Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

We use it for malware and IPS.

The automated policy application and enforcement have freed up time for us, on the order of 30 percent.

Also if one Cisco antivirus implementation is the subject of an attack, all other Cisco implementations get that information rapidly, in real time. All the other firewalls are in sync when it comes to malware attacks, through the update of the database. That is good.

The visibility it provides into threats is good. Every day we find lots of malware attacks targeting our network, but they don't get through to the network.

The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control.

Cisco Talos is well known around the world and everyone trusts Talos for malware intelligence. It is number one. It is also the most secure for Snort rules. It is more secure than others because its real-time analysis is better.

In addition, Firepower Management Center is helpful. 

We also use Cisco ISE and the integration between it and Firepower is okay.

I've been using Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall for four or five years.

It's a stable product.

The scalability is good.

Their technical support is good. When my NOC or my engineers have needed support the feedback I've had is that tech support has been good at critical moments. They have given us good service.

There was no issue with the initial setup. It's straightforward because Cisco gives us lots of documentation. It's not a big deal, for me. In four or five years I have deployed 35 to 40 Firepowers for financial organizations and corporate offices.

We also use Palo Alto, Fortinet, Sophos, and Check Point.

One issue with Firepower Management Center is deployment time. It takes seven to 10 minutes and that's a long time for deployment. In that amount of time, management or someone else can ask me to change something or to provide permissions, but during that time, doing so is not possible. It's a drawback with Cisco. Other vendors, like Palo Alto or Fortinet do not have this deployment time issue.

The other issue is the upgrading process, with Cisco. Sometimes, if we use a standalone device we need to create maintenance windows at that time and we need to restart Firepower. But with other vendors, like Palo Alto, there is no need to update in that way.

If they mitigated these two things, Cisco would be number-one in the world in the security domain.

We have not integrated Firepower with Cisco SecureX because it needs IOS 6.6. It's a limitation. If we have an external device, we would need downtime and in a financial organization, management will not allow us the downtime.

In my experience, the deployment procedure with Cisco is not the easiest, it's not plug-and-play. I hope that Cisco will give us that type of implementation.

Overall, I would rate Firepower at eight out of 10.

The primary use case is mainly around perimeter security at the HQ and the branch. This will include using the Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS), using advanced malware protection for networks on the firewall, and remote access VPN as well as site-to-site VPN.

I work for a Cisco partner and managed service provider. We have a number of customers. Typically, the standard setup that we have is a Firepower Management Center Virtual, running in VMware, with physical FTD appliances (as the firewalls) on-premises.

We work with more mid-size organizations who typically have email security, web security, endpoint security, and perimeter security. In terms of products, that would be:

• Cisco Umbrella
• Cisco Cloud Email Security
• Cisco Secure Endpoint
• Firepower, for the perimeter. 

That would be a typical technology mix. Sometimes, some customers will consume something like Duo Security for multi-factor authentication.

We are primarily running ASA Firewalls with the FTD image. We are also running some Firepower 1000 Series. 

One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful. 

Cisco implemented a role-based access control for Firepower, so you can have very granular accounts. For example, a service desk analyst could have read-only access. If we have a security operations team, then they could have access to update IPS vulnerability databases. A network engineer could have access to update ACLs, not rules, which is quite useful. Also, you can selectively push out parts of the policy package based on your role-based access control. So, if you have one job role and work on one part of the configuration, and I work on another job role working on a different part of the configuration, then I could just deploy the changes that I have made without affecting what you are doing (or without pushing out your changes). It is quite nice to be able to do that in that way.

The most valuable feature is the Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System. For customers who don't have a SIEM platform, Firepower Management Center offers some SIEM-like functionality that clearly categorizes intrusion prevention alerts. So, they are rated with flags, from zero to four. If I see a level 1 flag, then this means that the attempted intrusion, not only relates to a real vulnerability, but we likely have a system in our environment somewhere that could be exploited by that vulnerability. In that sense, it helps us quickly target which intrusions should be investigated versus what is noise. A level 2 flag just identifies where an intrusion relates to a known vulnerability. It doesn't mean that you are vulnerable to it, because you may not have the particular hardware/software combination that the vulnerability relates to. Therefore, being able to quickly determine where to focus your investigation is important.

All Cisco security technologies have API integrations. We have all Cisco security products for all our customers integrated into SecureX for overall visibility of threat detections across all security appliances. Cisco Advanced Malware Protection is a good example. It is not just a product but a capability that has been integrated into multiple products or technologies. We see in Firepower that we can benefit from Advanced Malware Protection at a network level, but that same technology is also available on email security as well as endpoint security. So, if a threat is detected in one place that can be blocked everywhere, almost at the same time, then the integration is very good. 

If we look at something like Cisco Umbrella, then we see Umbrella integrated with Cisco Meraki appliances, both on firewalls and access points. So, there does seem to be a good level of integration.

Integrations are primarily API-driven. You just generate an API. You have an identifier and generate an API key. It is normally five minutes or under to integrate something. Cisco has SecureX, which is their security management platform. They also have Cisco SecureX threat response, which is a threat hunting tool. With both of these tools, they can take the API keys from any Cisco products as well as some third-party products, then you can integrate them in just a couple of minutes. It is pretty easy.

FlexConfig is there as a bridge for features that are not yet natively integrated into Firepower. It is a way of allowing you to be able to configure things that wouldn't otherwise be possible until the development team can add them into Firepower's native capability. There is still some work that needs to be done around FlexConfig. There are still quite a few complex things, like policy-based routing, that have to be done in FlexConfig, and it doesn't always work perfectly. Sometimes, there are some glitches. It is recommended that you configure FlexConfig policies with Cisco TAC. It would be good to see Cisco accelerate some of those configurations that you can only do in FlexConfig into the platform, so that they are there natively.

I have been using it for around 18 months.

The product has significantly improved over the last two years. I am aware that the Cisco product team has made significant strides forward in addressing oversights that may have previously existed in the platform. I don't have that much in the way of improvements now. We are running the latest code, the 6.7 code, on all our environments. It addresses so many issues that previously existed in earlier versions of the code. From 6.6, the code has improved significantly and introduced many feature benefits.

The new code, 6.6 and higher, seems to be very stable. Now, you don't need to deploy the entire policy package every time you make a change. You can just deploy the segment of the configuration that has been changed. This has increased how quickly you can deploy the configuration, which is a good improvement. We seem to have less bugs and glitches in the newer code. I can't think of any real bugs or glitches that I have seen since we have been running 6.6. With 6.5 and earlier, there were some problems. Now, it seems to be very stable.

The thing that restricts the scalability would be Firepower Management Center. It is constrained by how many events it can record. It suits customers who have a smaller number of sites, like a dozen or maybe 20 sites. You can still record your connection and intrusion event history for a significant period of time. But, if you are talking about a customer with hundreds of firewalls, then Firepower Management Center probably is not the right proposition.

If I am a customer with a dozen sites, I probably don't have the money to pay for a dedicated SIEM platform. So, Firepower Management Center is great for me because it is like a mini SIEM from a perimeter security perspective. I can store my connection and intrusion event history. I can get an idea of which IPS intrusions are things I should focus my attention on. These are the things that a SIEM could help you with. I can manage my firewalls from a single management location, which is really good. However, if I am a customer who has hundreds of firewalls, then it is not really scalable because I wouldn't be able to store the amount of intrusion and connection events that I would need for those firewalls.

Cisco Defense Orchestrator would probably be the better option if you had an environment that had hundreds of sites with hundreds of firewalls. Even if you acknowledge that Cisco Defense Orchestrator doesn't store events per se, it just allows you to manage and deploy policies to the firewalls, when you have an environment with hundreds of firewalls, then you will definitely have the budget for a SIEM platform. At that point, you would be scaling by having separate platforms for separate functions rather than one platform to do everything.

Firepower Management Center is great for some customers with whom we work because they don't have hundreds of sites with hundreds of firewalls. They just have somewhere between two and 10 sites. So, it is a good fit for that kind of customer.

Cisco Talos is one of the largest private security, threat hunting, research organizations, but non-governmental. It is quite powerful when we explain to customers the threat intelligence injected into Cisco products. I have attended some Cisco Talos workshops, webinars, etc., and they do seem to be amongst the best in their field. So, I have a high degree of confidence in Cisco Talos, and it is one of the most powerful capabilities that Cisco has as a security vendor. You could have the best features for a product, but if the security intelligence is not good nor current, and if it can't accurately predict new threat trends in a timely way, then it still may not help you.

The technical support is absolutely brilliant. When I call Cisco TAC and have a case, every single engineer that I get assigned to any case is an expert in their field. I feel like they understand the product that we are talking about inside out. I have never raised a case for Firepower and not been able to get a resolution. I have a high degree of confidence in them.

The support may not be one of the features documented in the data sheet, but I have worked with other vendors where their quality of support is not comparable. When you are looking at the total cost of a solution, you need to look at more than what the face value of the product is. You need to look at:

• How complicated is this going to be to configure? 
• How complicated will this be to operate? 
• How long will it take me to get a resolution if I have a problem? 

From my experience with Cisco TAC, the resolution will always be very quick. More often than not, it is within a couple of days, if it is a P3. If it is a P1, then it is the same day. I couldn't ask for better.

I find the initial setup fairly straightforward. I wouldn't say it is simple, but it is not a simple piece of technology. You have different policies for different areas of the system, e.g., you have a policy for access control, NAT, FlexConfig, remote access, VPN, etc. There are a lot of policies that you either have to create or configure. However, it is fairly intuitive. Once you have done it once, you know where everything is.

If we assume the most basic variables, one FMC and one FTD on the same LAN, then the FMC can be provisioned with the policies in a day. The appliance can be imaged and added to the FMC with the policies pushed out on another day. If you add remote access VPN into the mix, especially if you have an Active Directory integration, I would probably add another day. You could probably have a working setup in three to four days, depending on if you have any issues with the licensing portal. 

It is very easy to deploy site-to-site VPN tunnels between Firepowers. I appreciate that Cisco deprecated all legacy cypher standards. This means you need to use the modern, robust cipher standards that cannot be broken right now. This is a good thing. However, if you are using two Firepower devices, then it is easy to set up a site-to-site VPN tunnel and use the strongest cipher standard, which is also good.

We normally always try to pre-stage, spinning up virtual FMC and VMware, then configure as much as possible before adding an appliance in. It can be a bit more challenging if you have a lot of FTDs at different sites because you need to be aware that you may be managing a device on an internal IP address while you are pre-staging, but that address may change when you deploy the solution. You just have to think that through, in terms of how Firepower Management Center will keep its connectivity to the device once you deploy it. So, if Firepower Management Center and appliances are all on the same local area network, then it is straightforward. However, it is when you have multiple appliances at different sites that it can be a bit more tricky to make sure that the connectivity is maintained when you deploy. I think some more guidance around this would be good. We have a process that works for us, but it took a bit of figuring out with Cisco TAC to make sure we were not missing anything. If they could maybe document it a bit better, that would be good.

Normally, someone like myself could set everything up, so you wouldn't need a big team. However, if you are doing integrations with something like Active Directory, then you need the person who administers that system to be involved. Likewise, if you are doing site-to-site VPN tunnels with third-parties, then you probably need someone from that third-party organization involved. Most of the configurations can be done by one person. You do need to let the Firepower discovery run for around two weeks before you then run the recommendations around which IPS rules to apply, but it would be possible to just select one of the base policies and leave it at that.

You could choose to run the network discovery, which you should do anyway because there are added benefits, for two weeks then choose the Firepower recommendations. However, if you didn't have time to do that, or that wasn't an option for some reason, you could just choose one of the base IPS policies, like Security over Connectivity or Balance, and that would work out-of-the-box.

Everyone who uses the platform has felt more confident in their perimeter security. The Firepower platform makes it very easy to keep track of what software revision you are on, what your revision is versus what the latest is. It makes it really easy to schedule tasks to download the latest geolocation and vulnerability updates, automate backups, and copy backups to a remote location. Operationally as well as from a security perspective, everything has been positive in terms of the feedback.

I like the Smart Licensing, because it is more dynamic and easier to keep track of where you are at. If we have a high availability firewall pair and they are deployed in active/standby rather than active/active, I would expect that we would only pay for one set of licenses because you are using only one firewall at any one time. The other is there just for resiliency. The licensing, from a Firepower perspective, still requires you to have two licenses, even if the firewalls are in active/standby, which means that you pay for the two licenses, even though you might only be using one firewall any one time. This is probably not the best way to do it and doesn't represent the best value for money. This could be looked at to see if it could be done in a fairer way. For example, you can only deploy MX firewalls in active/standby. There are no other options. You only need one license for those firewalls because you can only use one at a time. This seems quite fair. They may need to look again at this from a Firepower perspective.

I work for a Cisco partner, so we are very Cisco-focused. Most of our customers consume predominantly all Cisco solutions. We have some customers who may have the odd product that is not Cisco, but a majority of their security suite will be Cisco.

I have some experience with budget firewall platforms, like SonicWall and WatchGuard, but these are not really comparable to Cisco in terms of being direct competitors. It would be like me trying to compare a performance car against a budget economy car. It is not a fair comparison.

I would probably ask, "How long do you want to keep the connection and intrusion events for?" You need to remember that Firepower Management Center can only keep a certain amount of events. I think you need to have that in mind as one criteria to make your decision against. 

You need to look at what hardware platform you are going to be deploying. We have a lot of customers who are running ASAs, but they are running the Firepower Threat Defense image on their ASA. For all intents and purposes, those ASAs act as FTDs. Now, try to remember those ASAs were never designed originally to run the FTD code. Now, they can run the FTD code, but some of the dedicated Firepower appliances have a split architecture. So, they have separate physical resources, CPU, and memory for running the traditional firewalling capabilities versus the next-generation firewall capabilities, like IPS, AMP for Networks, and AVC. Maybe, have a think about the hardware platform, because you need to try to assess what throughput you are trying to put through the firewall and how that will impact the performance of the box.

There is definitely some advantage moving to the dedicated Firepower appliances rather than putting the Firepower code on an ASA. Although, it does allow you to leverage an existing investment if you put the FTD code onto the ASA, but you need to be mindful of the limitations that it has. Also, if you are looking to do SSL decryption, then you need a much bigger firewall than you think you need because this puts a lot of overhead on the appliance. However, this would be the same for any vendor's firewall. It is not Cisco specific.

If 10 is the most secure, then our customers are typically in the middle, like a five, in terms of maturity of their organization’s security implementation. This will be because they won't necessarily have things like Network Access Control, such as Cisco ISE. They also won't necessarily have security analytics for anomaly detection, like Stealthwatch or Darktrace. For some of these more sophisticated security technologies, you need to be a large enterprise to be able to afford or invest in them.

While Firepower provides application visibility and control, we don't use it much simply because we use Cisco Umbrella. Firepower gives you application visibility control on a location-by-location basis. So, if we have a firewall at the head office or a firewall at the branch, then we get application visibility control by firewall. However, because we use Cisco Umbrella, that gives us very similar application and visibility control but on a global level. So, we tend to do application visibility and control more within Cisco Umbrella because we can apply it globally rather than on a site-by-site basis. Sometimes, it is useful to have that granular control for an individual site, but it is not something that we use all the time.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of 10.

It is for defense, protecting workloads from a distributed type of an environment. On-premises, we are hosting several different distributed user session type environments. In our case, it is remote desktop services, which enable users to go out and browse the Internet, in some cases to do legitimate services, and in other cases, it is more of a personal browsing session. In this case, the primary purpose is to protect those user sessions when they are accessing the Internet. The secondary use case is to protect these services and applications from inbound threats, e.g., Internet scanning, Internet exploit attempts, any sort of attack, reconnaissance, or anything of that nature coming from the public Internet.

Firepower is an add-on to Cisco ASAs that enables intrusion prevention detection and some additional advanced functionalities. We have both.

We have two on-premise data centers where Firepower is deployed.

In terms of logging, that has been a big benefit because it is a fairly straightforward and easy process to log results. We stream through a folder and that information goes out to Splunk. It delivers immediate value. While Firepower reporting is generally pretty good, there is some delay, as far as when information shows up and updates the internal Firepower reporting mechanism. What we found is if this information is streamed into a SIEM, then it can immediately apply additional enrichment on top of it and build slightly more relevant, near real-time reporting, in comparison to doing it directly from Firepower. In terms of value for Firepower data, the ability to stream that out as a log, then characterize and enrich it within the SIEM that is where we gain the most value from a security perspective.

The solution’s ability to provide visibility into threats is good. Combined with Cisco's own trend intelligence characterization as well as the creation and application of that sort of tag into the stream of data that Firepower detects, that immediately tells us which threat type it is: 

• Does it belong to a threat group? 
• Is it an IP block list?
• Is it a URL block list? 
• Is it a known threat? 
• Which threat list does it belong to?

All this additional information is definitely useful. We treat it personally as set and forget because we are in the block mode - intrusion prevention mode. We don't let threats in. We err on the side of being overly protective. This is opposed to letting in threats, then detecting, identifying, and taking action on stuff that got through. Instead, we just block it. In our day-to-day operations, normally what was blocked is generally useful, but it's not operationally important.

It is set up to automatically apply the blocks and use the threat intelligence delivered by Talos as well as the intrusion prevention rules. All of that is entirely automated.

It has improved our organization's security posture dramatically. It has definitely given us modern protection and peace of mind in terms of attacks against our infrastructure from known or emerging threats, so we can be protected against them.

Intrusion prevention is its most valuable feature because of its effectiveness. Cisco is the largest security company and one of the largest threat intelligence services with Talos. Cisco can identify and immediately apply any new threat information into signature sets for their Intrusion Prevention tools, including endpoint. In our case, we are talking about Firepower. That scope is what results in is an almost immediate application of application prevention signatures against any upcoming network attacks. So, if there is a new vulnerability, some sort of high critical value globally, the Cisco team is typically able to identify and write corresponding detection or prevention signatures, then apply them across their toolset.

It is one of the fastest solutions, if not the fastest, in the security technology space. This gives us peace of mind knowing that as soon as a new attack comes online that we will be protected in short order. From that perspective, no one really comes close now to Firepower, which is hugely valuable to us from an upcoming new attack prevention perspective.

We are using Cisco Cloud Email Security and DNS security from Cisco as well as endpoint protection. The integration between these products is pretty good. The benefit is the ability of all these disparate tools to talk to each other and be able to take action, sort of feeding each other with newly intelligent detection mechanisms and passing that information on to the next tool, then taking action on that next tool based on information identified on the first tool. That is really the biggest benefit of using the ecosystem. So, we've optimized it. We leveraged Cisco's tech response, which connects with each of these tools. We definitely find value every day.

It was very easy to integrate with the SIEM, which is really our primary use case. Besides the Cisco ecosystem, it is integrating with a standalone separate SIEM solution, which is Splunk in our case. This was an easy, simple approach to accomplish. We had no issues or problems with that.

Try to understand if there is a need, e.g., if there is a need to log this information, get these logs out, and forward to some sort of a SIEM technology or perhaps a data store that you could keep it for later. There is limited data storage on the appliance itself. So, you need to ship it out elsewhere in order for you to store it. The only point of consideration is around that area, basically limited storage on the machine and appliance. Consider logging it elsewhere or pushing it out to a SIEM to get better controls and manipulation over the data to generate additional metrics and visibility.

In some cases, I could see how SIEM is not an option for certain companies, perhaps they either cannot afford it, or they do not have the resources to dedicate a security analyst/engineer who could deploy, then manage the SIEM. In most cases, Firepower is a useful tool that a network engineer can help set up and manage, as opposed to a security engineer. To make the solution more effective and appealing, Cisco could continue to improve some of the reporting that is generated within the Firepower Management Console. Overall, that would give a suitable alternative to a full-fledged SIEM, at least on a network detection side, application identification side, and endpoint identification and attribution side. Potentially, a security analyst or network engineer could then simply access the Firepower Management Console, giving them the visibility and data needed to understand what is going on in their environment. If Cisco continues to improve anything, then I would suggest continuing to improve the dashboarding and relevant operational metrics present within the platform, as opposed to taking those logs and shipping them elsewhere.

About four years.

Once it is deployed, not much staff is required as long as the intrusion rules are specifically configured to automatically update. That is the primary thing. Then, the continuous periodic updates from Cisco apply operating system patches just to make sure that critical vulnerabilities are patched and operating system optimization is applied routinely. Strategy-wise, I would patch quarterly unless there was a critical vulnerability that Cisco would discover, then apply a patch against it. At which point, we would then patch our appliance.

The stability is very good. As far as I can tell, we don't have any issues with availability or stability.

Cisco accounts for scalability by having different hardware recommendations, depending on what the throughput is, the required coverage is in terms of number of devices, the amount of traffic, etc. In our case, I don't see any issues. We are appropriately sized, but I could see how if someone's environment doubles, then someone should account for that by either procuring another appliance and separating some of the traffic flows or getting a bigger, more powerful system that can handle increase in throughput.

We try fitting to an ecosystem mentality. For example, we have four different Cisco products, which is technically a single ecosystem. If you were to think of it that way, then it is four different tools from Cisco. Then, there are two additional ones on the network, which makes six. There are additional two or three for an endpoint, plus another two or three for email, and another two or three for identities. So, I would say there are probably around 20 security solutions total.

The network team as well as the security team use it. Combined, that is approximately six people.

We are perfectly sized. I don't think there will be a need to increase the footprint or anything like that, at least for a while.

I know that people typically say TAC is hit or miss. In my case, it was always a good experience. Whether it was Firepower related for licensing questions or email, I have never had any issues with Cisco TAC.

Cisco Talos is very good. They are very well-regarded and well-known. I respect the team. They know what they are doing. They are one of the best overall. They are probably the best threat intelligence organization out there. Their visibility is unparalleled, because the data that Cisco has access to and the telemetry that it's able to gather are quite amazing.

Almost all networks globally in the world are built with the Cisco products. The telemetry that it generates gives Cisco unparalleled visibility, and Talos steps into that. They are able to apply their analytics over that data and identify emerging threats before practically anyone else, but Microsoft. From that perspective, my organization appreciates what Talos is able to do. Cisco's intelligence is delivered through Talos, applying it to other products that are not Cisco, but we haven't gone down that path yet.

We started with Firepower. It was one of the first products that helped secure our organization. We are close to sort of an advanced maturity, primarily compliance-driven. We are not there yet, but we are close to it. We are somewhere sort of in the high to middle area. We have sort of a high compliance-driven security and close to the compliance-driven area, but still slightly below it. We are still fine-tuning and implementing some security technologies. Then, within a year's time, these will be simply managed and audited.

In my current place, I did not help set it up, but I did set it up previously as a dedicated intrusion detection and prevention tool with another security engineer. Honestly, the setup was pretty straightforward. This was a couple of versions behind. It definitely has well-understood requirements from a virtual machine and resources required perspective. No questions that came up.

For the dedicated intrusion appliance, we needed to identify where the most benefit would come from, so we identified the network space. The sort of choke point where we could apply the Firepower appliance in order to inspect the most traffic. In terms of efficiencies, the primary goal was to identify how to maximize the visibility using Firepower. We deployed it in a choke point and ensured that most of the traffic for the company goes through this intrusion appliance and the initial deployment occurred in a visibility mode only - No blocking, intrusion detection only. Then, with time, as we got comfortable with all the traffic that was being seen with a signature application across the traffic and understood the chances for false positives were low to none. At that point, we put it into prevention.

If we needed to address something with Cisco directly regarding Firepower support, that was also addressed fairly quickly with no issues.

The automated policy application and enforcement saves us at least a third of an FTE per day. In terms of time, that is about 30 percent per day. By deploying the solution, we are saving $600 a week, which is significant.

In some cases, resources, like a security engineer, are actually hard to come by because they are expensive. Substituting some of that engineering time with an effective technology, like Firepower, is probably a good strategy.

I know that licensing for some of the advanced solutions, like Intrusion Prevention and Secure Malware Analytics, are nominal costs. 

I have used one of Cisco's competitors and am fairly familiar with it: Palo Alto. I am also familiar with the Barracuda solution. I would say Palo is comparable with Firepower to some degree. The Barracuda solutions that I've used are nowhere near as close in terms of capability, metrics, user interface, or anything like that to Cisco.

Palo Alto and Cisco are about the same in terms of application visibility, user assignments, and attributions. They are comparable. On the threat side is where I think Firepower is better. It's able to identify and characterize better. It's also able to deliver metrics around that information in a clearer fashion. As an example, it is easier to extract fields and values in the log. It seems that the design of the appliance was focused around security, which is evident in how that information is being presented, both in the Firepower Management Console as well as in the log.

On the IT infrastructure side, we are using Cisco hardware for the network. Then, as a security team, we are looking at adding Cisco's incident response solution, but we have not done it yet.

Firepower provides us with application visibility and control. We don't utilize it to the fullest extent. We rely on some additional tools like DNS, to identify applications being used across our endpoints. However, the Firepower deployment primarily protects the servers. So, on the servers, it is a controlled environment. Therefore, we do know the applications and services being used and deployed out of the servers.

Applying something like this to protect yourself from the Internet, which is where most of the threats come from, besides email. It guarantees that you are able to refocus your energy on internal processes: endpoints, people, etc. Intrusion Prevention is effective because it helps security teams refocus their efforts to build out other components, such as security pillars of the organization.

The solution is effective. My initial exposure to Cisco started through Firepower, since then I have understood that Cisco is moving towards an ecosystem approach. Basically, Firepower represents what I think Cisco stands for.

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

It does what it needs to do and does it great with a good sense of confidence, allowing the team and me to focus on other things. If needed, we can always leverage that data to derive different values from it.

We use Cisco Secure Firewall for remote VPN.

Cisco Secure Firewall played a crucial role in enabling all our users to establish remote connections from their homes.

Cisco Secure Firewalls' application visibility and control are beneficial because they provide a management console that allows us to view logging and sessions.

It enhances our organization's cybersecurity resilience by enabling us to deploy multiple instances of it both in Azure and on-premises. This redundancy ensures that in the event of an outage or any other issues, we can seamlessly switch to alternative locations.

Cisco Secure Firewall is reliable, which is why we opted for it during the pandemic for our remote users.

The cloud does not precisely mimic what is on-premises. There are some new challenges with the features in Azure. Due to Azure limitations, we cannot synchronize configurations between an active standby. This aspect makes it difficult to perform such tasks in the cloud, requiring manual intervention.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall ASA for ten years.

In my current role, I have not encountered any stability issues.

Cisco Secure Firewall is scalable.

Cisco's technical support is excellent, and its personnel are knowledgeable. I consistently receive prompt and satisfactory responses from them. However, there are occasions when we need to reach out to them for feedback follow-up.

Positive

We encountered some issues with the deployment because we run on Azure now. 

Although I am not directly involved in dealing with the pricing aspect of the Cisco Secure Firewall, I know that the licensing has improved over the years.

I rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine out of ten.

The Cisco Secure Firewall is not a remediation tool but rather designed for secure remote sessions.

We use the same ASAs for firewall functionality as we do for VPN functionality.

Our organization is currently considering Palo Alto as an alternative to Cisco. However, I am not involved in the decision-making process.

We use the solution to secure our external software application and user access through different ports.

URL filtering is valuable.

The virtualization aspect has room for improvement.

The scalability has room for improvement.

I have been using the solution for three and a half years.

The solution is stable.

I give the scalability a one out of ten.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The price is good.

I give the solution a nine out of ten.

Previously, our customers had to always utilize hand-to-hand delivery. Now, they are able to move completely to a secure digital method. They use a strictly dark fiber optics connection from a central location to the endpoint.

Our clients have been able to consolidate infrastructure products such as Talus for hardware encryption and Dell EMC for D2D de-duplication and backup.

FMC could be improved because management with FMC is quite difficult compared to using Firepower web-based management.

We've been selling Cisco Firepower for a year.

Our clients feel that Cisco has proven stability in enterprise networking, routers, and ASA firewall security.

We are very confident with Cisco's technical support and would give them a ten out of ten.

Positive

Previously, we sold Check Point and Palo Alto.

We choose to sell Cisco because it has been approved by NATO. Our clients use a strictly offline infrastructure, and there were significant issues with Check Point. In addition, we have good support from the local Cisco office, and they also suggested that the end user goes with Cisco.

As a Cisco Secure Firewall reseller, the value we bring is very good support. You will not get the same level of support from some other vendors. For instance,  Palo Alto and Check Point don't have direct support like Cisco. They have third-party support. Thus, you may get a response only when you escalate the issue to the third tier of the service level. With Cisco, everything is resolved within a day.

The initial setup is straightforward because most network engineers have worked with Cisco. Cisco invested in universities, and as a result, 40% of the network experience of students is with Cisco.

Our clients are mostly financial institutions and have strict policies that do not allow personal data on external clouds outside the country. As a result, they mostly use an on-premises or hybrid cloud deployment model.

We are currently having our customers switch from the 2000 to the 3000 series.

The price is not too high, but the subscription is a little bit high. We compared the activation of Cisco and Fortinet, and when we activated the whole portfolio of the UTM of Fortinet, the speed was reduced. We tested the same situation with the Cisco 2140 series, and there was no reduction in speed.

When you're evaluating the solution, take a look at the customer reviews.

We have had no issues with Cisco Secure Firewall, and I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

Our primary use cases for this solution are as a traditional firewall, VPN system, IPS, and for URL filtering.

I think that the firewall feature is the most valuable to me as it is one of the oldest features for this solution. We also appreciate how stable the VPN is.

I have a lot of difficulties with the solution's Firewall Management Center (FMC) and the GUI. Neither is responsive enough and should be improved.

My organization has been using Cisco Secure Firewall for more than 10 years. 

My opinion is that this solution is quite stable.

We encounter tech issues often. Sometimes it's really good to work with the tech engineer, but sometimes it can be really frustrating that it's slow to go through the email chat and everything. It depends on the engineer you get.

Positive

I have had difficulties with the implementation of this solution. When I first encountered this solution, I had difficulties bringing it up and configuring it, but this was maybe due to the fact that back then it was a new technology. It is possible that I would have an easier time with it right now. 

I would say that this solution did help free up staff. Today, and even during COVID, a lot of customers are interested in VPN solutions and this demand will only keep increasing. I work from home mostly and the solution saves me two hours per day.

I do want to stress that this solution saves our organization time. We have 13 engineers in our company and even more staff in other departments and they also have the opportunity to work from home and with this, they save a lot of time. We plan on buying a smaller office thanks to this and this too will save a lot of money for the company.

The reason we chose Cisco is that some of my colleagues partnered with the provider when they came to Hungary, so they have been working with these solutions for a long time.

I do not have experience with the Cisco migration tool, but my colleagues do and they are really happy with it and its ease of use.

I would rate this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

We are using these firewalls for edge security or different zones of security. We use them throughout the whole organization, but they vary in size, depending on if it's a small office in Spain or a large office in another country. We have offices in many countries.

It saves time. It protects us from experiencing big or small attacks. If we are vulnerable to attacks, it would take us a lot of time to fix that and put out all the fires. Hopefully, we won't need that when we have several layers of security.

We feel that we can trust the security, and our assets and business are well protected. We need to have trust in it, but we also see that it works. We have a security company that has tested that it works.

They have already improved it to some degree. It has become easier, but I've not drilled down much myself. I mostly use CLI, but I can see that it's a little bit more GUI-based. So, improvement is already there. It's a good thing that we now have GUI-based control over the details, and that would be the way to go.

It integrates with other security products from Cisco, but sometimes, there can be glitches or errors.

I have been using Cisco firewalls for the last 20 years. We are now mostly using FPRs, but we also have some old Cisco firewalls that we need to change to newer technologies.

It has been a while since I used it myself. My experience was good. You get the correct engineer for the task. I'd rate them an eight out of ten.

Positive

We have firewalls from other vendors, but we will be moving over to Cisco. When we have the same vendor, it would take less time to train people to do their job because there is one technology rather than four or five different ones.

I was involved in its deployment, but that was a few years ago. It was not an in-depth technical installation; it was more of a physical installation. It was easy. We are a big company, so we need to plan the downtime and get approval from the business to take down systems and upgrade them. 

I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a seven out of ten.