls have been effective in protecting our organization from external threats, such as DDoS attacks.

We have several integrations. One of them is between Cisco ISE and FMC, which allows us to monitor and control our users. Additionally, we integrated Cisco ISE with FTDs to function as a remote VPN server and control the traffic and behavior in our VPN network. We also use ISE as a TACAC server and integrated it with Cisco ACI and all of our devices. Furthermore, we use NetBox as a source of truth for our ISE, which helps us track all of our devices from the network and ISE.

The primary benefits of using Cisco Secure solutions are time-saving, a robust API, and convenience for the security team. 

Cisco Secure Firewall could benefit from enhancements in its API, documentation, and automation tools. Additionally, we've noticed that the Terraform provider for FMC has only two stars, few contributors, and hasn't been updated in a year. It only has 15 to 20 resources, which limits our capabilities. We'd love to update it and add more resources. For example, we currently can't create sub-interfaces with the provider, so we have to add Python code to our Terraform provider and use local provisioners. Additionally, improvement in the API would be helpful so that we can create ACL on the GUI with a simple click, but at this time we cannot create requests via the API.

I have used Cisco Secure Firewall within the last 12 months.

Cisco TAC support is excellent. Having worked with other support companies in the past. Cisco TAC is much more helpful and friendly. They always seem eager to assist with any issues and are particularly responsive in urgent situations. For example, if there is a problem in my production zone, they are quick to reassure and assist. Overall, I have a great appreciation for their support.

I rate the support from Cisco Secure a ten out of ten.

Positive

In our business, we have implemented a number of Cisco Secure products in our network infrastructure, including Cisco ISE as a AAA server, Cisco FMC Management Center for our firewalls, and Cisco FTD for Firepower Threat Defenses. We also use a TACACS+ server for our hardware. Cisco products make up the entirety of our infrastructure, including Cisco Nexus Switches, Cisco ACI fabric for our data centers, Cisco ASR Routers, and Cisco Wireless Solutions, which include WLC controllers, access points, and other relevant hardware. In our organization, Cisco is strongly preferred.

There has been a positive return on investment observed with the implementation of Cisco Secure solutions. The use of these solutions as our primary security products has been beneficial in terms of cost and security measures.

In the past, I encountered several difficulties and misunderstandings with Cisco licensing, but now the situation has improved. The Cisco Smart Software portal is an excellent resource for keeping track of, upgrading, and researching information related to Smart Licensing and other relevant topics. It is extremely helpful. Unfortunately, since it is not my money and there is only one vendor, I am unable to provide any comments on the prices. Nevertheless, the system, along with its provision through the Cisco Smart Software portal, as well as the traditional license and subscription models, are excellent and highly beneficial.

I rate Cisco Secure a seven out of ten.

My rating of seven out of ten for the Cisco Secure is because it's not excellent, but not poor either. It was enjoyable and overall satisfactory.

We use WSA proxy and Cisco Firepowers with the FMC suite and Cisco Umbrella. We mainly use WSAP for on-premises data centers to get traffic outbound to the internet. Cisco Umbrella is for our endpoints, and Cisco firewalls are to protect our perimeter but also internal choke points to secure segments on our LAN.

Currently, we don't have any integrations between the three of them. They all run in isolation. 

Our external partner does the day-to-day management. We are not using it on a day-to-day basis. We position the products from within my team, but the detection mechanism is different per platform. We mainly trust the policy, and our security department is checking logs for anomalies in the patterns.

In terms of cost savings, we've been using this mechanism for years on end, so we haven't been able to see a real cost reduction between using our own personnel versus our external partner for management. It has been like that for 10 years or so.

In terms of time savings, it doesn't put too much burden on day-to-day activities to go over the details. The policies are rather straightforward, and anything not configured is not allowed. In that sense, it's easy.

Protecting our landscape in general and being able to see logging when things aren't going as set out in policies are valuable features. Our security department is keen on seeing the logging. 

If WSAP remains to be an active product, it might be an idea to integrate the configuration policy logic between Umbrella and WSAP. There should be one platform to manage both.

The integration between the on-prem proxy world and the cloud proxy would benefit us. One single policy setting would make sense.

That's great. Sometimes, you need to be clear on the severity levels, but once determined, we have a good experience with tech support.

Positive

That was long ago, but we had Blue Coat proxies before. We switched because of our strategy to go for Cisco as an ecosystem.

We chose Cisco products because we have a Cisco-first strategy. We typically check first with the Cisco product portfolio and then make up our minds. Historically speaking, it serves our interests best.

I am not involved firsthand in its deployment. We have an oversight role within our company, so we ask our external supplier to do the implementation, and when needed, to have it validated via Cisco, but I've no real hands-on experience.

I would expect that we have seen an ROI because our sourcing department would make sure we get the best price for the solution.

Licensing is quite difficult to get your head around. My biggest challenge is to understand the details, the inner relations. Luckily, to some extent, we have enterprise agreements, but licensing for me is a real black box.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

We started with the old ASA 5510 and migrated to Firepower, first using ASA as the basic operating system. Lately, we've been using FTD because it simplifies operations a lot. We are a very small networking team, and being able to push one policy to many firewalls eases our workload.

We are a global company, and we don't always have IT staff in all corners of the world. Therefore, having one place to do everything is very nice.

Cisco Secure Firewall has made it easier so that more than one person can handle things. We are able to have a bigger team that can handle simple tasks and have a smaller team focus on the deep-dive needs.

We have the same basic policies everywhere now, which makes it more flexible for us to manage.

I like the central management and IPS features. Having everything in one place is very valuable.

Cisco Secure Firewall is very good at detecting threats. We see a lot getting blocked by the IPS in our DMZ, that is, our internet-facing web service.

It helped free up IT staff time. Before, we would have to manually configure every single firewall. Every time we configure something on a firewall, it takes five to ten minutes, and we have more than 50 firewalls around the globe. We do changes every week, and the automated policy and upgrades saved us a lot of time.

In terms of the organization, we have been able to save time by getting things out faster. However, the only downside is that the policy push takes quite a while. Thus, a quick fix still takes at least 15 minutes, and troubleshooting can take time as well.

Some of our problems are related to software updates in remote sites where the internet connection is not stable. Sometimes, the image push just gets disrupted and fails.

The most annoying thing is having to replace the hardware so often. It's very difficult for us to do.

The integration between different tools could be improved. For example, with SecureX, I am yet to find out how to forward security events to different tools such as Microsoft Sentinel, which is what we use for log detection.

We've been using Cisco Secure Firewalls for a very long time.

We had to get in touch with technical support a few times, and our experience was good. I would give them a rating of nine out of ten. 

Positive

The initial deployment is easy, and I have not had any issues.

The solution is deployed on-premises. We have an on-premises FMC that connects everything.

The cost of the firewalls versus the ROI is okay.

We are quite Cisco-centric because of the performance we get for the price range. We have a lot of smaller sites, and we are not a very big organization. The price fits us perfectly.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall at nine on a scale from one to ten.

We use Cisco ASA and Firepower.

ASA is used for AnyConnect connections, that is, for users to connect to the office. It is very reliable and works fine.

We use Firepower in some sites as firewalls to control inbound/outbound access. We use it as a software protection layer. However, because most users are now working from home, few users need it in the office. As a result, in some places, we have switched to SD-WAN.

The network products help save time if they are well configured at the beginning. They help increase security and protect the company's data.

Firepower's user experience should be a little bit better.

I've been using Cisco Firepower for six months.

There are some hiccups here and there, but compared to the technical support from other vendors, I have had the best experience with Cisco's technical support. I would rate them at nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was somewhat easy because we had previous experience with implementation. We copied that strategy or tried to align it to that implementation, but there were some challenges.

We have a hybrid cloud deployment. We have our own data centers and a lot of branches. In the data centers, most Cisco technologies start with ACI. With firewalls for big branches, we find that it's easier to break out to the internet globally rather than to use data centers.

Cisco's prices are more or less comparable to those of other products.

Compared to other vendors' firewalls, Cisco's firewalls are a bit behind. Overall, however, I would rate Cisco Firewall at eight on a scale from one to ten.

The main use cases are firewalling, routing, site-to-site VPN, and remote access. We have some older 5585-X ASAs in place. We do have Firepower 2000 Series and 4000 Series. 

For most setups, we do have high availability in place. We've at least two devices in active-active or active-standby. If it's a highly secure setup, we sometimes have two firewalls.

Cisco has a huge variety of products and features. It's a benefit to have the knowledge of all those things and also put it in the firewalling products. The knowledge that comes from other products or solutions that Cisco is selling is finding a place in security as well, and that's one of the key benefits.

There are time savings when you have a good solution in place for stopping or preventing security risks. In general, it isn't saving me time on a daily basis, but there is peace of mind knowing that you are being protected.

Basic firewalling is obviously the most valuable. In addition to that, secure access and remote access are also very useful for us. When COVID came, a lot of people had to stay at home, and that was the basic use case for having remote access.

One con of Cisco Secure Firewalls is that Java is used a lot for the older generation of these firewalls. Java is used for the ASA and the ASDM tool for administration. It's an outdated way of administering, and it's also a security risk to use this kind of solution. This is a pro of Firepower or the newer generation of firewalls because they are using HTML for administration.

In general, they can make it easier to manage the solutions. They can make it easier in terms of administration and provide a single tool for different firewalling solutions. They have different tools to manage different firewalls, such as Firepower or ASA. Sometimes, both are on the same thing. You have ASA with Firepower modules, so you manage some of the things via HTML, and then you manage some of the things via another management tool. It's not seamless. It should be bundled together in one solution.

I have been using this solution for six to seven years.

They have been very stable. I did not have any cases where a network was down due to firewalling. Fortunately, I did not have any hacker attacks, but that's being lucky. It's not something I would point out to firewalling or configuration. It's just that sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not.

It's very scalable. Cisco is for mid to large businesses. For small businesses, there are solutions that are cheaper, but that's not the main focus. 

A large environment comprises several thousand users. We have small to large size environments, but we mostly have mid to large.

Cisco's tech support is good in general. It varies and depends on with whom you're speaking and how the knowledge on the other side is. That's basically the same for our company. I'd rate them an eight out of ten. A ten would be perfect, and no one is perfect. You can reach maybe a nine, but no one can reach a ten.

Positive

For more security, we sometimes have two firewalls. We have other vendors in place, such as FortiGate or Palo Alto. We have Cisco at the front or at the end, and another vendor on the other side so that there is more security, and if there is a security breach in one solution, we still have the other one. These firewalls differ mostly in administration and how you configure things but not so much in terms of features. They may differ in small things, but in the end, they are all doing the same things.

I deploy and manage them afterward. I'm not only in the designing and implementing; I'm also in the operational business. Its deployment is not more complicated than other solutions. It's fine. When it comes to documentation, in general, Cisco is very good.

We mostly try to do it ourselves. Our approach is to have knowledge or any certification of the topic we are trying to take.

I'm not a salesperson. I'm more from the technical perspective, and I don't know if there are any savings at the end, but I believe that all that was bought in the past was used the way we wanted it to use. So, the money was well spent.

Licensing is not only for Secure Firewalls, and it's too complicated.

To someone evaluating or considering Cisco Secure Firewall, I'd advise having a good greenfield approach regarding what component to use. If there is no greenfield, you should evaluate what solutions you need and what type of use case you have and then decide based on that.

I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten. Cisco is a big player in networking and security, and that's basically the pro on their side.

It is primarily our VPN solution. Initially, it was used in our firewalling. Then, we transitioned it into just our standalone VPN service for the company.

It is on-prem. We have it in two different data centers: our main data center and our backup data center.

With what is going on in the world, e.g., hybrid work and work from home, and everything that happened, VPN was everything to us. Without it, we wouldn't have been able to operate.

Typically, before COVID hit, we were a very much work-in-the-office type of environment with five to 10 people on our VPN solution. We quickly ramped up to 500 people when COVID happened, which is the majority of our full-time users. Onboarding our entire company onto this solution was pretty cool.

It is very good at what it does. It is a very dependable, long-standing product that you can trust. You know exactly how it works. It has been in the market for a lot longer than I have. So, it is great at its core functionality.

We are still running the original ASAs. The software that you are running for the ASDM software and Java application has never been a lot of fun to operate. It would have been nice to see that change update be redesigned with modern systems, which don't play nicely with Java sometimes. Cybersecurity doesn't seem to love how that operates. For us, a fresher application, taking advantage of the hardware, would have been a better approach.

I have been with the company for seven years, and we have had it the entire time. Cisco Advanced Services came in in 2013, which was two years before I joined. They did a deployment and installed it then.

There is your regular day-to-day maintenance, e.g., the patches and updates. Because it sits at the edge, it is exposed to the world. With threats always being of concern, you often have to patch and update. However, it is nothing more than regular maintenance

We have never had to ramp up more than a small- to medium-business use case. For that, it has been great. Limitation-wise, we would run into challenges if we ever hit 2,000 to 2,500 users. We would then have to move onto hardware. Its scalability is only limited by the size of the appliance. So, if you ever have to exceed that, then you just have to buy a new box.

ASA has always been great because it has been such a longstanding product. There is a lot of knowledge in-house with Cisco. I always know if we call to get help, it is great. I do wonder in the future, as the product gets close to the end of its life, if those people will move onto other things and it gets lost a bit. However, it has always been easy enough to find that help.

For the ASA specifically, probably nine.

Positive

We were just looking for a different feature set. We found that ASA was rock-solid as a VPN piece. We wanted to separate the VPN from our firewall policy management, so we just moved it over to VPN as a solution.

We had a partnership with Cisco. They came in and redid the entire environment. Before that, there was no Cisco environment whatsoever. So, they came in with the Nexus switching and Catalyst Wireless solution, then the VPN came with that as well as the ASA.

I have never found it hard to deploy. We didn't have a BCP solution set up as our secondary when COVID hit, which was something that we had to scramble to put together. However, it was something like a couple of days' work. It wasn't really a big deal or really complicated. It was a fairly straightforward system to separate and manage.

It brings us the ability to work from anywhere and has allowed us to work remotely without having to incur a lot of other costs. If we didn't have this type of solution, since we have so many on-prem services that are required, we would have likely lost money and been unable to deliver. We have a video services team who helped build the content for our sporting events. When you are watching a Leaf game and those swipes come by as well as the clips and things, those are all generated in-house. Without the ability to access our on-premise resources, we would have been dead in the water. So, the return on that is pretty impressive.

We integrate it with our ISE solution, TACACS+, etc. We have a Windows NPS server for MFA through Azure. We don't have any challenges with it. It has always worked well. I can't think of a time when we have ever had problems with either of those things. It has worked just fine.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

I'm a solution architect specializing in IT infrastructure designs. I create solutions for clients using Cisco and other products. I've developed solutions with various Cisco Firewall models. I may use an entry-level solution for smaller businesses, like the Cisco 555 Series or 5500. If it's a large enterprise, I may use the 4000 Series, or an ISR router integrated with a firewall for a branch office, and maybe an ISR router, which is integrated with the firewall.

I work with businesses of all sizes, but I see Cisco more often in medium-sized companies or large enterprises. Small businesses often pick Sophos or FortiGate because of the pricing. Large enterprises use Cisco and other products like Palo Alto or Check Point, especially for managing cloud architectures like GCP and AWS. 

If the customer only needs a plain firewall, Cisco ASA is sufficient. It can compete with FortiGate or Sophos. When I talk about a next-gen firewall, the basics include malware protection, instruction prevention, URL filtering, etc. Firepower is integrated to address these next-gen requirements. 

I may use the tabs for dynamic policy implementation in cloud environments depending on the clients' needs, but not typically VMware. I might get a false positive with the VMware operator and platform layer. If I stop some surveys, my production will stop. In such cases, I cannot just go by dynamic classification blindly. It would be better for the application layer, not the platform layer.

I don't have any metrics about how ASA has improved operations for my clients, but I can look at their market share relative to Check Point and other competitors. Cisco has a decent footprint today, and it reduced my customers' CapEx. I don't have the numbers. I'm just speaking relatively. Cisco can reduce operational expenditures by around 40 percent. I'm just giving a vague estimate, but I don't have any specific metrics.

Cisco offers two architectures. I can choose the Meraki track if I want an OpEx model or the traditional track, which is a CapEx model. Due to Cisco's tech acquisitions, I have various feature options within the same product. The DNA of Cisco combines the traditional Cisco architecture with the next-generation firewall.

Segmentation can be helpful for some clients. Let's use a financial organization as an example. We have traffic moving through the branch to the core banking. This is where we can employ segmentation. We can do security policy restrictions for branch employees to prevent them from accessing certain financial reporting systems. We can limit them to the branch level. 

I can enforce certain policies to prevent all branch traffic from reaching one layer of a particular segment by minimizing the overall traffic on the network. I can always control the traffic when I segment it. This set of capabilities is beneficial when a lot of financial algorithms are done.

ASA integrates with Firepower, IPS functionality, malware filtering, etc. This functionality wasn't there in the past. With its cloud architecture, Cisco can filter traffic at the engine layer. Evasive encryptions can be entered into the application, like BitTorrent or Skype. This wasn't possible to control through a traditional firewall. 

Deep Packet Inspection looks at the header information and inspects the contents of a particular packet. We can also look at traffic management. It can control end-user applications, and we can check device performance when we do this type of regression on our resources. This is what we look at with a DPI. It can help us reduce the overall OpEx and CapEx.

Traditionally, we needed multiple software and hardware tools. With these features, we can snoop into our network and understand each packet at a header level. That's called the service control engine.

Within Cisco's Service Control Engine Architecture, there's something called the Preferred Architecture, which has a supervisor engine. It's more of a network management tool. Cisco makes it more convenient to manage our resources. It has a nice UI, or we can go into the command-line level. 

Cisco's micro-segmentation features are helpful for access control layers and virtual LAN policy enforcement. That's how we segregate it. Micro-segmentation is focused on the application layer. When we design a policy that is more automated or granular, and we have a specific business requirement, we get into micro-segmentation. Otherwise, the majority of the implementation will be generic network segmentation.

Dynamic classification is also essential given the current security risks and the attacks. We cannot wait for it to tell us if it's a false positive or a real threat. In those cases, dynamic classification is essential, especially at a MAC level.
When using WiFi, we may have a suspicious guest, and we cannot wait for someone to stop it manually. The firewall needs to at least block the traffic and send an alert.

In cases like these, integration with Cisco ISE is handy. If the firewall alone doesn't help, you must redesign your architecture to include various associated products as you increase your requirements. For example, you may have to get into multiple servers, so you'll need an ISE for identity management. 

As you start scaling up your requirements, you go beyond a firewall. You start from an L1 layer and go to the L7 sitting at the organization's gateway. When you talk about dynamic policy implementation, that's where you start to get serious about your operations and can change things suddenly when an attack is happening.

With ISE integration, you get another dynamic classification if an endpoint connects immediately. ISE has a lot of authorization rules, so it applies a filter. The dynamic policy capabilities enable tighter integration at the application workload level. Snort 3 IPS enables you to run more rules without sacrificing performance, and IPS puts you one step ahead of any threats to the organization.

There are some limitations with SSL. Regarding the security assessment for the ISO 27000 standard, there are certain features that Cisco needs to scale up. Not all products support it, so we need to be slightly careful, especially on the site track. 

We face challenges with Cisco when implementing some security vulnerability assessments, including the algorithms and implementing SSL 3.0. I may change the entire product line because traditional product lines don't support that.

Integration isn't typically a problem because the network is compatible, but Cisco could upgrade the threat database. They could integrate the threat database of the on-premise firewall with the cloud. Check Point has cloud integration with a market database of all the vulnerabilities. Cisco could add this to its roadmap to make the product more effective.

I have been working with firewalls for about 20 to 25 years, but I've been using Cisco for around 12 to 15 years.

Cisco ASA Firewall is reliable, especially in the Indian context. For example, I had a couple of banks with around 5,000 branches and ATMs. It was easy to deploy remotely or send it to each branch. 

Cisco ASA Firewall is scalable to a certain extent.

Cisco support is okay, but not great. I rate Cisco support five out of ten. The response time is too long. We need an instant response to security issues. They follow some legacy processes.

In some cases, I think they're good, but they have hundreds of questions and steps to go through before the ticket is escalated. The local partner adds a lot of value in that case.

Neutral

The standard setup is straightforward and takes around four hours. You can also do more customization and adjustments to deploy it in a particular environment.
I design a custom implementation strategy for each customer. It depends on whether I'm migrating an existing environment or doing a fresh deployment. I try to understand the customer's security footprint and all the issues I need to address before installation. 

I think Cisco's price is in the right space now. They have discounts for customers at various levels. I think they're in the right spot. However, Cisco can be expensive when you factor in these additional features. 

If you add SecureX, Cisco's cost will definitely jump. We started with the standard ASA, then we added segmentation and micro-segmentation, and now we're talking about automation and unified architecture. SecureX is an integrated security portfolio. It gives a vertical and 360-degree algorithm with an open, integrated platform that can scale.

In most next-generation products, the UA itself will manage a lot of things, but it's easier to find people with expertise. If you put 10 firewall experts in the room, six will be talking about Cisco, but you can hardly find one or two people talking about Check Point or Palo Alto. Others would be more talking about Sophos, FortiGate, etc.

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall seven out of ten. If you're implementing a Cisco firewall, you must be crystal clear about your business requirements and how a Cisco ASA firewall will address your problem. You need to understand whether this product line contains all the features you need. 

Can it pass a security audit? Does it integrate with your network device? How scalable is it? Will this solution you're implementing today be adequate in the next three years? These are the questions that you should ask.

We are an insurance company. The core of what we do is service. We manage people and security. We have all the implementation for security. 

We have one ERP running on-prem and another one is running on the GCP cloud. We have a cloud service that runs that ERP on GCP. Our other service is running with Microsoft 365. So, we have an in-house AD that syncs with the cloud AD, but it is the firewall that is managing the communication process in between. The on-prem AD sync with the cloud AD is managed by the firewall. It is like a gateway. 

A vendor implemented this system for us to use and manage the process. We have an integration with the GCP. We've integrated this system with our network in such a way that you cannot access the GCP applications or infrastructure if you are not on-premises. This integration with the GCP and our virtual network online has been done locally.

In general, the management of our infrastructure is now easy. I can manage remotely. I can manage on-prem. I can always log in. I have a couple of users who work remotely via VPN because of the license. Not everybody works remotely in my organization. For people who work remotely, we have licenses for them to log in remotely from where they are and use the service. So, managing people, resources, and devices is easy. It has been a good experience. I don't intend to change it because it's giving me the service I need.

In terms of money, it has saved a lot of money. A lot of other organizations that don't have this kind of easy-to-manage layer of security are going through different kinds of attacks. We have a culture of being careful, even though you cannot be a hundred percent careful. When I hear that people have some security issues, I come and check my devices, and I notice that my firewall has actually blocked a lot of things. It gives me rest and peace. So, it saves a lot when you consider the cost of the organization's operations going down, even for one, two, or three hours. We would lose a lot if that happens. It probably saves us over a million dollars a year. The investment is totally worth it.

Our network is a little bit flat. We have a load balancer before getting into our network. We have configured the load balancer on the device itself. We have two major service providers. We have a core business application, and there are some people who use the core business application. We also have some light users. We have set up criteria to give priority to the people who use the core business application. I have a provider that gives me 300 MB to 500 MB, and I have another provider that gives me 20 MB to 25 MB as a backup. I have set priority based on the usage. If you're using the core business application, it pushes you to the fast network. Otherwise, it sends you to the other network. All that has been done on the firewall. It has been very good for this. I have no complaints.

It enables us to implement dynamic policies for dynamic environments, which is important for us. We can control the network based on different kinds of users. We can quickly and easily define the policies. We can set priorities based on different applications, systems, and users on our network.

Its security and filtering are most valuable. Every layer of data that comes into the organization goes through it. After setting up the criteria, it automatically filters the traffic. We don't have to check it often. Sometimes, when users complain that they are not able to see a particular thing, we log in to check the scan and see what it has scanned and filtered. It is usually something it has filtered out. It works perfectly.

It is easy to use. There is a GUI, and there is a backend that is being managed by our consultant. When we log in to the GUI, we are able to do anything we want to do. Its user interface is good, but it could be better. Currently, you have to know what to do before you can manage a device. If you don't know what to do, you can mess things up. There are some devices that are easier, such as FortiGate. The user interface of FortiGate is more intuitive. It is very easy to log in and configure things. With Cisco, there is also a lower limit on virtual accounts. In FortiGate, they could be in thousands. Cisco is also more expensive. 

I have been using this solution for about three to four years.

It is very stable. I've not had any thought of reconfiguring it. I have just applied my criteria, and I'm good.

Scalability is not a problem because I still have a span of five to seven more years. After that, I might have to go for a bigger device. For now, I have no issues. I can scale up or down. I'm good with that.

Their support is very good. We had an issue where the OS got corrupted. We got Cisco to log in. They did the reset on it, reformatted it, and sent it back to us. Because of the subscription we have with Cisco, we got a copy back in no time. We're now good. We've not been calling their tech support very often. We only call them when we have a very serious issue. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

It wasn't simple. Its implementation doesn't take much time, but we had to get a consultant in. Implementing a Cisco solution from scratch is harder than implementing FortiGate. With FortiGate, I can do my implementation and put all the criteria easily, but with Cisco, I need to do a lot more research, and I need to get someone to help me, but after implementation, it just works.

We had a consultant from a local vendor here called Incognito. Our experience with him was good. I can refer him to anybody.

When we have issues and we need improvement, he comes in. There was a time we noticed that we had lag on our network. We were trying to figure out the cause for it. We were using two service providers but the same backbone. We called him to make the required modifications.

It is more expensive than the other solutions. 

I'm the CIO here. When I came here, I did an audit of the IT infrastructure to see what was there. I looked at what was existing and thought of improvement. I got in all the vendors and had a meeting with them. I also got in a Cisco vendor and sat down with him and told him about the implementation I wanted. Because of the cost, I didn't change any equipment. So, he did the implementation. At any other place, I would look at the users and implement what is easy for them to manage. For a big enterprise with a whole crew, I would definitely consider Cisco. For any other place, I would go for Fortinet. Cisco is harder to implement and manage, but its stability is good. It is also more expensive. There are other cheaper solutions I would have gone for, but I had to focus on what was existing and improve. I had to make sure I worked with what was existing. We also have Cisco switches.

What it's been configured to do, it does it well. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We have multiple use cases for Cisco Firepower. We have two types of use cases:

• Protect the perimeter of the enterprise.
• Inter-VRF zoning and routing. 

The goal is to have some Firewall protection with a Layer 7 features, like URL filtering, IPS, malware at the perimeter level as well as inspecting the traffic going through that firewall, because all traffic is encrypted. We want visibility, ensuring that we can protect ourselves as much as we can.

In production, I am currently using Cisco Firepower version 6.7 with the latest patch, and we are starting to roll out version 7.0.

I have multiple customers who are running Cisco Firepower on-prem. Increasingly, customers are going through the cloud, using Cisco Firepower on AWS and Azure.

We are implementing Cisco Firepower at the Inter-VRF level so we can have some segmentation. For example, between ACI and all the Inter-VRF being done through Firepower, we are able to inspect local east-west traffic. It is great to use Cisco Firepower for segmentation, because on the Firepower, we now have a feature called VRF. So, you can also expand the VRF that you have locally on your network back to the firewall and do some more tweaking and segmentation. Whereas, everything was coming into a single bucket previously and you had to play around with some features to make sure that the leaking of the prefixes was not advertised. Now, we are really working towards segmentation in terms of routing in Firepower.

The integration of network and workload micro-segmentation helps a lot to provide unified segmentation policies across east-west and north-south traffic. One concrete example is with Cisco ACI for the data center. Not only are we doing what is called a service graph on the ACI to make sure that we can filter traffic east-west between two endpoints in the same network, but when we go north-south or east-west, we can then leverage what we have on the network with SGTs on Cisco ISE. Once you build your matrix, it is very easy to filter in and out on east-west or north-south traffic.

Since SecureX was released, this has been a big advantage for Cisco Firepower. You can give a tool to a customer to do some analysis, where before they were doing it manually. So, this is a very big advantage. 

The IPS is one of the top features that I love.

The dashboard of the Firepower Management Center (FMC) has improved. The UI has been updated to look like a 2021 UI, instead of what it was before. It is easy to use and navigate. In the beginning, the push of the config was very slow. Now, we are able to push away some conflicts very quickly. We are also getting new features with each release. For example, when you are applying something and have a bad configuration, then you can quickly roll back to when it was not there. So, there have been a lot of improvements in terms of UI and configuration.

We saw a lot of improvements on Cisco Firepower when Snort 3 came along. Before, with Snort 2, we were able to do some stuff, but the bandwidth was impacted. With Snort 3, we now have much better performance.

I would like to see improvement when you create policies on Snort 3 IPS on Cisco Firepower. On Snort 2, it was more like a UI page where you had some multiple choices where you could tweak your config. On Snort 3, the idea is more to build some rules on the text file or JSON file, then push it. So, I would like to see a lot of improvements here.

I have been using Cisco Firepower for multiple years, around four to five years.

In terms of Firepower's stability, we had some issues with Snort 2 CPUs when using older versions in the past. However, since using version 6.4 until now, I haven't seen any big issues. We have had some issues, just like any other vendor, but not in terms of stability. We have had a few bugs, but stability is something that is rock-solid in terms of Firepower.

Cisco Firepower scalability is something that can be done easily if you respect the best practices and don't have any specific use cases. If I take the example of one of my customers moving to the cloud, there is one FMC and he is popping new Firepower devices on the cloud, just attaching them to the existing policy and knots. This is done in a few minutes. It is very easy to do.

When you open a ticket with Cisco tech support for Cisco FMC, you can be quite confident. Right away, the engineer onboarding is someone skilled and can help you out very quickly and easily. This is something that is true 90% of the time. For sure, you always have 10% of the time where you are fighting to get the right guy. But, most of the time, the guy who does the onboarding can right away help you out.

The initial setup and implementation of Cisco Firepower is very easy. I am working with a lot more vendors of firewalls, and Cisco Firepower is one of the best today. It is one of the easiest to set up.

The minimum deployment time depends on really what you want to do. If you just want to initiate a quick setup with some IPS and have already deployed FMC, then it takes less than one hour. It is very easy. 

What takes more time is deploying the OVA of Cisco Firepower Management Center and doing all the cabling stuff. All the rest, it is very easy. 

If you are working without a Firepower Management Center and using Firepower Device Manager with Cisco on the cloud, then it is even easier. It is like the Meraki setup, where you just plug and play everything and everything will be connected to the cloud. It is very easy.

If you configure Cisco Firepower, it has to be based on Cisco's recommendations. You can view all the traffic and have full visibility in terms of applications, support, URL categorization, and inspect malware or whatever file is being exchanged. We also love to interconnect Cisco Firepower with some Cisco ISE appliances so we can do some kind of threat containment. If something is seen as a virus coming in from a user, we can directly tell Cisco ISE to block that user right away.

I am working for a Cisco Professional Services Partner. We have only one guy deploying the devices. We don't require a big team to deploy it. In terms of configuration, it takes more people based on each person's skills because you have multiple areas: firewalls, IPS, knots, and routing. So, it depends on which skills will be required the most.

For maintenance on an average small to medium customer, it takes one to two people. When it is a big customer with multiple sites, you should have a small team of four to five people. This is because it is mostly not about creating the rules, but more about checking and analyzing the logs coming through Cisco Firepower Manager Center.

Whether Cisco Firepower reduces costs depends on the architecture that you are on. I had some of my customers answer, "Totally, yes," but for some of them that is not really true.

When we are fighting against other competitors for customers, whether it is a small or big business, we feel very comfortable with the price that Firepower has today.

I have worked with Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Sophos. I work a lot more with Palo Alto and Cisco Firepower. I find them to be very easy in terms of management operations. Fortinet is also a vendor where we see the ease of use, but in terms of troubleshooting, it is more complex than Firepower and Palo Alto. Sophos is the hardest one for me to use.

I love the IPS more on the Cisco Firepower, where you can do more tweaking compared to the other solutions. Where I love Palo Alto and Fortinet more compared to Firepower is that you still have CLI access to some configs instead of going through the UI and pushing some configs. When you are in big trouble, sometimes the command line is easier to push a lot more configs than doing some clicks and pushing them through the UI.

Compared to the other vendors, Firepower requires more deep dive skills on the IPS stuff to make it work and ensure that you are protected. If you go with the basic one in the package, you will be protected, but not so much. So, you need to have more deep dive knowledge on the IPS to be sure that you can tweak it and you can protect yourself.

Another Cisco Firepower advantage would be the Talos database. That is a big advantage compared to other solutions.

In terms of threat defense, we have a feature of TLS 1.3 that is free where we can see applications without doing any SSL inspection, which can increase the performance of the firewall without doing some deep dive inspection. At the same time, we keep some visibility of what application is going through. Therefore, we have a win-win situation if one wants to protect against some specific applications.

Do not just look at the data sheet that vendors are publishing. Sometimes, they make sense. But, in reality, these documents are made based on specific use cases. Just do a proof of concept and test every single feature. You will find out that Cisco Firepower is much better and more tweakable than other solutions.

When you start using Cisco Firepower Management Center, you need a few days to get used to it. Once you know all the menus, it is kind of easy to find your way out and analyze traffic, not only in terms of the firewall but also in terms of IPS or SSL decryption. Different users are split away who can help you to troubleshoot what you want to troubleshoot, not having everything in one view.

Today, the only use cases that we have for dynamic policies are leveraging the API on Cisco FMC to push some config or change the config. There isn't a feature built automatically on the FMC to build a new policy, so we are leveraging APIs.

I would rate Cisco Firepower between eight and nine. The only reason that I am not giving a full nine is because of the Snort 3 operations, where there is a need for improvement.