Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

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.

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 it for our VPN requirements. We wanted to allow people to work from home and we used the ASA to create VPNs through AnyConnect at the endpoints.

It has 

• allowed people to work from home when they otherwise couldn't
• improved response times when there are fires that need to be put out when people are not onsite.

The VPN feature is the most valuable to us because it accomplishes the task well. We're able to do everything we need to do.

I would like to see them update the GUI so that it doesn't look like it was made in 1995.

I've been using the Cisco ASA Firewall for between one and two years.

It's been very stable. I don't think we've ever had an issue with it failing entirely.

It scales well. We've had no issues ramping things up.

We're going to expand our usage of it. We rolled it out to about 200 users and now we're going to expand that to about 1,000 users out of our 3,000-user base. It has been really good.

The tech support is excellent. I've always gotten really good tech support from Cisco.

Positive

We did not have a previous solution.

The pricing could always be cheaper.

The solution always requires maintenance. I have about two people who are the "experts" and they help maintain it pretty well.

Cyber security resilience has been extremely important for our organization because of our customers' demands for security. The ASA has really helped to accomplish that with the VPN. My advice to leaders who are looking to build resilience is don't go cheap, and make sure you have backup solutions and high availability.

It's a good, robust firewall and VPN solution, with lots of knobs to turn. It is effective at what it does.

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 primarily use the solution for configuring the firewall.

It's an almost perfect solution.

The configuration is very easy.

The management aspect of the product is very straightforward.

The solution offers very good protection. 

The user interface itself is very nice and quite intuitive.

It would be ideal if the solution offered more integration capabilities with other vendors. For example, if you had a web security appliance, it would be great to be able to integrate everything in order to better report security events.

While I can't think of specific features I'd like improved, overall, they could do more to continue to refine the solution.

It would be nice if you didn't have to configure using a command-line interface. It's a bit technical that way.

We first started using the solution in 2015. It's been five years at this point.

The solution is very stable. We've found it to be extremely reliable. There are not bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The solution can scale well. that's not a problem at all. If a company needs to expand it to fit their needs, they can do so.

We've been in contact with technical support on multiple occasions and each time we've had a good experience. We're satisfied with their level of support. They are fairly good.

I have nothing bad to say about the deployment. It went pretty well, and we can configure everything as we need to.

I don't really handle the billing, so I'm unsure of the pricing. I work more on the technical side. 

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with Cisco.

It's a very good solution. I'd recommend it to other users.

Overall, I'd rate it seven out of ten.

Although I can't speak to the pricing, I've found the solution works quite well for us. I'd rate it higher if it could integrate a bit better with other solutions.

I can't put Cisco on the firewall when the security landscape has changed so much in the past five to ten years. We are doing a lot more in the next generation of firewalls. We had a legacy classic firewall before we went to Firepower, and we spent a lot less time on that firewall, but we are spending more time on the Firepower because we are utilizing a lot of the features that are available in Firepower that were not available in the previous firewall that we had. I'm not going to say that we're spending less time, but we're gaining more value.

Another benefit has been user integration. We try to integrate our policies so that we can create policies based on active users. We can create policies based on who is accessing a resource instead of just IP addresses and ports.

If I were to have been asked a few weeks ago, I would have said threat prevention was the most valuable feature, but the world is changing a lot, so my favorite features a few years ago might not be my favorite features today.

The visibility the solution gives when doing deep packet inspection can be complex. I really like the visibility, but it's not always intuitive to use. I also help other customers. We are a contracting company that implements their solutions, and I've found that it's not always easy to get everyone to utilize some of the visibility features. But for me personally, I think they're very valuable. 

The ease of use when it comes to managing Cisco Firepower has a lot of room for improvement. When monitoring a large set of firewall policies, the user interface could be lighter. It's sometimes heavy in use, and there could be improvements there. I know they're trying to make improvements.

It's mainly the UI and the management parts that need improvement. The most impactful feature when you're using it is the user interface and the user experience.

We were an early adopter when Firepower first came out. I've been using Cisco firewalls for the last two decades.

For newer hardware models, the stability is good. We've tried to run Firepower on some of the legacy-supported hardware as well, but with the stability issues, they are not as good. If I were to judge based on the hardware that I have, I'd say it's good. I haven't had any issues with the stability on my platform.

We just recently enabled Snort 3 so I'm evaluating the functionality. That's what we've considered, but we haven't done any performance testing. Our company would qualify as a small to medium business company. The average office environment is about 100 to 200 people. Performance-wise, my company is about 120 people.

Scalability is really not relevant. I know there are features that address some of those parts, like clustering and stuff, but that's really not applicable in my use cases.

The support is eight to nine out of ten. You can't blame them for any faults of the prototypes, but the support has been really good and really helpful when we had any issues.

I have hands-on experience in both Fortinet and Palo Alto. So if I were to compare this to Palo Alto, for example, I would say that the user interface in Palo Alto is a lot better. But the reason that I'm working with Firepower is that we have a Cisco network as well, and Cisco ISE. We're trying to integrate different Cisco solutions. We're trying to utilize the ecosystem benefits where I can connect my Cisco Firepower to ISE and have it talk to the App Cloud. There's a benefit of utilizing Cisco Firepower in conjunction with our other Cisco solutions.

Ease of management is similar with Cisco and Fortinet, I would say similar, but it's easier in Palo Alto.

I recently deployed a similar solution at a customer's premises, and that setup was straightforward.

The steps are fairly documented and the documentation and guides on Cisco are straightforward. You know what you're expected to configure, and it's easy to get up, running, and started. It takes some more time to check everything and get everything as you want to have it, but getting started and getting connectivity and starting to create policies was easy to do and didn't take a very long time.

It took two to four hours, including some upgrades.

My main advice would be to utilize all the guides and documentation available from Cisco publicly and not trying to implement it using legacy thinking. Don't try to just replace something else you have. If you have a next-gen firewall, you want to try to utilize what you're getting, and getting the most out of a firewall. There are some great guides and documentation on Cisco that explains what you can do and how you can do it.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

I use Cisco ASA Firewall at my company for network security.

Cisco ASA Firewall could improve by adding more advanced features such as web filtering, which is available in the next-generation firewalls. However, the Cisco ASA Firewall I am using could be old and these features have been updated.

I have been using this solution for approximately two years.

The stability needs improvement.

I have found the Cisco ASA Firewall scalability could improve.

I have not contacted technical support. There is a lot of information on the internet for troubleshooting. All you need to do is use a search engine and you will find the information you are looking for easily.

They can improve by adding a public troubleshooting process.

I have previously used Fortinet firewalls that I have found to be better.

I would not recommend Cisco.

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall a six out of ten.

We use this solution for advanced IPS, IDS, advanced malware protection, and web filtering.

The most valuable features of this solution are advanced malware protection, IPS, and IDS.

web filtering needs to improve because cisco firepower sync with bright cloud website for the website category. sometimes your URL is falling in the wrong category because of the bright cloud. so if you want to change the category you will have to drop the mail to the bright cloud and they will take action and it's a very long procedure. 

more than 2 years

This is a very reliable solution.

I have extended my Cisco solution and did not have any trouble.

We have more than 400 users and we plan to increase usage.

The initial setup is very simple to deploy in the Egyptian network. It takes two to three days to deploy but if you are implementing AMP then it will take an extra one or two days.

I am happy with the product in general, including the pricing.

We evaluated a Sophos firewall but when I checked the reviews, I found that Sophos did not rate as well in terms of IPS, IDS, and malware protection.

Cisco utilizes BrightCloud for URL filtering. Web filtering is the main problem with this product.

My advice to anybody who is considering this product is that if they want good security, compared to other offerings such as those by Check Point and Palo Alto, then they should implement Cisco Firepower.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I am using the solution as a firewall.

I like the IPS feature, it is the most valuable.

I do not like the assembly of this solution. For example, they should combine FirePOWER into one solution.

I have used Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Check Point previously and I prefer the process of everything working together. We are in the process of moving on to Fortinet from this solution.

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall a six out of ten.