Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

Our primary use case is filtering as we have a filtering strategy. We are trying to filter a destination and do not have a centralized filtering strategy. So we have MX and on the other end filtering on the firewalls, but not in the middle. This means that both ends of the connectivity do all the security on the firewalls.

The most valuable MX features are the ease of deployment and a great dashboard. The most valuable Cisco Secure Firewall features are options, features, and ease of deployment because it's an appliance.

Cisco Secure Firewall's integration with cloud providers has room for improvement. We could do more in terms of integration, for example, if we had a tag on an instance. 

I would also like to see tag rules with cloud objects. This would be a great improvement for Cisco Secure Firewall. 

As far as MX is concerned, I would like to see more interconnection. We would also like to be able to do BGP.

Our organization has been using this solution for about 10 years.

We had MX when it was launched initially and it was not as stable as it is now. The stability of the solution has improved. 

I would rate the stability of this solution three years ago a 3 and today's stability an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

I think that their tech support is quite good. I would rate them an eight, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

We have used different types of solutions. We had Cisco ASA for about 10 years, and then we switched to an on-site firewall to MX from Meraki, Cisco. For our cloud, we have Cisco Services Routers.

The migration to the cloud has been a lot of work. Not all of our systems were compliant with being on the cloud so we had to work on some applications and delete some of them. For the old systems, we had to do extra work but for the newer systems, it was fine. The migration took around 18 months to migrate 99%.

We had more than 2,000 on-prem firewall sites.

Cisco helped with the migration to the cloud with the migration tool. Migrating MX was really easy and the tools helped us to migrate from the old ASA we had to the new MX. The cloud, firewalling, and CSR helped us from the data center on-premise approach to the cloud because at the time we didn't have a lot of experience with the cloud. It was easy to use the Cisco appliances in that space.

I think that this solution has saved our IT staff time because of the ease of deployment. When I first started as a network engineer, it took a whole day to configure a firewall because of all the particularities you could potentially have at a site.

I think that this solution saved our organization's time because security saves money because. At the end of the day, firewalls block threats.

This solution helped with the consolidation of tools as we had all the observability tools in the solutions. Some 10 years ago we all had third-party solutions doing the observability. Now, we have the whole package and not only the firewall.

We choose Cisco 10 or 20 years ago mostly because it was a market-leading solution. I also think it's because of MX's user-friendly solution that you can get on board easily. As far as CSA goes, I believe it's because you have a lot of features on the firewalls and it's the stability of course.

We use ASA Firewall to protect 250 to 300 devices, including workspaces and servers.

All the rules are secure and we haven't had a significant malware attack in the five years that we've been using ASA Firewall. It is a tremendous improvement for our network. However, I can't quantify the benefits in monetary terms. 

I like the ease of administration and the overall speed of processing web traffic. The modules help protect and administer web traffic. ASA Firewall's deep packet inspection gives me visibility regardless of whether I have the agent installed on all the workstations. I can see incoming web traffic and control access to suspicious or dangerous sites. I can apply a filter or make rules to restrict categories of websites.

Setting firewall network rules should be more straightforward with a clearer graphical representation. The rule-setting method seems old-fashioned. The firewall and network rules are separate from the Firepower and web access rules. You can access the firewall rules through the Cisco ASDM application, not the web client. I'm using an older version, and I'm sure this issue will improve in the next edition.

Micro-segmentation is somewhat complex. It's not easy, but it's not too difficult, either, so it's somewhere in the middle. I used micro-segmentation for 10 or 15 VLANs, and ASA Firewall acts as a router for those VLANs. The visibility offered by micro-segmentation is pretty poor. It's not deep enough. 

I have been using ASA Firewall for five years.

ASA Firewall is a stable solution.

I don't think ASA Firewall is very scalable. It depends on the models and the license. However, it's pretty simple to update and upgrade the models, so I would say it's moderately scalable. 

I worked with Cisco's technical support from the beginning and it was excellent. I rate Cisco support 10 out of 10. 

Positive

Previously, I used some Linux Servers with a software firewall for 20 years.
It was a Microsoft firewall, but I don't remember the name. It was a server that I had to install on the gateway.

Deploying ASA Firewall was complex because I needed to install an ESXi machine to implement the Firepower module. That was relatively complicated, and it took two or three days to complete the installation and verification.

I worked with a consultant who sold me the product and helped me with minor issues as needed. 

In the past, the company experienced multiple ransomware attacks, but we haven't seen any since installing ASA Firewall. It was a huge improvement. It's hard to quantify that in financial terms, but we had 40 or 50 machines damaged. 

I'm not sure precisely how much ASA Firewall costs, but I know it's a little more expensive than other solutions. I rate it seven out of ten for affordability. 

I learned about Fortinet and Palo Alto firewalls. I think FortiGate is easier to set up and manage. At the same time, Cisco firewalls are pretty secure and reliable. I think the ASA Firewall is in the top five.

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall eight out of ten. 

It's deployed in multiple ways, depending on the use case. Generally speaking, we have them as edge firewalls, but I have some customers who use them as data center firewalls, and some customers who use them as VPN firewalls. And in some places, they're the east-west firewalls, as they would be called in a core network. We do have some that are for cloud firewalling, that we're using in Azure and AWS. But generally speaking, they're deployed as edge firewalls and on-prem.

In some cases that I'm aware of, when moving from specific platforms like Check Point, Firepower has offered a much easier way of working with the platform and deploying changes. For the customer, it's a lot easier in the newer platform than it was in the previous one.

I've done network assessments, where we wanted to get visibility into all flows. I used Firepower boxes for some of those, where we tapped a line and let Firepower see all the traffic. It was incredibly helpful in picking up all of the flows of data. As a result, I was able to give information to the customer, saying, "This is what it's doing and this is what it's seeing in your network." I find it very helpful to get all that type of data. It's got a lot more information than NetFlow-type systems.

There have also been use cases where I'm doing east-west and north-south in the same firewall box. That is possible with SGTs and SD-Access and Firepower. That ability has been critical in some of the designs we've done. A scenario would be that we have an underlay, a corporate network, and a guest network VRF-routed zone; big macro security zones. We are doing micro-segmentation at the edge with SD-Access, but the macro-segmentation between the zones is handled by the firewall. Because we didn't want to split up our east-west and north-south, because there really wasn't a budget for it, they're on the same box. That box is able to do both flows that go towards the internet and flows that go between the different interfaces on the firewall. We're using SGTs in those policies and we're able to extend the logic from the SD-Access environment into the firewall environment, which creates a very unified approach to security.

We're also able to implement dynamic policies for dynamic environments with 7.0. That's becoming more and more important every day. IPs are becoming less important; names and locations and where things live in the cloud mean things are becoming a lot more fluid in the world of security. It's very helpful to have objects and groups that can follow that fluidity along, as opposed to me trying to do it old school and static everything up. No one has time for that. Dynamic policy capabilities enable tight integration with Secure Workload at the application workload level. The IP is less relevant and the application or the VMware tag can be tied to a specific ruleset. It's very helpful to be able to have it be so dynamic now. We're using more and more of those dynamic group concepts.

When it comes to the solution’s tags for dynamic policy implementation in cloud environments, VMware is the primary one I'm seeing these days, but I expect Azure to pick up significantly. The use of these tags for dynamic policy implementation in cloud environments simplifies things. We don't have to have so much static stuff pinned up. We can just have a single rule that says, "If it's this tag, then do this," as opposed to, "If it's this IP and this IP and this other IP, then you're allowed to do this thing." By disconnecting it from the IP address, we've made it very flexible.

It may sound a bit strange, but one of the most valuable features of Firepower 7.0 is the "live log" type feature called Unified Event Viewer. That view has been really good in helping me get to data faster, decreasing the amount of time it takes to find information, and allowing me to fix problems faster. I've found that to be incredibly valuable because it's a lot easier to get to some points of data now.

Also, the new UI is always getting better from version to version. In the beginning, when it came to managing Cisco Secure Firewall, it wasn't always the easiest, but with 6.7 and 7.0, it's gotten easier and easier. It's a pretty easy system to manage. It's especially beneficial for people who are familiar with ASA logic because a lot of the Firepower logic is the same. For those people, they're just relearning where the buttons are, as opposed to having to figure out how to configure things.

I've used the backup VTI tunnel and that's a feature that lets me create some redundancy for my route-based stuff and it works pretty well. I haven't had any issues with it

Firepower 7.0 also has fantastic Dynamic Access Policies that allow me to replicate a lot of the configurations that were missing and that made it difficult to move off the old ASA platform for some customers. The addition of that capability has removed that limitation and has allowed me to move forward with implementing 7.0. 

Snort 3 is one of the biggest points on Firepower 7.0. I've been using Snort 3 for quite a while and, while I don't have a ton of customers on it, I do have some who are running on it and it's worked out pretty well. In their use cases, there wasn't a lot of risk, so that's why we started with it. Snort 3 has some huge advantages when it comes to performance and policy and how it's applying things and processing the flows.

Dynamic Objects have also been really critical. They're very valuable. Version to version, they're adding a lot more features onto Dynamic Objects, and I'm a big fan. 

I've also used the Upgrade Wizard quite a bit to upgrade the firmware. 

And on the management side, there are the health modules. They added a "metric ton" of them to the FMC [Firepower Management Center]. In version 6.7 they released this new health monitor which makes it a lot easier to see data and get to information faster. It's quite nice looking, as opposed to CLI. The new health modules really do stand out as a great way to get to some of that health data quickly—things like interface information, statistics, drops—that were harder to get to before. I can now see them over time, as opposed to at just a point in time. I've used that a lot and it has been very helpful.

In addition, there is the global search for policy and objects. I use that quite a bit in the search bar. It's a great way to get some information faster. Even if I have to pivot away from the screen I'm on, it's still great to be able to get to it very quickly there. 

In a lot of ways, they've addressed some of the biggest complaints, like the "housekeeping" stuff where you have to move around your management system or when it comes to making configuration changes. That has improved from version to version and 7.0 is different. They've added more and have made it easier to get from point A to point B and to consume a lot of that data quickly. That allows me to hop in and do some data validation much faster, without having to search and wait and search and wait. I can get to some of that data quicker to make changes and to fix things. It adds to the overall administrator experience. When operating this technology I'm able to get places faster, rather than it being a type of bottleneck.

There is also the visibility the solution gives you when doing deep packet inspection. It blows up the packet, it matches application types, and it matches web apps. If you're doing SSL decryption it can pinpoint it even further than that. It's able to pull encrypted apps apart and tell me a lot about them. There's a lot of information that 7.0 is bringing to the forefront about flows of data, what it is, and what it's doing. The deep packet inspection and the application visibility portion and Snort are really essential to managing a modern firewall. Firepower does a bang-up job of it, by bringing that data to the forefront.

It's a good box for visibility at the Layer 7 level. If you need Layer 7 visibility, Firepower is going to be able to do that for you. Between VLANs, it does a good job. It's able to look at that Layer 7 data and do some good filtering based on those types of rules.

I'd like to see Cisco continue its approach to making it easier to navigate the UI and FMC and make it easier to get from point A to point B. Generally, the room for improvement is going to be all UI-related. The platform, overall, is solid.

I'd also like them to continue to approach things from a policy-oriented perspective. They are moving more and more in that direction. 

Also, the change-deployment time can always be improved. Even at 50 seconds, it's longer than some of its competitors. I would challenge Cisco to continue to improve in that area. It's very reasonable at 50 seconds, it's not like it used to be in early versions of Firepower, where it was around seven minutes. Still, it could be quicker. The faster we can deploy changes, the faster we can roll back changes if we have messed something in the configuration. Low deploy times are really good to have. 

I would also like to see more features that will help us connect things to the cloud dynamically, and connect things to other sites dynamically. There should be more SD-WAN features in the boxes. If I can use one box to solve cloud connectivity problems, and not have to do stuff so statically, the way I have to do things today on them, that would be helpful.

I am a Cisco partner and reseller and I actually beta test for the Firepower team. I work on Firepower boxes and have done so since the beginning. I have customers on Firepower 7.0 and I have been using Firepower 7.0 since its release.

I haven't really had any major complaints or issues with Firepower 7.0 stability.

It scales, but it depends on the growth rate of the customer and the amount of bandwidth. It's usually a speed and feed problem: Is the firewall box big enough to handle the traffic? Snort 3 has made some improvements there and it's even given some life back to older boxes because of improvements in code and in how Snort processes data. But, overall, the box just has to be big enough for the amount of traffic you're trying to shove through it.

I've been doing this a long time and I don't usually need to call tech support. But when I do need to call TAC, after working with a lot of the other vendors out there, Cisco TAC is still one of the best technical resources in the market. I do like TAC. That's not to say that every TAC engineer is great, but comparatively, they're one of the best support organizations.

Neutral

The initial setup is straightforward, with the caveat that I've been doing this for a long time, so for me it is simple and makes sense. But it is pretty straightforward. You have overall policies that wrap up into your access policy, which is the base policy. You have DNS policies that will roll right up into it. Likewise, platform policies get attached to devices. Generally speaking, it's a lot of working through the logic of the rules: How do you want to block stuff, and how do you want to permit stuff? A lot of that is normal firewalling. When I say the setup is simple, it's because it involves normal firewalling issues. You have to deal with routing, NAT rules, ACLs, and VPNs. It's a matter of just kind of working through those same things that every firewall has to solve.

The deployment time depends on the customer and how many rules. If we're building out all their rule sets, it could range from 40 hours to hundreds of hours. It also depends on what we're coming from. We're not generally walking into environments that are green, meaning there's no box there today. It's almost always that there's something else there that we're replacing. We have to take what we're coming from, convert it, and then put it on Firepower. Small businesses might have a couple of rules, enterprises might have hundreds of rules.

Our implementation strategy is to go in, document the current state of the environment, and then work on a future state. We then work through all the in-between stuff. When we have the old firewall configuration, we determine what it will look like on the new firewall configuration. Does the firewall configuration need to be cleaned up? Are there things that we can optimize and improve or modify? A lot of it involves copying configuration from the old platform to the new one. We're usually not trying to change a ton in a firewall project because it increases the risk of problems arising. Usually, customers' networks are operating when we get into them. We prefer to do a cleanup project after implementation, but sometimes they coincide.

In our company, one person can usually do a firewall cutover. And maintenance of Firepower 7.0 usually requires one person. Maintenance will usually involve a firmware upgrade.

There is a lot of value with SecureX. Other customers struggle to bring all the data back to one place, the way you can with SecureX, across a product portfolio. The value of that capability is incredible. I don't know how to put a monetary value on it, but from an operational perspective, it's very helpful to have it all back in one place because you're not having to hop around to multiple UIs to find the data you're looking for.

With any vendor, prices are often a little bit negotiable. There are things like discounted rates. There's a list price and then, as a partner, we get a discounted rate based on how much product we're purchasing and our relationship with the vendor. 

But on the list-price side of things, there are three big licenses on an FTD [Firepower Threat Defense] box. There are the malware license, the threat license, and the URL filtering license. You can license them in one-year, three-year, and five-year increments. Each license will enable different features on the box. The malware license will enable AMP filtering or AMP detection. The threat detection enables use of the IPS solution, which is really Snort's bread and butter. And the URL filtering enables filtering based on URL categories.

Sometimes we use URL filtering and sometimes we don't. It depends on the customer and on whether they have a different URL filtering strategy, like Umbrella. The two big ones that we sell are malware and threat detection, with threat detection probably being the license we sell the most.

SMARTnet, the technical support component, covers the box. When you purchase the hardware, you buy it with SMARTnet. Licenses cover features, SMARTnet covers support.

We continue to support, integrate, and sell three out of the major four vendors: Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Cisco. Every vendor has been a great partner with us, so I don't want to showcase one firewall platform over another.

Palo Alto is arguably the most mature out of the group when it comes to the firewall in general, but they've also been developing on the same platform for quite a long time.

FortiGate, on the other hand, is great in a lot of use cases.

Cisco's strength is how it integrates with the security portfolio at Cisco. When you have a lot of other security products or integrations, Firepower really stands out above the rest. Palo Alto and Fortinet, although they can integrate with SDA to some degree, they don't integrate to the same depths as Firepower. You really start to see the benefits of Firepower in your organization when you're looking at the Cisco security stack. That's what I would argue is one of the biggest benefits of Cisco in general, that stack of products.

With Cisco, it's not necessarily about a single piece, it's definitely about how they all can communicate and talk to each other, and how information is shared between the components, so that you can create a unified approach to security. Their SecureX product is an integration point. It brings together a lot of that information from different product lines in one place. That's really Cisco's game. Some of the other security vendors struggle to keep up with the breadth and depth of what Cisco is doing in all those different spaces.

In terms of ease of management, Firepower is an enterprise product. While FDM [Firepower Device Manager] is really easy to use, FMC has a lot more knobs to turn. Comparing FortiGate to FMC, a lot of the capabilities of FortiGate are still at the CLI level only. Palo Alto is 100 percent UI-based, not that you can't configure a Palo Alto from CLI, but I don't think anybody does that.

My advice is that you need to know your flows. If you're upgrading to Firepower, you should know what traffic matters and what traffic doesn't matter. If you really want to be successful, you should know all the flows of traffic, how they function, what they do. That way, when you get the box up and running, you know exactly how it should operate.

You can split Firepower users into two buckets: help desk and admin. Help desk will usually be read-only and admin will be read-write. If there's one engineer at a customer, he might have admin rights. If there's a help desk and one senior firewall guy, he might have admin rights where his help desk has read-only. It varies by the size of the customer. Most midsize organizations have one or two firewall guys. When you get into the big enterprises, the number goes up.

Regarding Firepower's Snort 3 IPS allowing you to maintain performance while running more rules, the "book answer" is yes, it's supposed to. We're not really running Snort 3 a ton on those yet because of some of the risk and because some of those customers haven't upgraded to 7.0 yet. Those that are on Snort 3 are just not running policy sets that are large enough that to notice any major or even minor improvements. I have seen an uptick in performance improvements with Snort 3, even on firewalls that are not 100,000-rule firewalls. We are seeing improvements with Snort 3. It's just that Snort 2 performance hasn't really affected the box overall, it just runs a little hotter.

When I mentioned the risk for Snort 3 for our larger clients, what I meant is that with new things come new risks. Snort 3 is one of those new things and we have to evaluate, when we upgrade a customer to it, whether the risk of the upgrade warrants doing it for the customer. In some cases, the answer is no, because of burn-in time. With some of our riskier locations or locations that require 24/7, it makes more sense to run Snort 2, which has been out there since forever on the Firepower platform. It's a lot more stable on Snort 2 and the problems are known problems, from a design perspective. We've mitigated those and worked around them. With Snort 3, there could be new bugs or problems, and in some environments, we want to mitigate that risk.

My expectation is that by 7.1 or 7.2 we will upgrade more generally to Snort 3. It's not that it's far away. It's just that with 7.0 being the first release of Snort 3, and 7.0 only having one or two patches under its belt, we thought it better to remove some risk and just use Snort 2.

Cisco Secure Firewall helps to reduce firewall operational costs, depending on the firewall vendor it's replacing. In some cases, customers are coming from old platforms where the security wasn't nearly at the same level as a next-gen firewall, so the advantage of moving to a next-gen firewall is the increase in security. But that comes with an operational burden no matter the firewall type. There is a lot more visibility and capability out of the NGFW platform, but it comes at a cost. There's more data to work through and more things to configure. Still, in most cases, Cisco Secure Firewall is going to decrease operational usage with the caveat that it has to be an "apples-to-apples" situation, which is very hard to come across these days. 

We had implemented our Cisco API and Cisco Stealthwatch. We use the Cisco Secure Firewall for easy integration that can collaborate with all these Cisco solutions. My operations will also have less maintenance and the same existing team.

Cisco Secure Firewall's security solutions, advanced malware protection, and DDoS communication are very good. With Cisco Secure Firewall, the security is very much manageable because it protects all the incoming and outgoing traffic of our several telecom IT rooms.

The solution's deployment is time-consuming, which should be minimized and made more user-friendly for us.

The solution's graphical user interface could be made more user-friendly, and the configuration can be simple.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for five years.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a stable solution.

I rate Cisco Secure Firewall ten out of ten for stability.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a scalable solution. Around 400 users are using the solution in our organization.

I rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution’s technical support is good.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is complex and requires Cisco-certified people.

Two engineers were involved in the solution's deployment, which took one week.

We have seen a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall because it provides advanced malware protection and seamless integration with my existing solutions.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a moderately priced solution. We have to pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution.

The solution’s maintenance is very easy, and one person can do it.

Overall, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten.

We mainly use it for policy-based VPNs to IPSec one of the businesses. We also use it as a firewall solution for remote VPN users. We have vendors who have access to our VPN solution, and they get a dedicated network.

We can automate the VPN. The build process and how we've standardized it makes it very easy for us to focus on other tasks. We know that an end user can push a button, and the VPN will get built. They only bring us in for troubleshooting or higher-level issues with the other vendor. Because of that program, the ability to use Cisco ASA every time, in the same way, makes our job easy.

Once we started standardizing and using the same solution, we've been able to correlate that so we know what we are doing. We can train even less experienced and newer guys to do the tasks that in turn frees up the higher-level engineers. It has cut out the VPN work for higher-level engineers. They may have been spending ten hours a week previously, and now they may spend ten hours in the quarter.

It has improved our cybersecurity resilience. It has allowed us to see some differences with partners using weaker ciphers, which allows us to validate what we're using and reevaluate it. We put exceptions in cases where we have to. The security risk team is as well aware of those, and they can essentially go back on a buy-in or see if the vendor has upgraded to plug in a security hole. It has given us that visibility to see where we are weak with our vendors.

Being able to use it as a policy-based VPN is valuable. It's very easy to understand. 

It's very easy to troubleshoot. It may be because I'm comfortable with it or because I've used it for so long, but it's easy to use for me. I don't have any problems with how to set it up or use it.

For what we use it for, it ends up being the perfect product for us, but it would help if they could expand it into some of the other areas and other use cases working with speeding up and the reliability of the pushes from the policy manager.

We've been using Cisco ASA at least for the last six years. That's how long I've been in this organization, but my organization has been using it longer. 

We don't open bugs for it. It just works for what we've used it for. The last time we opened up an ASA bug would have probably been three years ago. From a reliability standpoint of what we're using it for, it's fantastic.

We've had no problems with scaling our business. We went from using probably 200 active VPNs an hour to over 600 VPNs without blinking an eye at that.

I enjoy Cisco's tech support. Just like any tech support out there, you could get a great or fantastic engineer, or you may get somebody who has just learned, so you just have to work with it. However, working with Cisco TAC, you find less of that than you do with other companies. 

Just to give them a shout-out, whenever we hit the Australian TAC, they're absolutely fantastic. Sometimes I feel that we should wait our hours when we open a ticket just so that we get one of them. They know their stuff. They absolutely do, so whoever they're hiring there, they got to keep that up and spread that out. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I've worked with Check Point's firewall, and I've worked with Palo Alto's firewall. Things like packet capturing and packet tracing that I can manipulate to pretend I'm doing traffic through the firewall are a lot easier to do with ASAs than with other products.

We have other firewalls in our environment. We still use Palo Alto. We do have a little bit of a mix with Palo Alto in our environment, but in terms of VPN specifically, the way that Palo Alto does route-based VPN by default doesn't flow well with most people out there. It works great with cloud providers. Cisco can do route-based VPNs too. We have a route-based VPN solution with Cisco as well. We just use an ISR for that instead of a firewall.

I've been part of the deployment. Specifically, how NATTING and the firewalls work, that part is not difficult at all, but there are some challenges when you take any product and manipulate the order of operations, but that's not a Cisco challenge. You're pairing different information. There are some tools that usually try to help with those conversions, but most of the time, I find it just easier to develop what you need and just build it from scratch.

We implemented it on our own.

We've seen an ROI in terms of our high-level engineers having to work less on the product. I've been able to provide it to the NOC because of the use of the solution. They see value in that.

Pricing is more for my leadership, but I give them the quotes, and if they approve, they're happy. They've never wavered, so I wouldn't say it's out of the realm where they're considering another product. It must be in the direct price range for our leadership to not blink an eye when we give it to them.

To those evaluating this solution, I'd say that it's a solid product. It works. It does what we need. It gives us peace of mind to sleep at night. I'd definitely put it up there with some of the other firewalls to consider.

I'd rate Cisco ASA a nine out of ten.

We use Cisco Secure Firewall for traditional firewall use cases, like VPN, segmenting of traffic, and creating PPSs.

We need reliable communication to do what we do, and that's very important. The solution does what we need to do and when we need to do it. It has a great reputation for the support that we need because if things don't work within the Department of Defense, people don't survive. Communication and keeping the adversary out are key components of our work. So we need a robust, reliable, and secure product, and that's what Cisco provides us.

Cisco Secure Firewall is robust and reliable.

The process of procuring modern-day technology within the DOD needs to improve.

I've spent quite a few years with Cisco Secure Firewall.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a very stable solution.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a very scalable solution.

Cisco Secure Firewall's technical support is great, reliable, and responsive.

Positive

We have seen a return on investment from using Cisco Secure Firewall. From the DOD's perspective, we need a reliable and robust solution that has to be reliable in real-time. Cisco Secure Firewall is a reliable solution that works when needed.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a great scalable, secure, and robust product.

There is a dedicated team designed to handle firewalls.

I have a good impression of Cisco Talos and its effects on our security operations. They have a great reputation for doing a lot of great things.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience.

Overall, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall nine out of ten.

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.

Our use case is mostly for the data center. We are introducing a security zone in the data center, and Cisco is helping us to identify the traffic that is coming from north to south or from outside the data center to inside the data center. It helps us to manage the traffic and ensure that it's secure and allowed to go inside the data center. We have almost completed the project. We are currently tuning the access policies to only allow what's allowed to go inside.

We are using all the firewall models for the data center. AMP, detection, and prevention are a part of the solution.

It was a requirement from our security and compliance team that any traffic going to the data center needs to be checked and secured. We are almost at the final stage of this project to allow only secure access to the data center. We are almost there. We haven't yet completed the project, but it will definitely be a very critical service for us. Our data center is huge with more than 1,000 applications. It will protect and secure our services.

We are using Cisco firewalls not only in the data center but also on the internet edge. We also have it on the OT system or OT network. We are using most of the products from Cisco, and it was easy to integrate with other services. We have the Cisco ACI solution in the data center. We could integrate Cisco ACI with our firewall. We also have Cisco Stealthwatch and Cisco ISE. We can easily integrate different technologies.

Integration and troubleshooting are the main challenges of having multiple vendors. Having an end-to-end solution from one vendor makes life a lot easier because there is an ease of integration. We don't need a third party. It is also easy in terms of support. One engineer from the same vendor can help us with various technologies. We don't need engineers from different vendors, and we also avoid that common scenario where they start to blame the other one for the issue.

Having an end-to-end solution from the same vendor simplifies the implementation. We are able to have centralized management of different products. We were able to integrate and centrally manage even the older versions of Cisco firewalls.

I'm not a security person. I'm a planner, and we were interested in the advanced features of the firewall to allow us to manage the traffic. At the current stage of implementation, their help in implementing a policy has been valuable. It simplified the implementation. Cisco's engineer helped us with a lot of scripting to see what existed. Previously, we didn't have a proper policy. In fact, we didn't have any policy because we didn't have any firewall for the data center, so generating a policy was a big challenge. Cisco's engineer helped us to do some scripting and find out what kind of policy we can have and organize those policies. That was nice.

Its implementation was not straightforward. It was mainly because we were running two projects together. In terms of features, at this stage, I don't have inputs for the area of improvement. We are still in the implementation stage of our project. After we have the solution ready and we test it, we can go to phase two and see how to enhance the solution in the future. We can then see which features will allow us to do that. After we implement it, the next stages will be to maintain it, tune it, and build on it. We will then see how flexible it is.

I've been using Cisco firewalls for about 20 years. The last model we bought for the data center is 9300.

Cisco is always there to support customers and their businesses. They are there 24/7. Whenever you have an issue or challenge, they are always there. For us, a good thing about Cisco is that there is a Cisco office in Oman. Our colleagues coordinate and communicate with them almost daily. They are always there to support us through any challenge or issue. All vendors are not available in Oman, so having a trusted partner who would always help us was a key factor for investing in Cisco. 

When we open a ticket with Cisco support, we always get someone to help us. We have a dedicated engineer who knows our infrastructure and can help us and track the issues. We are a big organization, and we have critical services. We are the biggest oil producer in Oman, which is the main economy of the country. We can't afford any interruptions. We are trying our best, and Cisco always supports us. They handle our cases in an urgent manner because they know the criticality.

For the data center, we didn't have a security zone previously. It was one of the key requirements to come up with the security zone. We chose Cisco firewalls because we were implementing ACI in the data center, and we thought that having one vendor for both activities will reduce our time of implementation, which didn't turn out to be true.

It was not a straightforward implementation. The main challenge was that we were running two projects together, so we ended up doing the same activity twice. We had two requirements: refresh the data center devices and secure them because there was no security zone. We went for the ACI implementation, which was new for us and required a lot of discussions, and when we tried to introduce the firewall, we again had a lot of discussions with Cisco about whether to go with clustering or active standby.

We discovered that our ACI was not compatible with the firewall that we are introducing. So, we ended up upgrading our ACI. That was a big activity because we had to interrupt our data center. It should have been a seamless upgrade, but because some of our services didn't have dual links, we had to do some maintenance for that. After that, we also ended up upgrading our switches because they were not supporting 40 gigs, which is what the firewall interface supported. That was another challenge that we had. After that, going to active-standby or clustering was another challenge because the switch fabric didn't work well with our design. So, we ended up going with active-standby.

It was a journey, but in the end, we managed to overcome those challenges and implemented our solution.

We've definitely seen an ROI. It was a requirement, and looking at the way it went, especially in terms of coming up with the policy and securing our data center, there has been a value-add. We now have a security zone, and we have policies. We can manage and monitor the traffic coming in and going out.

In addition, we have the flexibility of sending any traffic to the firewall, even internally from the data center. Whenever we have a doubt about any application or traffic to any application, we can just send it to the firewall and let it check and monitor. We have this visibility that we didn't have before. We can see any traffic that comes in. 

We bought a three-year license as a part of the enterprise agreement, which includes help with implementation and troubleshooting. We have a big data center with many applications, so implementation was not straightforward. We had to put effort into it. It wasn't an easy or straightforward implementation. The support that we got from Cisco engineers with the three-year premium license was helpful. The enterprise agreement helped to consume the licenses in a practical and faster way and streamline the implementation.

We are very pleased with Cisco for the automation they did to help us in coming up with a policy. That was a big challenge because we didn't have any policy in place. It was a big help for us that they came up with a policy or at least proposed a policy for us.

Our engineers are familiar with Cisco firewalls, and they are not new to them. However, things are changing and technology is changing, and new features are getting added. Automation will be the main challenge for us. Some of our engineers are not yet very good at scripting. They're still learning. The way forward would be to have people do some amount of programming to come up with useful information to enhance the solution in the future.

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

We are currently using the Cisco Firepower 2140 model because it fits our sizing and performance needs.

We use Cisco Secure Firewall as the internal firewall to protect our retail PCI networks from the rest of the corporate business.

We are a global company, and we have multiple data centers. There are two in Europe, and we deployed Cisco Firepower in all of our worldwide data centers. In each region in the world, we have two data centers with Cisco Firepower to separate retail from corporate and Firepower for IPS services. This solution protects around 1,500 stores, and our corporate office has around 10,000 people.

I like the basic firewall features. We use Cisco Firepower to separate PCI from corporate, so we're not using it at the edge. If we were to use Firepower at the edge, then we would enable other features like IDS and SSL inspection. However, since we only use it as an internal firewall, plain level-four firewalling is enough for us.

Cisco Firepower is useful for securing our infrastructure from end to end so that we can detect and remediate any threats. I like the Cisco products because they are very stable and what you see is what you get. There are no vague or gray areas. We log all of our logs to Splunk, for example, and everything we see in Splunk is very useful. Finding errors or finding reasons why something is or is not working is very easy.

This solution helped to free up our IT staff's time so that they can focus on other projects. The management platform makes deployment and management, that is, day-to-day changes, very easy.

Cisco Firepower saved our organization's time because it has role-based access. We can give some engineers the ability to do day-to-day tasks and give more experienced engineers more in-depth tasks.

We have been able to consolidate our tools and applications. The FTD tool also manages our Firepower IDS nodes. As a result, we have a consolidated single pane of glass for all of our Cisco Firepower security tools.

We use the FTD management platform for the boxes. The GUI that manages multiple Firepower boxes could be improved so that the user experience is better.

We have been using Cisco Firewall for the last 15 years. We started off using Cisco ASA and have now migrated to Cisco Firepower.

The stability is very good; there's no vagueness. Either it works or it doesn't, and it's also very easy to find out why.

There haven't been any performance issues. We run HA clusters and don't do multiple clusters for scaling. We scale the boxes to our performance needs. We have nine staff members who work with this solution.

Cisco's technical support staff have always been helpful and have been able to solve our issues. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We used Cisco ASAs, and they were all individually managed. We went from individually managed IDS and Firepower IDS solutions to this consolidated single management platform.

We chose Cisco Firewall over competing solutions because what you see is what you get. We liked that the changes are immediate. The way the logs come into our Splunk system gives us a good feeling about the stability and performance of Cisco products.

We have seen an ROI. Compared to that of other vendors, Cisco's pricing is in a good range. We use Cisco products for their complete lifespan. With the support context that we have, we also know what we spend over the lifetime of the solution.

The pricing of Cisco's boxes is pretty good.

My advice would be to talk to people who work with different vendors and get some hands-on experience. Don't just listen to or look at sales documents. See whether the performance actually matches that mentioned in the sales documents. Check with other competitors for hands-on experience as well.

I would give Cisco Secure Firewall an overall rating of eight out of ten because I'm not 100% happy with the management dashboard.

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.