Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

This solution is running behind the infrastructure and behind the hypervisor itself. We have two firewalls and two nodes in the cluster environment.

This solution is suitable for both cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments. I have implemented a cloud project, and one hybrid as well. The hybrid was between a public and a local cloud.

The Cisco security rules are very strict and very strong.

I like the Cisco ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager), which is the configuration interface for the Cisco firewall.

When comparing this solution to other products, the Fortinet UTM bundle has some better features in their most receive product. For example, there are better configuration features, the Sandbox is better, and so is the web censoring. These are currently in the Cisco solution, but they are better in Fortinet. The Sandbox and the Web Censoring in this solution need to be improved.

This solution has to be more secure from the cloud. The current trend is moving towards private cloud and hybrid cloud, so it is very important to consider the cloud security aspects when the solution is installed. This includes things such as IoT and the existence of user connectivity on the cloud.

The stability of this solution is great. The Cisco name and hardware are enough. The product is used in tier four data centers, so it is very trusted and very dependable. If you compare Cisco to others, the high industry and high workload have gone to Cisco. Stability is very, very high.

This is a scalable solution.

In terms of the number of users, it depends on the customer. A small customer may have less than twenty users. A larger customer can be complicated by having different branches with different users and different security rules. This means that you can reach up to the hundreds. 

Technical support for this solution is good. Most of the technicians are technical people that have certifications such as CCNA, CCNP, CCIE, and CCISP. I think that they are well knowledged and well educated about the Cisco culture, industry, and products.

The Cisco distributors are everywhere, even if I'm speaking about the Middle East. I can find distributors everywhere in Dubai. Here in Dubai, the support is great, including for firmware updates, and even replacing the hardware when the firewalls crash.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

The deployment does not take much time. It is just a matter of installing the firewall and configuring the basic system to get it up and running. That's it.

There are, of course, different models of deployment, like deploying customers, that have to be considered. However, for the most part, deployment time is not an issue at all.

The pricing for Cisco products is higher than others, but Cisco is a very good, strong, and stable technology. If we compare Huawei or FortiGate or others then the prices are lower, but the higher Cisco price is acceptable because of the stability, trust, and reliability.

This is my first recommendation for firewalls, and my second recommendation is Fortinet FortiGate.

This is the number one firewall product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I deployed the Cisco Secure Firewall at the Internet Edge for the most part.

We use the solution for deep packet inspection, Internet Edge functionality, IDS, and IDP.

The solution’s GUI could be better.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for six years.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a scalable solution that allows you to add capacity.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

The solution’s pricing is competitive.

I rate the solution's ease of management and configuration an eight out of ten. I would recommend Cisco Secure Firewall to other users based on what they want it for and a combination of price point and supportability.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We deploy the firewall on the customer end and the customer can facilitate the VPN for their clients. We use Cisco Umbrella to secure their network and their endpoints.

We only work with Cisco products. We have been working with Cisco products for many years. In that way, we save time and we don't want to change to other vendors.

The security features are the most valuable. My customers find the security products very useful because nowadays there are many threats from the internet and other malicious users. The security products really help.

So far, Cisco Secure for securing infrastructure from end-to-end so that we can detect and remediate threats is good enough.

It should be easier for the IT management or the admin to configure products. For example, the firewall products are not very straightforward for many users. They should be easier to configure and should be more straightforward. 

Some competitors are very easy to configure, you don't need to spend a lot of time reading the documents and learning them.

I have been using Cisco products for ten years. 

The support is good. Sometimes it has a long waiting time. The waiting time depends on the products. For some products, for example, the Data Center solutions, you have to wait for an hour, even though they said that they escalated the case. 

Positive

The initial deployment should be more straightforward. It's not that straightforward at the moment.

The licensing is not good, it's confusing. I'm an engineer so I don't care about the actual price that much but the licensing part is confusing.

We've evaluated other solutions. We've been consulted to use competitors' products. There are things that are good with those competitors, but everything has two sides.

We choose Cisco because we are a Cisco partner, so we only recommend Cisco products. They believe in us, so we have a good relationship with them. 

I would rate Cisco Secure products an eight out of ten. 

My advice would be to use them. 

We use ASA firewalls to limit traffic between the networks.

We use an on-premises deployment model.

I like that it is easy to change the settings.

Cisco ASDM is a problem because it is old.

I've been working with it for a year, but my company has been using Cisco firewalls for 15 years.

We use Cisco Secure Firewall ASA 5506 and 5508.

Cisco Secure Firewall ASA's stability is good.

I recently had a case with technical support that took a couple of weeks to resolve. We use Cisco Smart Licensing and are not connected to the net. It was a big problem to get it to work. Cisco's technical support did not know how it worked, and I had to tell them how it worked. We haven't had interactions with technical support where there were more positive outcomes.

On a scale from one to ten with ten being the best, I would rate technical support at two.

Negative

The initial deployment is easy for this solution.

Overall, I would rate this solution at seven out of ten because Cisco ASDM needs to be updated.

We use this solution to provide firewall solutions for clients. We have been transitioning from ASA to FTD, since FTD has come out with new versions or upgrades.

This solution is very flexible and offers different functionality including firewalls and VPN connectivity. It checks a lot of boxes. It is an easy solution to learn how to use and the positive impact on our organization was apparent as soon as we implemented it. 

The CLI is the most valuable feature. We are moving towards FTD, which is more GUI based. The value of this solution lies in the fact that it is a standard platform that's been around for years and is always improving. This is important to us due to the necessity of ensuring cyber security. 

We are replacing ASA with FTD which offers many new features. 

We have been using this solution since 2009. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a very scalable solution as long as you get the right hardware. 

Over the last two years, getting a response from the support engineers has been challenging. This could be due to the impact of COVID. 

We sell a lot of different firewall varieties including SonicWall, Cisco ASA, and FTD. 

When setting up the solution for our clients, we ensure they have the bandwidth they need and consider what their throughput needs are. The solution does require maintenance in terms of patching. This requires approximately six team members depending on how many moving parts there are for clients. 

We have seen a return on investment using this solution based on the fact that we are spending less money overall. 

The pricing for this solution is pretty fair. 

If it is possible, I would advise others to try out a demo with Cisco to test their firewalls. The biggest lesson I learned from using this solution is that there are many ways to achieve the same outcome. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution for company security and to define access and connection between different devices.

This solution made our organization more secure and gave us better control.

The access list is the most valuable feature of this solution. 

This solution could be more granular and user-friendly.

I have been using this solution for 12 years. 

This is a stable solution. 

This is a scalable solution. 

The technical support for this solution is good. I would rate it a seven out of ten.

Neutral

We use this solution together with Palo Alto, depending on the use case. 

The initial setup is straightforward and the deployment only takes a few hours. Our deployment strategy was to keep it simple. A large deployment of this solution can require up to 10 resources. 

The solution does require maintenance and we use an external service provider for this maintenance. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

We use them for VPNs and as firewalls, of course. We wanted to protect the network and have secure communication with our peers.

They secure the network and ensure our network is always available.

They are easy to maintain.

I would like to see them add more next-generation features so that you don't need a lot of appliances to do just one task. It should be a single solution.

I have been using Cisco ASA Firewalls for nine years.

In terms of stability, it is a really good product and platform. Overall, it's great.

It's not really cost-effective when it comes to scalability. It is a really expensive product if you go to the modular firewalls. You need to get new appliances to get new features.

Tech support is good but it could be improved on some points.

Neutral

I have used Fortinet, Check Point, and Palo Alto firewalls. Most of those solutions have everything integrated into them so you don't need multiple appliances. You get a single solution for your network. It would be better to have a centralized firewall, from Cisco, that can do everything.

The initial deployment was straightforward. The last implementation of an ASA took us about one to two weeks.

Our implementation strategy was to have good architecture and to have all the requirements for the project beforehand. Everything went really smoothly because of that.

We needed four or five people for deployment, including field techs and network engineers.

For clean and easy protection of an enterprise, it is a really good product. It can be also deployed as a virtualized solution in data centers.

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.