Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

We use it for content management and filtering. We wanted to separate DMZ traffic from normal customer traffic. We were also looking to set up portals for outside interests that needed to come in. We have our firewall set up for VPN and, with COVID breaking out, that became more important. We also use it for remote access control.

It improved our security. It keeps the outsiders on the outside and enables us to monitor the content that's going out from within the organization.

The ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager) which is the graphical user interface, works out, and Cisco keeps it current.

Cisco still has a lot of work to do. You can convert an ASA over to a Firepower, but the competitors, like Palo Alto and Juniper, are coming in. And believe it or not, they are a little bit more intuitive. Cisco has a little bit more work to do. They're playing catch up.

There is also content filtering. The bad actors are so smart nowadays, that they can masquerade as the data for a given port, and they can actually transfer data through that port. The only thing that the older firewalls know about is the port. They can't read the data going across it. That's where content filtering comes in, like Palo Alto has, with next-generation firewalls.

I have been using Cisco ASA Firewalls from the beginning, when they moved over from the PIX.

They're pretty reliable. Even from a hardware perspective, we haven't lost any power supplies or the like. An ASA works until we remove it. The maintenance is very minimal. 

It's very scalable. Every organization sets it up differently, but we've been able to perform upgrades with minimal service disruption. We have ASAs in multiple locations.

Being a government-supported organization, the technical support is great. They send us equipment. It's top-notch.

Cisco has been a leader in firewalls, and the US government primarily chooses Cisco first, before it chooses competitors.

We have a variety of providers from Juniper to Palo Alto, et cetera. But the Cisco GUI is pretty consistent, so most individuals catch on. But when it comes to the Firepower, we're going to need some more training on that, as we're upgrading and moving to the Firepower.

I like the ASA product, maybe because I'm an old guy, more so than the transition to the Firepower. The ASAs have worked ever since the PIX days and they work very reliably. Even with the upgrades, your rules don't change. That's true even with a major OS upgrade.

Things are changing and the ASAs are becoming dated. People want content filtering and so on now.

We use it as a next-generation firewall for the perimeter. I generally use it on-premises.

It helps protect my servers from hackers.

The most valuable feature is the Intrusion Prevention System.

Most of the features don't work well, and some features are missing as well. The completeness of the solution is most important for me. It should be complete, but some parts are missing. Cisco should improve it.

Every part of the features should be developed. That includes the next-generation firewall parts, such as application recognition.

I have been using Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewalls for about five years. I am an integrator and reseller of multiple vendors' products.

The stability is getting better day by day, but I would expect a more stable solution, to be honest. It is stable now, but we have solutions that are more stable.

Technical support is nice, but most of the limitations or problems are caused by the product itself. There's nothing that a technical engineer can do about them.

The licensing package is good, but the licensing fee should be decreased.

I have used CheckPoint, Palo Alto, Juniper, and FortiGate. The Palo Alto solution is complete. 

If I choose Cisco Firepower it is mostly because of its integration with other solutions. When the customer has several Cisco solutions, I put Cisco Firepower on top of them. But if the customer has a complex environment, I generally prefer other solutions.

For specific needs, like VPN, you can use Cisco Firepower. But our expectation is for a next-generation Firewall or UTM solution that includes all the features. I cannot recommend Firepower to others, at the moment, as a unified threat management solution.

Generally, if the customer's number of users is greater than 100, that's when the Cisco solution is more likely to be effective.

Maintenance of the solution requires one or two people.

We use it for our data center. We have clusters of the solution to protect the equipment in our data center. We also use it for site-to-site VPN hubs.

Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall made our firewall response much faster when trying to respond to any services or networks that stand out. It makes us very responsive when any of the visualized logs are blocked in real-time.

The most valuable feature would be ASDM. The ability to go in, visualize and see the world base in a clear and consistent manner is very powerful.

The ability to better integrate with other tools would be an improvement.

I have been using this solution for six years.

It is highly stable.

It is highly scalable. It has some limitations, but for medium to large-sized deployments, it is excellent.

Technical support is outstanding. You can get same-day support.

We previously used Juniper SRX. We switched because we have a contract with Cisco. This was the cheaper option and was faster.

We have very much seen an ROI in terms of the saving on man time and the costs of standing up new equipment. Compared to what we had before, Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is faster.

I would rate this solution a nine on a scale from one to ten.

In the new design, I put Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall as a LAN segment and as the data center firewall. In the old design, I just used FortiGate Firewall for configurations, and we are going to replace it. The complete solution will be replaced with a two-tiered data center.

I like that Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is reliable. Support is also good. 

We only have an issue with time sync with Cisco ASA and NTP. If the time is out of sync, it will be a disaster for the failover.

I have been using Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall for about 11 years. 

Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is a stable solution. 

Scalability is good, but just like the issue with Palo Alto and Fortigate, there is also an issue with Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall. I can configure it easily because of my Cisco background, but others in my team aren't comfortable with it.

Technical support is good. They were both fast and reliable and quick in making decisions. We faced specific issues, and tech support was efficient and provided an immediate solution. Other firewall vendors are slow to respond, and I'm not satisfied. It's also easy to Google and find solutions to our problems. We can't do that for other firewalls.

On a scale from one to five, I would give technical support a five.

Positive

We used FortiGate Firewall, but we are replacing it with Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall because we had issues with HP solutions. We also switched because I am Cisco certified, and my background and expertise are in Cisco.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

We have seen a return on our investment. 

I will tell potential users that the data center firewall is a good solution. But most of the companies are using other firewalls like Palo Alto and FortiGate. Most of the design architects prefer the parameters of the firewalls like we prefer the data center firewall.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall a ten.

It is hard to control the bandwidth of end-users with a Cisco Firewall. That is the main issue I've faced. I used Mikrotik for many years for this very reason. Mikrotik has the option to set a bandwidth restriction for a single IP or complete segments. Cisco should add this option to their firewall.

We have been using Cisco for about five years. All our products, switches, routers, and firewalls are Cisco devices.

Cisco Firewall's scalability is fine. 

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall eight out of 10. Cisco offers a great educational series to train users on their devices.

One of the things that we have solved the most with this solution is the P2P connection that we have with different clients. It gives us greater connection security with good management of the configured rules. 

Likewise, it has made it easier for us to have this type of equipment under monitoring, and, since we have implemented them, we have not been presented with any performance problems in the equipment as they have not presented CPU or RAM saturation or that for some reason it fails without any cause. We all have them managed and monitored. We always receive an email notifying us if there's something that the equipment has detected as well.

The ASA firewalls have undoubtedly helped us to improve our infrastructure throughout the corporation and currently we have just over 50 firewalls - all of them in different parts of Mexico. 

This infrastructure has been improved since, in our corporation, we handle the dynamic EIGRP protocol, which Cisco owns, and this solution has given us a geo-redundancy in our company. In case of presenting a problem with a firewall or a link, it performs an immediate convergence where end-users do not detect a failure, helping us to maintain a 99.99% operational level at all times.

I am very happy to use this type of Cisco equipment in my infrastructure. It has given us the most value is the management of dynamic routing, in this case, EIGRP. This protocol, together with a series of additional configurations, has helped us to maintain an automatic redundancy in all our infrastructure, keeping us with very high numbers of operability and without failures that take more than 1 minute or that have not been resolved automatically. With this solution, we only speak with our suppliers either for a link or equipment report, and even if the box or circuit is out of operation, the operation continues to work without problems.

Today, ASA firewalls are leaving the market and are being replaced by firepower equipment - a technology with which I am not very familiar. However, in the training or research, I have done on this new product, I see that it has many additional tools such as centralization of the administration through a single team (in the case the firepower management). It is something that we do not have, yet we are already considering it since this type of technology will help us to have better management and better administration of the equipment through a single platform. The management of additional services with this new module will certainly help us to have the internet network much more secure with connections to the outside.

I've used the solution for more than seven years.

The solution is great in terms of stability.

The scalability is great.

Technical support is great.

We previously used Fortigate.

The initial setup was not complex.

We handled the implementation in-house. 

We've seen an 80% ROI.

Cisco is not cheap, however, it is worth investing in these technologies.

We always evaluate various other options.

We are a payment switch and we deal with cardholder data and information. Our primary goal is to ensure the security of customers' payment data, that they are protected.

Our security maturity is now at a good level compared to the past. To be accepted to drive Visa and Mastercard, you have to pass security assessment audits and we have managed to pass all of them now, for some years.

Apart from our firewall, we have three security tools. We have a NAC, we have a SIEM, and our syslogs.

It's easy now because we have many Cisco devices in a central point. We don't need to log in to each device and apply rules to them. We can do it from the management control and apply them to the specific firewalls that we want to apply them to.

In addition, compared to our previous firewall solution, the security is much better. Through our monitoring, we now see all the information that we require on security, in terms of PCI. We can see exactly what is happening in our environment. We know what is going, what is going in and out. If an incident happens, it provides a notification so that we can do an analysis.

Web filtering is a big improvement for us. The previous version we used, the AC520, did not have that feature included. It was not very easy for us, especially because the environment had to be isolated and we needed to get updates from outside, such as Windows patches. That feature has really helped us when we are going outside to pull those patches.

Another important feature for us is user access. Now, we can base access on rules and specify that this or that user has privilege on the NG firewall. That was not available before. 

The IDS also makes it easy to detect abnormal traffic. When it sees such traffic in the environment, it sends a notification.

We have been using Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall for about two months.

The solution is stable. It's not hanging. With the firewalls from Cisco we are not facing a situation where devices are hanging because of too much traffic.

The scalability is fine.

We're getting support but there's a big delay until we get a response from their technical team. They're in the USA and we're in Africa, so that's the difficulty. When they're in the office, they respond.

We migrated from Cisco AC520 to the Cisco NGFW. We have also used HPE and IBM switches, as well as FortiGate firewalls. We are now completely Cisco.

Previously, we were also using AlienVault and it was easy to integrate with Cisco devices.

The initial setup is 50/50, between straightforward and complex. Migrating from Cisco to another Cisco product is okay, but migrating to Cisco from other network devices, like an IBM switch, is a bit tricky. You can't test the configuration to see if it's the same as what you're going to. But we managed with support from Cisco.

It took a month to complete the deployment.

Our implementation strategy was based on not upgrading everything at the same time. It was phased. We deployed a specific device and then we monitored everything to make sure everything looked okay, and then we moved on to the next one.

It requires a minimum of two people for deployment and maintenance, from our network and security teams.

We used internal resources with support from Cisco.

We have gotten exactly what we're looking for, based on the company's requirements.

The pricing is high.

Cisco NGFW's ability to provide visibility into threats is good compared to other solutions. The visibility is quite impressive and gives us what we're looking for, based on our security requirements.

The scalability, the performance of the devices, the features, and the support, when looking at them combined, make the product a nine out 10.

We're planning the deployment of Cisco ISE soon, to be like our NAC.

We provide IT solutions. We provide solutions to our customers based on their requirements. We support them from the beginning and do the installation and configuration in the head office and front office.

We installed Cisco ASA to support a customer in a WAN environment. They used it for site-to-site VPN and remote VPN. They used it for accessing remote office locations via the remote VPN feature. They had Cisco ASA 5500.

It made our customer's network more secure. They also have customers outside the office, and they are able to use the remote VPN feature to log in securely.

The high-availability and remote VPN features are most valuable.

It is easy to configure. It has a GUI and a CLI.

It doesn't have Layer 7 security.

I used this solution for maybe a year.

It is stable.

It is scalable.

For any issues, we contact the local support. They are very easy to deal with.

I have also worked with Fortigate.

It was easy to configure. The site-to-site VPN configuration didn't take too much time. It was complete in three to four hours.

Its price is moderate. It is not too expensive.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a nine out of 10.