Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

I've deployed them in a number of different use cases. I've deployed them at the internet edge. I've used those VPN concentrators, and I've deployed them at the data center core, segmenting VLANs.

We've seen a lot of improvements in terms of cybersecurity resilience and securing our infrastructure from end to end so that we can detect and remediate threats. The visibility with FMC is excellent. Being able to have, for instance, a data center core firewall, an internet edge firewall, and a VPN concentrator device managed by the same FMC and being able to take all of that information and see it in one place is very beneficial from the security posture standpoint. It's a time saver because it makes things easy. I can log in and very easily see what my detected threats are, what's been happening over the last 24 hours, or if there's anything I need to be concerned about. Being able to see who's logging into the VPN, but also what traffic are they sending, what are they bringing back, and being able to have all that in one place is really nice. The integration between the FMC and endpoints is a nice feature and a big time saver in terms of remediating threats and remediating malware and other malicious software.

FMC is very good in terms of giving a lot of visibility into what the firewall is seeing, what it's stopping, and what it's letting through. It lets the administrator have a little bit of knowledge of what's coming in or out of the device. It's excellent.

The policies module in FMC specifically isn't the most user-friendly. Coming from Cisco ASA, Cisco ASA is a little bit easier to use. When you get into particularly complex deployments where you have a lot of different interfaces and all that kind of stuff, it's a little bit tricky. Some usability improvements there would be nice. 

For scalability, they could support a little bit more diverse deployments around clustering and high availability. Currently, it's very active standby, and being able to do a three firewall cluster or four or five firewall cluster would suit some of my deployments a little bit better. It would also help to keep the cost down for the customer because you're buying smaller devices and clustering them versus larger devices.

I've been using Cisco firewalls for fifteen years at least. I've been using them in some form or another, such as from ASAs and now FTDs and Firepower.

Its stability is excellent. In the last six months, I've probably deployed about 14 Cisco Secure Firewall devices, and I am yet to get a callback. I deploy them, and then the customer takes ownership of the device, and they're off to the races and ready to go. They've been stable, which is good. I don't like devices that break the week after I install them and make me look bad.

I've implemented them anywhere from a 500 MB throughput device up to a 20 GB throughput device. Particularly around scalability, some improvements in terms of clustering would be good.

I've called Cisco TAC many times throughout my career, and I never hesitate to do it. They've always been fantastic for me. I'd rate them a ten out of ten.

Positive

I've used a number of other competitive devices. I've customers running SonicWall, I've customers running Palo Alto, and I've customers running Fortinet. Cisco Secure Firewalls are excellent.

Cisco is at a really good place, especially with a lot of the recent updates that have happened. Compared to Palo Alto and Fortinet specifically, I find FMC is way easier to use. Specifically in the realm of cybersecurity resilience, it's for sure a much more effective tool than Palo Alto. Having come from Palo Alto, the way FMC surfaces threats and enables response to set threats is vastly easier for me and my team to work with, so we're seeing a lot more resiliency. We're seeing a lot quicker response to threats. We're seeing a lot quicker identification of threats. From that perspective, it's far and away better.

Cisco Secure Firewall is the best in the market right now. Palo Alto is okay, but Cisco is better. In terms of resiliency and providing actionable intelligence to a security team, I find Cisco products to be way better. Fortinet is also fairly easy to use. They have a lot of the same strengths. However, Fortinet's technical support is terrible. Cisco has a nice package of devices. It's easy to use. It's easy to integrate for the security team. It gives you a lot of actionable intelligence in your network. Having that kind of company and technical support to be able to back that up and be able to support the customers is very useful.

I've deployed them countless times, and I find it very easy. I did a high availability pair of internet edge firewalls for a 2,000 users organization migrating from Palo Alto, and I moved them over with AnyConnect, Umbrella, and Duo from Palo Alto in a week and a half with no downtime. I do a lot on-prem just because of my verticals. I work a lot in law enforcement. I work a lot in government, and those end up being very on-prem heavy. 

It's pretty competitive. If they could make it cheaper, it would be great. You always want cheaper, but relative to the performance capabilities of the firewall and relative to what you get, it's fair.

It's not the cheapest in the world, but you get an excellent product for that price. The onus is on us as a customer to look at what we're buying and establish not just the price but the value. You need to look at what you're getting for your dollars there. Cisco has a very good proposition there.

Its licensing is pretty good. It's not very complex. There are not a million different SKUs. I had a Palo Alto deployment where the customer had asked for a license for integration with their Cortex XDR, and they didn't include it. It was eight more SKUs and eighty thousand dollars more. It was a real disaster, and it can put a customer off from using Palo Alto. Cisco's licensing model is easy to understand whether it's apps or VPN. The way that they handle the subscriptions is very easy to understand. It's very fair.

To someone researching this solution who wants to improve cybersecurity in their organization, I'd say that the main thing to look for is usability. Find something that you can understand and that provides you with actionable intelligence because a security device that's not administered and monitored properly isn't going to do much for you. It's not going to be very effective. So, you want a device that's easy to use and that gives you a lot of that visibility and makes your job as a security administrator easy. It should make identifying and responding to threats as seamless as humanly possible because the quicker you can respond, the more security you're able to keep in your organization.

Cisco Talos is an excellent product. I've been using Cisco Talos since Cisco introduced it. In fact, I was a Sourcefire customer before Cisco acquired them, so I'm very familiar with the roots of that team and where it's from. I've been all in on them since day one.

Overall, I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement, especially in security because the security world is changing on a daily basis. We're always looking for what can we do better and how can we improve, but what Cisco has done since the Sourcefire acquisition and where they've taken it, I'm very excited for the future.

Remote access through the VPN wasn't available in the old firewall that we used, so that was a value-add. That's one way Cisco ASA has impacted our company. Also, from an administrator's perspective, newcomers have a shorter learning curve working with the ASA firewalls.

Also, when we deployed it on the data center firewalls, we did some microsegmentation using different subnets for the whole environment, including UAT and production. We didn't have segmentation before, but with the growing security needs, we segmented the servers. For each of the subnets we made different gateways on the firewall. That helped us achieve the requirements of the latest standards.

Thanks to the IPS, the malicious traffic has dropped. Initially, when we deployed the IPS, it gave us some problems. But after a week or two, it worked very well. I used a balanced security policy when I integrated it with the FMC server. On the FMC, the GUI gives me a very good, extensive view of what traffic is getting dropped and at what time. It gives me all the visibility that I need.

• The normal firewalling features are very good. You can easily create objects and work with them. 
• The AnyConnect software for remote VPN is an added feature on the firewall that works very well in our environment.
• The IPS is another important feature that I use. It doesn't impact the overall performance of the ASAs.

All of these features work fine.

Cisco ASA works very nicely from an administration perspective. The management of the device is very nice. The ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager) is the software that we use and it is very easy to configure using the GUI. If you are familiar with the ASDM software, it's very easy for anyone to handle. The CLI isn't different from other Cisco CLIs, so that makes it easy as well.

Also, the visibility when doing packet inspection on the ASA, using the ASDM GUI, works well. You can go to the monitoring part and see the live logs, the syslogs. All the traffic events are displayed in the syslog. You can filter on whatever event you are interested in and it is visible to you in no time. It provides a real-time display of the traffic. Troubleshooting issues is very easy using ASDM. 

In addition, if you want to do some captures at the interface level, there's a packet tracer, a tool within the ASDM and the ASA, which is available on both the GUI and the CLI. That is on the newer firewalls as well and it's very nice. It shows you the life cycle of a packet within the firewall, from entry to the exit, and how many steps it goes through. It really helps while troubleshooting. I'm very satisfied with that.

The operation of the ASA is good but the problem is that whenever you require an upgrade, there are multiple pieces of software that you have to upgrade. Extensive planning is required, because if you upgrade one piece of the software it has to be compatible with the others as well. You always need to check the compatibility metrics.

For example, if the ASA Firewall's software has to be upgraded, it has to be compatible with the IPS software—the FireSIGHT software. So that has to be upgraded as well, in addition to the ASDM software that you use to manage the firewall using the GUI. Besides that, if you are using the remote VPN part of the firewall, there is the AnyConnect hidden software that also requires an update.

So upgrading is a very extensive exercise, both when you're planning it and when you are doing it. The upgrades are very lengthy. Then Cisco introduced FTD as a unified approach, and that was a leap forward, but it has its own issues.

I've been working as a Cisco partner for about four years. Before that, I was using Cisco firewalls as a network admin. I've been engaged with Cisco firewalls since 2015.

On the FTD (Firepower Threat Defense) model, I've been working with version 6.7. I haven't tried the latest 7.0 version.

The robustness of the ASA is very good. Whenever you upgrade it, it does very well. There are no hiccups or hitches, post-upgrade.

Cisco's TAC provides very good support. If you have any issues, you can contact them and they provide assistance. You need a subscription for that. The subscription comes with a notable cost but you get great value from it. I'm very satisfied with it. 

The tech support of Cisco is unparalleled if I compare it to any other product that I have used. I've been using Citrix, Juniper, and even Palo Alto, but the support that I get from Cisco is very good. It's easy to get support and the engineers get engaged. Sometimes they provide more than you need. For example, if there are design-level issues, they will tell you that it isn't implemented well and that there are things that need to be corrected. That's not their responsibility but they'll provide that feedback.

I consider Cisco support to be the industry standard.

Positive

I've seen Cisco deployed for five to seven years. The product life cycle is good and they're continuing to support things. If you add more features and utilize it to the maximum, using the remote VPN and the like, it becomes more cost-effective. 

Having the IPS part within one box also saves you on costs. Back in 2015, the IPS was a different box that had to be deployed separately. At that time, it cost more if I had to buy another IPS and a box.

Before ASA, we were using Juniper. It had a GUI, but the CLI part of Juniper was difficult. The network administrators required a little bit of a different type of expertise. Juniper was very good, but its CLI wasn't as simple as Cisco's. When somebody new comes into the company to work on the firewall, the Cisco learning curve is relatively short and easy.

Nowadays, everybody is working with Cisco. Juniper has almost been phased out. Some people use Juniper for certain reasons, but there's a very specific clientele for it.

We went with Cisco because it is very easy to operate. It provided next-generation firewalling when it came out with ASA plus Sourcefire IPS. That was very effective at that time, compared to the others.

These days, Palo Alto is matching Cisco and, in some ways, Palo Alto is better. From 2015 to 2018/19, Cisco was considered to be the best. The security leaders are always preferred and Cisco was a leader. That's why we preferred it.

We were also always happy with Cisco support. It was very convenient to get to Cisco support, and it was very prompt and effective. They really solved our problems.

The Nextgen firewalls have a good IPS, but that IPS part wasn't very configurable using the ASDM. Later, they introduced the FMC (Firewall Management Center) and we could integrate the ASA with the FMC and get the IPS configured from the FMC GUI. That was good, but you needed two things to monitor one box. For the IPS you needed an FMC server, and for the firewalls, you needed the ASDM or the CLI.

In terms of integration with other solutions, it is a simple firewall that is integrated with the syslog servers and the SNMP monitoring from the NMS. Those types of simple things work very well. I haven't worked with much integration beyond that. You can't attach that many feeds to it. That's more a function of the Next-Generation Firewall with the IPS and FMC.

SecureX is a relatively new cloud-based solution. It's been around for one or two years. It's offered for free if you have any Cisco security solution. It encompasses ADR and NDR. The clients I work with in Pakistan are mostly financial institutions. Because it's a cloud-based security solution, they are not interested. They want on-prem solutions.

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.

Positive

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.

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.

For our customers, Firepower is a classic perimeter firewall. Sometimes it's also for branch connections, but for those cases, we prefer Meraki because it's simpler. If a customer has Meraki and requires advanced security features, we will offer Firepower as a perimeter solution for them. Meraki is for SD-WAN and Firepower is for the perimeter.

Firewalls are not a new technology but they have a very distinct role in an enterprise for defending the perimeter. Firepower is for organizations that have traditional infrastructures, rather than those that are heavily utilizing cloud services. For us, the clients are government agencies and ministries, and we have a lot of them as our customers in Latvia.

Most firewalls do the same things, more or less. Because we have to compete with other vendors, it's the things that are different that are important. With Cisco, it's the security intelligence part. It's quite simple to configure and it's very effective. It cuts down on a lot of trouble in the early phases.

IPS and Snort are very important because they also differentiate Cisco from other vendors and competitors.

I also like that, in recent years, they have been developing the solution very quickly and adding a lot of new, cool features. I really love the new web interface of Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center. It looks like a modern web-user interface compared to the previous one. And the recent release, 7.2, provided even more improvements. I like that you have the option to switch between a simplified view and the classic view of firewall policies. That was a good decision.

A major area of improvement would be to have more functionality in public clouds, especially in terms of simplifying it. The high availability doesn't work right now because of the limitations in the cloud. Other vendors find ways to make it work differently than with on-prem solutions.

This is very important because we have customers that build solutions in the cloud that are like what they had on-prem. They have done a lift-and-shift because it's easier for them. They lift their on-prem physical boxes and shift them to the cloud, convert them to virtual, and it continues to work that way. Many times it's not the most efficient or best way to do things, but it's the easiest. The easiest path is probably the way to go.

I have been using Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewalls for four or five years now, but before that, I worked with ASA Firewalls a lot. It was just a transition. I have been using Firepower almost from day one.

We are an integrator and we resell as well as provide professional services. We do everything from A to Z.

There are a lot of things that can be improved. As a Cisco partner, I usually take the first hit if something doesn't work. In recent years, the solution has improved and is more stable. But it has to continue to improve in that direction.

A Firepower firewall is a very important point of exit and entry to a network. It's a critical piece of infrastructure. They should have high availability.

By comparison, I am also a huge fan of Stealthwatch (Cisco Secure Network Analytics) and I use it everywhere. I've been working with that solution for 15 years but it's not mission-critical. If it doesn't work, your boss is not calling you. If it doesn't work, it is not collecting telemetry and it doesn't do its job, but you are not stressed to fix it. With firewalls, it's a little different.

Tech support really depends on how lucky you are. It depends on when you create a TAC case and in which time zone the case is created. That determines which part of TAC takes ownership of your case. I have had a few unpleasant cases but, at the end of the day, they were resolved. I didn't feel like I was alone in the field with an angry customer.

Positive

We made a gradual transition from ASA to Firepower because they first had this as Sourcefire services. That is what we used to install first for our customer base. Then Firepower defense appliances and firmware came out. It was a natural process.

My view may be a little bit biased because I do a lot of Cisco deployments, and I have a lab where I play all the time. But overall the deployment is not too complicated.

The deployment time depends on what type of deployment you have. If it's a physical deployment, it may be a little bit faster because you don't have to set up virtual machines. But I recently had a project in AWS, and I used Terraform Templates and it was easy. I still had to configure some additional things like interfaces, IP addresses, and routing. 

Because I know where everything is in the UI, the deployment is okay. One thing I miss a little bit is being able to configure things, like routing, via the command line, which is how it used to be done with the ASA Firewalls. But I understand why they've taken that ability away.

With ASA Firewalls, even when you were upgrading them, the experience was much better because it didn't have those advanced Snort features and you could usually do an upgrade in the middle of day and no one would notice. You didn't have any drops. With Firepower, that's not always the case.

It's hard to talk about pricing when you compare firewalls because firewall functionality is almost the same, regardless of whether it's a small box or a large box. The difference is just the throughput. Leaving aside things like clustering, what you have to look at are the throughput and the price.

Cisco's pricing is more or less okay. In other areas where we work with Cisco solutions, like other security solutions and networking, Cisco is usually much more expensive than others. But when it comes to firewalls, Cisco is cheaper than Check Point although it is not as cheap as Fortigate. But with the latest improvements in hardware and speed, the pricing is okay.

To me, as a partner, the licensing is quite simple. I'm responsible for providing estimates to my sales guys and, sometimes, as an architect, I create solutions for my customers and give them estimates. There are other Cisco solutions that have much more complicated licensing models than Firepower. In short, the licensing is quite okay.

Not all of our customers use Cisco and that means we have competition inside our company with Check Point. We also made some attempts with Palo Alto Firewalls, long before we became Cisco partners, but somehow it didn't work for us.

I enjoy working with Cisco because it's more of a networking-guy approach. It reminds me a lot of all the other Cisco equipment, like their switches and routers. The experience is similar.

I haven't worked a lot with Checkpoint firewalls, but I like how they look. What I don't really like is the way you configure them because it's very different from what networking guys are used to doing. I'm not saying it's bad, it's just different. It's not for me. Maybe it appeals more to server guys. Cisco has a more network-centric approach.

We are Cisco partners. We have been selling Cisco products for more than 25 years, and we are a major player in various African markets, such as Morocco and French-speaking countries in Africa.

We have been offering a wide range of Cisco-branded security products. The most important ones were the ASA firewalls, and now, we have the next-generation ones, XDR, and all the applications or all hybrid security solutions offered by Cisco, including Umbrella, on-premise Identity Service Engine, and all the other third-party solutions.

Our main objective is to show customers the added value of Cisco products and how they can tackle all the security issues and all the threats or the cyber security issues rising on a daily basis nowadays. Cisco Talos, for instance, is something that we propose, and we also propose all the restrictions to be up-to-date. Cisco's ecosystem is very wide in security, so we have very good use cases. 

In the beginning, customers used to implement ASA firewalls mainly as the network firewall in data centers, branch offices, all locations, and also in the DMZ. Nowadays, the perspective has changed, and also with the design requirement, the nature of the cloud hybrid solutions leads us to use more sophisticated tools based in the cloud, but we still cover all the security aspects from the branch office to the data centers.

Cisco adds value by providing various solutions such as Umbrella and Duo. It's a combination. An existing firewall system only protects or controls flow on a daily basis in a normal production environment, but when it comes to security threats, we need to add more components. This is why Cisco is offering a wide range of products. Cisco is completely handling all the aspects from end to end with micro-segmentation, for instance. Identity Service Engine can handle the end-users' protection, and in the end, for the data center, we have different tools, and this is how we can cover end-to-end solutions.

The most valuable feature is IPS. It's a feature that's very interesting for tackling the most current attacks. We also have Umbrella with Secure DNS because all the threats nowadays are coming from email servers. We also have the DSA solution to limit the threats coming from ransomware. Combining all of these with Talos provides the best security solution.

It's a question of performance. When we talk about data centers, we are talking about 100 gig capacity or 400 gig capacity. When it comes to active-active solution clustering and resilience and performance, Cisco should look into these a little bit more.

We have been offering Cisco Security firewalls from the beginning of ASA, which was more than 20 years ago. We then started offering all types of firewalls, including the ones for data centers and then the next-generation firewalls.

The stability of the Cisco firewalls is the best in my opinion. We used to have ASA firewalls running for more than five years. Even when we did software upgrades, we had a very stable platform providing high performance without any outage, so customers can rely on Cisco firewall solutions.

For daily operations and projects, scalability is very important. Cisco provides a way of mixing and clustering firewalls to enhance scalability. We have many ways to scale, and as our clients grow, we can have the Cisco firewall solution grow as well.

We work with different vendors based on customer needs. We have a specification that we need to have a combination of different vendors, which is the best practice in the data center architecture and design. We cannot have one vendor at all levels, and we should have a combination. 

As a vendor, Cisco has a complete range of products to handle all the security aspects. When I look at the architecture design, the implementation of Cisco firewalls is the best. We have data centers based on Nexus for instance. We have routing components. All the compliance and architectural design requirements are met, and we can meet the customer needs according to the Cisco design guide and validation guide. When we look at the security aspect and the guidelines in terms of next-generation firewalls, in terms of redundancy on both sites or multi-sites, we have better performance with Cisco than other vendors in some cases.

Our customers use Cisco firewalls mainly in data centers, branch offices, and campus environments. They don't only use basic firewalls. They also use next-generation firewalls, which have email control, web filtering, and IPS. So, we have Cisco firewalling at all levels for providing the strongest protection policy.

The deployment of Cisco firewalls is very easy so far. We have the security expertise and all the knowledge that we need to deploy them and secure our customers' facilities. Networking and architecture are not really complicated, but you need a well-defined plan before doing implementation and going live.

Based on my 25 years of experience, 100% of our ROI expectations are met with Cisco products. The equipment is strong enough, stable, and well-developed. We have had the equipment running for more than five years without any outages, which leads to lesser costs of operations. There is also a reduction in cost in terms of upgrades or replacements, and this is why the ROI expectations have been met.

With the bundling mode with Duo licensing, it's now better. It's better to have one simplified global licensing mode, and this is what Cisco has done with bundling. The next-generation firewalls include a set of features such as filtering, emails, and IPS. This combination offers the best way for customers to manage their operating expenses.

One way to evaluate Cisco products is by looking at the experience. Gartner provides a good overview of Cisco products based on customer feedback, but the best way is by trying the product. Try-and-buy is a good model. Nowadays, all customers, enterprise service providers, and ISPs, are aware of Cisco solutions. They don't just purchase based on the technical specifications.

As a Cisco partner for over 25 years, we provide value by bringing our experience. We have worked so far with a different range of products, from the oldest Cisco firewall to the newest one, and we continue to promote them through design recommendation, capacity specification, deployment, engineering, high-level design, low-level design, migration, go-live, and maintenance and support. We cover the whole lifecycle of a product.

Our partnership with Cisco is a win-win partnership. Cisco provides us with the latest experiences and latest solutions, and on the other hand, we are doing business with our customers by using Cisco products, so it's a win-win relationship with Cisco, which leads to enhancing, promoting, and excelling in Cisco products. I would tell Cisco product managers to go fast with security platforms. Other vendors are going fast as well, and we need product managers to tackle the performance and capacity issues. It's not really an issue in itself, but it's something that can enhance and bring Cisco to the first place in security solutions.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten. The reason why I didn't give it a ten is that they have to make it better in terms of the capacity and performance for the 10 gig interface, 40 gig interface, and 100 gig interface, and in terms of how many ports and interfaces we have on appliances.

We're a partner so we work with all sorts of different end-users to deploy them for their use cases, including a lot of internet edge, some data center segmentation, east-west firewalls, and not so much in the cloud, but mostly on-prem today.

We use them for securing the internet perimeter and preventing malware from coming into the environment, as well as providing content filtering for CIPA compliance or other sorts of compliance out there. That's a big use case with our customers. 

The integration with the other Cisco products is something that a lot of our customers are looking forward to, with SecureX and ISE and Secure Endpoint. Things like that are a lot of the use cases that customers bring to us to help them solve. It integrates really well.

It's allowed them (our clients) to feel or know that their network is secure, and to put those guidelines in place, or those controls in place, to prevent their users from going out and unintentionally doing something dumb by clicking on the wrong link. It's able to prevent malware. And the Umbrella integration prevents them from getting to those websites if they do happen to be too busy and click on a phishing link or something like that.

As far as metrics or examples, I don't have any that I can specifically say off the top of my head. I will say I definitely have lots of happy customers that are running it and they feel it's a stable solution and one that they can rely on.

I'm a big fan of SecureX, Cisco's platform for tying together all the different security tools. It has a lot of flexibility and even a lot of third-party or non-Cisco integration. I feel like that's a really valuable tool.

From the Firepower solution, all the features that you would think of when you're thinking about a Firewall [are valuable], including some that I stated: content filtering, the IPS, IDS, and malware prevention. All of those are big use cases and great features that work well.

I've been using Cisco Firewalls and Cisco Firepower for at least 10 years.

It's stable. I have multiple clients that run it. There are always going to be some bugs and issues that we run into, but that's where their TAC definitely jumps in and helps and recommends code versions and things like that. Overall, the stability is pretty good.

In terms of scalability, they've got all different sizes of firewalls for different scales. Being able to understand how to size the firewalls appropriately is definitely key in that. That's where a partner can help, or even the customer Cisco account team can help with the scalability. They have the big multi-instance 9300 chassis down to the small 1000 series. There's a lot of scalability within the portfolio.

Cisco has a huge TAC organization. Experiences can differ. Sometimes it's really good, sometimes you get a newer TAC engineer who needs to start at step one to investigate the issue. But they're always there. They always pick up the phone and there's always a person, a TAC engineer to escalate to, who can provide really good support. You know that they've got someone in there. It's a matter of getting to the right individual.

They could improve by having more skilled, high-level engineers that are available around the clock. I know that's an easy thing to say and a hard thing to do. 

We have engineers that do the deployments. They're very skilled and have done many Firepower deployments. The methodology that Cisco has, the documentation they have out there on how to install it and how to configure it, are top-notch. That really helps us install it for a customer and get the customer up to speed on how well it works. A firewall is never a super simple thing to install and configure, but Cisco does a really good job with some of their automation tools and the documentation.

Usually, we assign a single engineer to a firewall deployment project and he's able to complete that. The amount of time it takes to deploy will vary. A small branch, may be several hours' worth of work to deploy a firewall. A large corporate site, obviously, that's going to be much more time-consuming, with lots of policies to configure and talk through with the customers and things like that. It varies depending on the size and application.

In terms of return on investment, I have multiple clients that have been through multiple generations of ASA to Firepower to the next generation of Firepower. They definitely find the return on investment there. They find it's a valuable product to have in their network. It definitely checks that ROI box for them.

Cisco is known as a premier product and it comes with a premier price point sometimes. Sometimes that makes it challenging for some customers to bite off. They see the value when we get into a proof-of-value scenario. Price points can tend to be high, but the new line of the 3000 series Firepowers definitely solves that issue and it's very attractive.

In terms of improving it, they're doing a really good job in a competitive landscape against some of the other vendors out there. The new Firepower 3000 series was a great addition to the portfolio and really stacks up, price-wise, well against some of the other vendors out there. A year ago, that was one thing that I would've commented on, but they've done a pretty good job of filling that niche.

There are some other good solutions out there. There are a lot of other successful firewall vendors. But when I compare a Palo Alto, or a Fortinet, or SonicWall, or something like that against Cisco, it's a tough comparison. Cisco has the ecosystem of security products that all tie in together, integrate really well together. There are lots of good dashboards and observability built into the product. That's where they've got a leg up on their competition. 

My advice for others looking to use the solution is to get [together] with a good partner, someone who's got engineers and architects that know the product well, and get their thoughts on it. We can always help compare and contrast against other options out there in the market. My job is knowing the market landscape and being able to help differentiate.

And always take advantage of a proof of value. It's always best to get that box into your network, see how it works with your particular traffic mix and your set of policies. I would always put a PoC/PoV as a checkbox in a buying decision.

I would rate the product somewhere between a seven or eight out of 10. Sometimes there are stability issues, as I referenced before, or just the general TAC support, while good, could be better. There's always room for improvement there. But I feel like it's a really good product that Cisco has definitely improved as time has gone on.

We mainly use it for site-to-site VPNs, connecting to other businesses. I work in manufacturing and hospitals.

We connect to remote networks: manufacturing-to-businesses and hospital-to-hospital.

It was deployed in our data center across multiple sites. At the hospital where I last worked, it was deployed at 18 sites, then we did VPNs between our hospital and clinics.

We don't have to worry about when something goes down. Instead of saying, "Oh my gosh, this went down and now we have a gap here," it has automatic failovers and built-in redundancy. So, it says, "I don't have a gap anymore." This is one less thing to worry about, which was a big benefit for me. If our security group comes back, and says, "Hey, this is down." Then, it is like, "Yeah, we got it covered."

Our security groups are always very adamant that things stay up. If something went down, they say, "Why did it go down? How do we prevent it?" Since resiliency is already built-in on its initial design, we don't have to go back in every time, and say, "Here, this is what we did. This is why it was done like this." Instead, it is just, "Yes, they blessed it, and it's approved," and we don't have to go back and keep reinventing the wheel every time.

I like the ASDM for the firewall because it is visual. With the command line, it is harder to visualize what is going on. A picture is worth a thousand words.

Sometimes, it is not easy to troubleshoot. You need to know where to go. It took me quite awhile. It's like, "Okay, if it doesn't go smoothly here, then go find the documentation." Once you do it, it is not so bad. However, it is sometimes a steep learning curve on the troubleshooting part of it.

I have been using this solution for more than 20 years.

I have never had any problems with stability. In the 20-plus years that I have used them, I don't think I have ever had a failure on them. They have always been rock-solid.

We haven't done much with scalability. We have always just done active standby. However, it scales once you figure out how to do it. If there are site-to-site VPNs within your own location, it is easier because there is a template, where it is, "Here, change this IP address. Change this IP address. There, it's done." 

Third-parties weren't bad. Once my side was done, then we could easily cut and paste it, and say, "Okay, here's what my side's configured for. If you have something that is not working, then you can tell me what it is and I will help you." However, we never really had anything that we couldn't fix. It was also possible to scale on the other side.

I haven't called tech support very often. When I did call them, they could tell me what the problem was. That is where I started learning, "Here are the commands that you should be using to debug this." They have been very helpful. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

I have used Palo Alto and Fortinet. We switched mainly because we were trying to unify all our products. Instead of using multiple systems, everything with the Cisco solution is end-to-end with different views of security. Some of them wanted to be diverse, keeping things separate. For others, it was easier if everything was just with one vendor. Also, if you are Cisco-centric, it is also easier.

Since I have been using this solution, I have seen it grow. When they first started doing it, it was more like, "Here's the command line. Here's what you got to do." Now, it's easier for a new engineer to come on, and say, "Okay. Here, you are going to start supporting this, and here is how you do it," which has made life easier. Since it is a repeatable thing, no matter which company you go to, it is the same. If you get somebody who is doing it on the other side of the VPN, it is a lot easier. So, I like the Cisco product. I have used several different ones, and it's like, "Well, this is the easiest one." It might be just the easiest one because I have used it long enough, but it is also a good product. It just helps us be consistent.

We did a lot of site-to-site VPNs. We also did a third-party, which is Palo Alto or something. Though, some of them were SonicWall. It is like, "Okay, I don't know how the site is configured, then I spend hours trying to troubleshoot a VPN." The more you use it, the easier it gets. It used to take days to do it. Whereas, the last one that I built took about 30 minutes. The more we use it, the better the outcome is and the faster we can do it. Now, I am not spending days building a VPN, which should only take 10 to 15 minutes.

There is ROI when you use it more.

Once you know what the product is, it is not that bad. Yes, it is expensive. When you try to get a license, it is like, "Well, I don't know which one of these I need. And, if I don't buy it now, then I will probably be back later. Now, I have to justify the money." Typically, you end up just buying everything that you don't use most of the time. It is one of those solutions where you get what you pay for. If you don't know what you need, just buy everything. We have additional licenses that we don't use.

Take your time with it. Actually, read the documentation. Don't just assume you know what stuff means since that will sometimes come back and bite you. I have done that too many times. If you go from version to version, it changes a little bit, and so it is like, "Well I don't know why it doesn't work." Then, you go read the notes, "Oh, yeah. This changed and it is done over here now."

Building more resiliency should be a priority, and it's going to take money to do that. So, you need to actually believe and invest in it. Otherwise, it's an idea. It's great, because we all want redundancy, but nobody typically wants to spend the money to do it. Or, they want to do it as cheaply as possible. It's like, "Okay, I can do that," but you're going to have more gaps. Then, it is not really worth it. Therefore, invest the money the first time and do it right.

I would rate it as nine out of 10.