Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) Reviews

We use it at the end and the center as the core and apply a lot of policies to the firewall.

Using Cisco Firepower has helped us.

We like the Cisco product, the concept, and the tech intelligence. We are much more comfortable with Cisco products. It's a reputable organization, and we trust the products.

The next Cisco NGIPS release should include more features for production ideas and more intelligence for IDS and IPS features.

We have been using this solution for two years. 

We initially had some difficulty loading pages due to certain rules regarding performance and stability. On some websites, we had to click more than once. These issues were quite easy to fix.

Regarding scalability, the solution is not that good.

They're nice people. We don't have any issues with them. They are quick to respond, but sometimes it takes time to solve the issues.

We previously used Check Point and Cyberoam. We switched because the license expired.

We initially had some difficulties, but now we have no problems.

A Cisco vendor in Nepal helped us configure the product properly. We didn't have a strategy. The vendors supported us from the very beginning. After working with them, we had no problem using the product.

It took almost a month and a half to install the system.

I would rate our ROI as eight out of 10, with 10 being the highest ROI.

Cisco NGIPS licensing is yearly. 

I would rate the pricing four out of 10, one being very expensive and 10 very cheap. 

I would give Cisco NGIPS an overall rating of eight out of 10, 10 being the best.

We have a department of almost 50 people in our company using Cisco NGIPS. 

We have 10 people to maintain the product.

We want to cover all the systems and networks of our organization. 

Customers who are trying to replace their internal firewall with good visibility at the application-level content level use Cisco NGIPS. It has the ability to do packet inspection and the customer can check their users while they're searching the web and going to different websites. Cisco NGIPS has the ability to connect to your firewall with advanced intrusion prevention.  

The most valuable feature of Cisco NGIPS is the centralized user interface. You have the ability to quickly push out configurations across your environment using the Cisco UI. It's a powerful capability of that solution.

Cisco NGIPS could improve its ability to do SSL inspections. Sometimes the ability to do SSL inspection is not scalable and you might not be able to get the installment required if you don't size the right hardware.

I have been using Cisco NGIPS for approximately five years.

Cisco NGIPS is stable, but I there is more that can be done.

Cisco is particularly strong when it comes to firewalls and the IPS, IBS, or next-generation firewalls. When I was working as a system architect we went from Cisco to Palo Alto or Fortinet. I don't know if they've made some recent improvements or maybe it's in the roadmap, but I would say there's still room for improvement with Cisco security appliances.

Cisco NGIPS is scalable. However, the cost to the customer is always high, because it's still a hardware base. After the resource cycle of three or five years, you have to replace them. From that perspective, they are not the greatest solution out there.

Our networking team of approximately 50 people that are mostly using this solution in my organization.

The support from Cisco NGIPS is good.

The initial setup of Cisco NGIPS is of a medium difficulty level.

My advice to others is they should look into other vendors and cloud-based solutions. Solutions that don't require you to refresh and get hardware, because nowadays there are new problems for hardware. It's getting more difficult, try to get a more software-based, cloud-centric model solution.

I rate Cisco NGIPS a six out of ten.

I use Cisco NGIPS as a firewall.

The most valuable features of Cisco NGIPS are protection and reporting.

We have a separate management controller for Cisco NGIPS. If they have not done it already they should integrate Cisco NGIPS with the Cloud Portal.

The solution has some bugs that sometimes take time to resolve.

I have been using Cisco NGIPS for approximately two years.

The stability of Cisco NGIPS has been good since we have been using it.

The scalability of Cisco NGIPS is good.

Cisco has better technical support than other competitors, such as Check Point IPS or Palo Alto. Cisco has very good support, they are always ready to help their customer if there are any production issues.

Cisco NGIPS should add a technical person to the chat support. They correctly do not have a specialist. The knowledge base of the chat agent should be better.

I have used Check Point IPS solutions.

The implementation of Cisco NGIPS is straightforward.

You have to do your own implementation of the Cisco NGIPS hardware, but for the configuration, Cisco support can be involved from day one. That's what I have experienced. There was some exception but I have involved the Cisco support team from day one when I started configuring my firewall.

We have seen a return on investment by using Cisco NGIPS.

There is a license required to use Cisco NGIPS and it can be a one or three-year license.

I would advise others to use the support from Cisco, they are helpful.

I rate Cisco NGIPS an eight out of ten.

This product automatically blocks any form of threat in a network. Once a threat is detected, it will notify the IT team. It will show the full threat, the target destination, and perhaps a loophole that the intruder used.

What it reports depends on how you have configured it.

It's able to map the solutions that you have, detailing how they are connected. It gives you visibility in terms of what's happening without your network.

This is the leading Cisco solution across Sub-Saharan Africa.

The most valuable feature is that it is able to detect any form of infiltration. It does this in an automated fashion so that you don't have to do anything to it. Once it is properly configured, it will act on its own.

The visibility that it gives you is very good. You're able to know what has happened within your network.

The way it pushes policy rules is very good. It makes sure that your information is reliable, and that you have the right visibility and the right intelligence.

I would like to see a more user-friendly interface. This is true for Cisco in general, with many of the products that they have.

We have been selling Cisco NGIPS for approximately four years.

This is a very stable product. In Sub-Saharan Africa, it is used by every six or seven banks out of ten.

This solution is very easy to scale, depending on your organization's roadmap. I have had customers that are using it and scaling very fast, especially in the financial sector.

Being a clustered solution, you can have 500, 1,000, or 10,000 users. In fact, one of my customers has 20,000 users of NGIPS. I have another organization that has 1,200 users. The size of the solution is set based on the number of users.

The technical support from Cisco is good, and it is not expensive. Over the past couple of years, they have really improved when it comes to service delivery.

I have worked with a variety of security solutions. I have worked with products from Trend Micro, Cisco, and others.

This product is straightforward to install. A CCMP can complete the deployment in one day.

One skilled person is suitable for deployment.

This is a very affordable product.

This is a product that I can recommend anytime. I have sold millions of dollars of it, every year. 

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

The Cisco NGIPS and IGS are used as network firewalls for IPS and IGS protection. I have both the Cisco Firepower and Cisco Meraki solutions in different customers' locations. They have the capability of the NGIPS built into it. We have different customers that they are using it. For example, on Edge, data centers, and campus networks.

Among all the different solutions I have worked with, such as Palo Alto many other firewalls. Cisco has the support, documentation, and design. The documentation is widely available and it can help you a lot with implementation. It makes the implementation much easier.

What I don't like about Cisco recently is they keep changing the names, which makes it hard for customers and sometimes even us as engineers to know what is the solution they are speaking about. For example, with AMP, now they call it Secure Endpoint and I don't know if in the next couple of years they're going to change it to something else. They should keep the names the same.

I have been using Cisco NGIPS for approximately 10 years.

Cisco NGIPS is stable, however, it is nothing special.

The scalability of Cisco NGIPS I am not too familiar with. The solution can do clustering and other operations. With the Orchestrator, I haven't worked with it yet but I hope that will help to make standard policies all run better. The most important part about scalability is how do you want to apply the same policy all around and across the different locations that you have. This is something that is not easy with any firewall unless you have a Secure Orchestrator. I don't see any issues with the scalability at this time.

The support from Cisco NGIPS is very good.

I have used many other solutions, such as Palo Alto.

I would rate the price of Cisco NGIPS a three out of five.

They are very expensive in some places and not reasonable at times for many customers. I have had customers choose another solution because of the high price.

When speaking about the features of Cisco NGIPS, what makes the feature good is dependent on what the customer likes and the skillset that they have. I cannot say what is the best feature because it depends on the use case.

There are times I see customers spend a lot of money on something which they really don't use. Whether this solution is good or not depends on what exactly the customer wants to implement and protect. They should pick the right solution with the skillset that they have.

I rate Cisco NGIPS nine out of ten.

We use Cisco as a firewall. It is an intrusion detection and prevention solution.

The malware detection, threat defense, sandboxing, VPN, and mail security have all been valuable features of Cisco NGIPS.

The performance of CISCO Firepower could be improved. 

We moved from Sophos to Cisco before the pandemic. During the pandemic, there was an increase in VPN connections. We had a layer of security within CISCO Umbrella, and now with Cloud. The firewall protects the internal system, but we needed to add another layer of security for the endpoints that are outside the local area network. We needed another product to cover this lack of security.

We prefer to have integration with the points that are outside our local area networks using the same brand using one single console. Because the firewall only protects the people inside the network, we required another solution.

I would like to see Cisco NGIPS include home office support in one single product.

Our organization has been using Cisco NGIPS for two years.

Cisco NGIPS is stable most of the time.

This solution is not easily scaled. I would like Cisco NGIPS to be easier to scale. With the increase in work from home, we needed to add another layer of security to ensure we can meet the demand of stability, high availability, and connection.

Our company has two layers of support with Cisco. One is the local support, which is very good. The second support is directly from Cisco. They are quick to respond and have quick solutions to the problems.

We moved from Sophos to Cisco Firewall because we were looking for better integration between all the appliances and data center. All of our core switches, our wireless system, and other tools are the Cisco brand, meaning that all our monitoring options are integrated under Cisco.

We hired a professional service to install this solution.

With the increase in work from home, companies may need more than just a firewall. I recommend anyone considering Cisco NGIPS evaluate all the demands from their in-home offices and determine if their solution needs to be bigger, or wider, for security and performance.

I would rate this product a 9 out of 10, particularly if you work in a LAN environment.

It is our main firewall. We use it for reporting and for firewall purposes to block unwanted inputs and outputs.

Its ease of use and its ability to block and allow ports in and out of our organization are the most valuable features.

It works very well. It gives us all the information that we need.

We don't like its licensing model. It has separate licensing for all the features. For instance, to get URL filtering, you need to buy another license. Every feature set seems to require another license. Unless you purchase them all upfront, you find some surprises and realize that you can't do that because you need another license. 

Its logging isn't quite as good as it used to be in our previous solution. We used to have Cisco ASA, and we could view the logs a lot easier than NGIPS (also known as Firepower). We saw real-time logging, but we don't see that as much in Firepower.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It has been very stable. I don't think it has gone down at all in two years.

It is very scalable. In terms of the number of users, we have 26,000 students and 3,500 staff members. Everybody in our organization goes through it and takes advantage of it on our system. We have about five people who are managing it, and they are from the network group, infrastructure group, and storage group.

We did have some engagement with the technical support people regarding the integration with Nexus Switches, and they were very good. They helped us out quite a bit.

We were using Cisco ASAs. They were going out of service. They were going out of sale and support. So, we decided to move to Firepower. We wanted to go to the Next-Gen IPS type of stuff, and ASAs didn't have that kind of feature set.

It was quite complex. It required some workarounds with other network components in our system. It could have been a lot less complicated. Nexus Switches that we had were a little bit older, and they didn't integrate as well with Firepower as they could have. So, we ended up having to buy some new switches. 

The deployment pretty much took about three weeks. It involved moving all of our stuff from our old firewall onto the new one. Rules were a little different, so we had to work on it for a while. Fortunately, we could run them in parallel, so it worked out okay.

We did it in-house.

It has definitely given us our return on the investment.

It is expensive. It has separate licensing for all the features, and every feature set seems to require another license.

Licensing is on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs besides the standard licensing fee.

I would advise others to make sure that the rest of their equipment is completely compatible with the newest Firepowers.

I would rate Cisco NGIPS an eight out of ten. It gives us all the information that we need. We've got to dig for it sometimes, but it is a good product.

The solution works on a base set of rules to detect malicious traffic or certain exploits, which can be done from both the outside and inside network.

In the virtual deployment, you have a couple of choices depending on your needs and how much bandwidth you have that needs to be inspected. It is quite flexible because it can be deployed on the cloud as well. All the kinks which were in the previous versions were fixed.

I do not think that Cisco has official documentation regarding use cases. They can do better on their documentation because the product is really hard to understand. You need a lot of time to change around things to understand how it works exactly and fine-tune it. If they make it less complicated, I think it will really help all the customers.

They could make the user interface of the management center more user friendly and customizable in the next release. I think they can take some pointers from Palo Alto because their user interface is really intuitive and really customizable.

I have been using the solution for approximately five years.

The solution is stable.

The solution is scalable. The management center, which controls the sensors, you can deploy it. You have two different virtual appliances, one is for managing up to 25 sensors and the bigger one is up to 300 sensors. The hardware list of the products ranges from, I think, 20 sensors and up to 500. Depending on your needs, you can scale it.

We have three administrators working on the solution and the whole organization is being protected by it.

Cisco support is really great. Especially when you have a priority case, when everything is down, you can get an engineer in 15 minutes.

The setup is easy, you do not need hardware. You can just sign up for AWS or Azure and you can deploy it there.

There are licensing fees depending on the features that you are using.

I have evaluated Palo Alto in the past.

Before this version of the solution, it was like a normal IPS. The source for IPS was bought by Cisco, and now it is integrated into the Firepower Threat Defense. The Firepower Defense is a unified image of both the previous firewall which Cisco had, the ASA, and the source for IPS. Currently, the FTD is like a UTM device, a unified threat management device, because it has firewall capabilities and IPS capabilities.

I am going to continue using this solution even though I enjoyed using their main competitors product from Palo Alto. I would recommend this solution to others.

I rate Cisco NGIPS a seven out of ten.

Basic IPS functionality for intrusion prevention. We have two kinds of deployment. The one that is Inline and the one that is not Inline, where it's just listening. We have like a tap to which its monitoring traffic. For the one that is kind of offline deployment but for the Inline deployment, all traffic goes through it, like for North-South traffic, towards internet to provide some real-time intrusion prevention.

Ir's signature-based. We are also using the anomaly baseline formation, where it links the network, then anything that goes away from the norm is also flagged. Those are the two most valuable features. 

It has room for improvement when it comes to integrating machine learning and AI into it where even if you don't have a baseline that is of length for anomaly detection, it could do more like an AI style machine learning. It learns on its own. It learns patterns, learns what good traffic looks like then is able to stop bad traffic, not just based on behavior but based on every other thing. I think other next-generation IPS solutions are turning towards integration of ML and AI. I need machine learning and the ability to share intelligence. 

I have been using Cisco NGIPS for seven years.

It is pretty stable and has good throughput.

It's scalable. You can add more to it as traffic requires, one cluster can do HA, so it's pretty scalable. In fact, you can cluster up to six chassis on the 4100.

If it's host-based IPS, we can count a number of users and say we have 45,0000 users but for network-based IPS, where it's just picking traffic from different connections when you're trying to go to the internet or when you're trying to come back to the internet it can support up to 10 million concurrent sessions. We have around 200,000 users but it can support 10 million concurrent sessions.

For maintenance, once you configure it, depending on what you call maintenance if it's software upgrade it doesn't take a lot to upgrade it. If it's active/standby you can upgrade the active. The standby becomes the active. Then when the active comes back on, you can upgrade the standby. So usually, at least you have an active/standby scenario, but if you have a cluster, you can take each out of production in codes. We start while others are in production. 

If you're talking about maintenance in terms of log collections and shipping of the logs, it's also easy to deploy from that perspective.

Cisco has very good support. We get good support from Cisco. 

We've been using Cisco for a while. Going from the IPS module on ASA or the IPS appliance, we've transitioned from different Cisco IPS solutions to this Cisco Next Generation IPS. 

It's been Cisco all along, it's just that this one has more visibility and it's next-generation style compared to the older IPS. 

The initial setup was straightforward and easy to deploy. It was very quick.

We also looked at Sourcefire.

They bought this particular one from Sourcefire and Sourcefire was the world leader in next-generation IPS before Cisco bought it and I know it wasn't just in terms of visibility and how much it can do but in terms of cost too because it was an open-source project that was going on before Cisco bought it. Cisco bought the enterprise version so I feel it's not expensive, but I've not really checked the licensing cost.

Sourcefire wasn't originally Cisco and it was already a world leader and if I'm not mistaken or quoting wrongly, I think it's from the Snort project. I know the open-source community is still contributing to what Cisco is presenting with FirePower or FireSIGHT IPS. It's an open-source project. You can trust it because of the originality score and with what we've used so far too, I see the difference in the old version and this new one. You get better security compared to these other next-generation IPS out there.

In the next release, I would like to see AI machine learning capabilities built into it.

I would rate it a nine out of ten.

In my company, the solution is used as a platform for cybersecurity. The product offers protection from malware. In general, the solution offers protection to our company's internal network.

The product's benefits experienced by the company stem from the fact that the solution provides keep abilities that help users see what is happening in their network. The solution also provides alerts.

My company does not use the URL filtering capabilities offered by Cisco NGIPS. My company prefers to use the URL filtering feature offered by a brand other than Cisco since other tools provide an easier way to use the functionality.

I wanted to look into the other products offered in the market because Cisco NGIPS is expensive. The product's high price is an area of concern where improvements are required.

I have been using Cisco NGIPS for eight years. My company has a partnership with Cisco. I am also a user of the product. My company operates as a reseller of Cisco products.

I don't remember seeing any crashes when using the solution. The product has been very stable in our company.

The scalability offered by the product is fine. My company has not faced any problems with the scalability feature. The solution is deployed in three of our company's data centers.

The first call that I had with the product's technical team was not good since it took time to provide an explanation to get the right engineer to help us with our problems. Once the user gets connected with the right engineer, the support offered is very good.

I rate the technical support a seven out of ten.

Neutral

I have experience with Fortinet. I don't remember the name of one of the solutions that I had used in the past.

The product's initial setup phase was easy.

I rate the product's initial setup phase a nine on a scale of one to ten, where one means a difficult process, and ten means that it is an easy process.

The solution is deployed on an on-premises model.

The solution can be deployed in a couple of weeks. We take care of the testing phase in our company before installing the solution only when the signatures are updated in our environment, which takes around a time frame of less than two weeks.

Around three or four engineers take care of the product's installation phase.

My company purchases professional services from Cisco's partner to take care of the installation phase.

Cisco NGIPS is an expensive product.

I have compared Fortinet FortiGate IPS against Cisco NGIPS.

With Cisco NGIPS, the rate of false positives is very low.

I would tell those who plan to use Cisco NGIPS that it is a good solution, but if they have budget constraints, they should explore the other brands in the market.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.