Akamai App and API Protector vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

Akamai and Cisco are both solutions in the Cloud and Data Center Security category. Akamai is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.7, while Cisco is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.5. Akamai holds a 0.8% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco’s 13.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

Akamai App and API Protector

Read 28 Akamai App and API Protector reviews

4,636 Views
185 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Workload

Read 15 Cisco Secure Workload reviews

4,623 Views
3,190 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Akamai App and API Protector

Cisco Secure Workload

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Oct 14, 2024

Cisco Secure Workload and Akamai App and API Protector compete in the field of cybersecurity. Akamai seems to have the upper hand due to its comprehensive threat intelligence and scalability, offering robust application-level security.

Features: Cisco Secure Workload provides network-level segmentation and helps safeguard internal threats. It includes policy discovery automation and micro-segmentation for enhanced control. Moreover, it offers application dependency mapping, saving time and offering high precision in security measures. Akamai App and API Protector is noted for application and API-level security, delivering extensive DDoS protection and precise traffic management. Its comprehensive security features include custom rule creation and a robust web application firewall (WAF) for thorough threat detection and mitigation.

Room for Improvement: Cisco Secure Workload could improve its deployment complexity, requiring extensive network configurations that may delay implementation. Enhancing user interface usability and reducing dependency on extensive manual policy adjustments would also be beneficial. Additionally, better automation of application dependency mapping could streamline its setup. Akamai App and API Protector could improve cost-effectiveness, as its pricing can be on the higher side. Simplifying granular control adjustments for less technical users could enhance user experience. Additionally, expanding its threat intelligence capabilities could provide even more comprehensive security insights.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Akamai App and API Protector is known for its cloud-native deployment, offering seamless integration and responsive support, facilitating easier onboarding. In contrast, Cisco Secure Workload faces challenges with complex deployment processes that might require additional support interactions. Streamlining the deployment experience for Cisco could make it more competitive for users seeking quicker setup with less hassle.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco Secure Workload offers more budget-friendly initial pricing, ideal for organizations with cost constraints in network security. However, Akamai App and API Protector justifies its higher price with a higher ROI through comprehensive security measures and seamless integration. Its expansive capabilities provide significant value for businesses aiming to invest in broad security solutions, making the cost worthwhile despite the initial expense.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai App and API Protector vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: July 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai App and API Protector vs. Cisco Secure Workload

July 2025

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Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Categories and Ranking

Akamai App and API Protector

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

10th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Web Application Firewall (WAF) (9th), Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Protection (4th)

Cisco Secure Workload

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

8th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (13th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Akamai App and API Protector is 0.8%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 13.6%, up from 12.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

Bharat Chandra

Head of DevOpps at Indian express

Exceptional support, protects our sites, and provides visibility into traffic

We did a PoC of Akamai and Cloudflare. One area where Akamai can improve is the captcha part. Cloudflare provides a captcha if there are a certain number of threats. For example, I can assign that if there are 10 requests within a second from a single IP, it should send a captcha to the user. The user should fill in the captcha, and only after that, the user should be able to access our website. This captcha feature should be built into Bot Manager. I love this captcha feature of Cloudflare. Other things are good in Akamai. That is why we are using Akamai. Only the captcha part should be implemented.

Read full review

Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

Read full review

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

"They have a fantastic tool for analyzing and viewing your traffic."

"Traffic filtering and WAF are valuable."

"I have contacted the support team of Akamai... I am happy with their responses and answers to my problems."

"The CDN and the WAF features are the best."

"It gives us a report of traffic. It gives us a report of the day-to-day URL traffic, and it also gives an individual report. If we reach out to Akamai, they give us the IPs as well."

"The solution easily identifies, delays, or allows business traffic."

"It enables us to move faster with new products because we have this layer of protection set up in our infrastructure."

"The product is user-friendly."

More Akamai App and API Protector pros

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."

"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."

"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."

"It's stable."

"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

"The only use case I can see that makes sense is micro-segmentation. I think there are other use cases for it. The main purpose of the product is to do micro-segmentation by collecting IP. That could be done by installing an agent, and then you have all the communication coming in and out. You could also use some flow sensors installed in the network that receive a copy of the traffic and then report that back to the system."

"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"Akamai App and API Protector is very new to me, so I do not have any insights on improvement areas for the product. However, when we ask for some help, it can take some time. We understand that the job is done by professionals, but if that time can be reduced, it would be great."

"The WAF features definitely have a lot of room for improvement. A lot of the WAF is really basic. For some products or some of our solutions, we need to run a second layer of more advanced WAF. If it had better layer seven protection then we would not need a second WAF."

"Customer support has room for improvement."

"The interface is a little bit clunky and can be improved."

"In terms of precedence of Akamai rules, the last one is implemented. That is the one that is operational. If two rules contradict, the last one is implemented. We had a clash, but it was really tough to find that out. I would like to have a rulebook because, in their architecture documentation, it is not mentioned anywhere that if two rules clash, the last one works, and if it does not work, then what to do. This is something we were debating today with their tech support. With AWS, we get documents for the issues so that they do not occur in the future. Akamai's support and knowledge base needs to be improved."

"It would be nice if Akamai Web Application Protector's price is lowered and made cheaper."

"One thing I asked them is to integrate the API discovery product that they have and push that data into Akamai App and API Protector so that we do not have two types of reviews to identify the type of traffic. We already know the APIs that are frequently getting used, so analysis becomes easier. We can integrate both products and use them."

"The performance of the cloud monitoring tool is low."

More Akamai App and API Protector cons

"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."

"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."

"There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."

"Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it."

"The interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly."

"The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring."

"It has an uninviting interface."

"It is highly scalable, but there is a limitation that it is only available on Cisco devices."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Akamai is very expensive."

"Cost depends on the volume of traffic."

"The product’s price is high."

"Its price is at the medium level. It is not very high. It is also not very low. It serves the purpose."

"If you want quality, you have to pay the price. Its price is fair. Their account managers are also very helpful. They help you a lot with pricing even though they are working with Akamai."

"Based on the billing discussions in the DevOps team, Akamai's cost does not seem to be a major thing. However, LOE is an issue. When it comes to support, we know that even all the competitors do this. For a 30-minute issue, they give us a LOE of one or two hours. That is a basic practice, but that is something we worry about."

"The solution is expensive."

"The product is expensive, but it is worth the money."

More Akamai App and API Protector pricing and cost advice

"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."

"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."

"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."

"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."

"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."

"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

20%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Performing Arts

Computer Software Company

23%

Manufacturing Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Akamai Web Application Protector?

The product is user-friendly.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Akamai Web Application Protector?

The price is higher than others. It could be about 80% to 70% more expensive than other tools. So, it’s not just a slight difference.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Akamai Web Application Protector?

It could have better analytics and reporting visibility in the OEM console.

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?

The product provides multiple-device integration.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?

CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discovery. This raises questions about the resources required to discover and write po...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

See all answers

Comparisons

Microsoft Azure Application Gateway vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 10% of the time

AWS WAF vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 9% of the time

Cloudflare vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 8% of the time

Prolexic vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudflare Web Application Firewall vs Akamai App and API Protector

Compared 6% of the time

More Akamai App and API Protector Competitors

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 22% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 16% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 16% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 10% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 9% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Akamai App and API Protector

August 2025

Download Akamai App and API Protector product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

August 2025

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Also Known As

Akamai Web Application Protector, Akamai Kona Site Defender, Akamai Kona DDoS Defender

Cisco Tetration

Overview

Akamai App and API Protector provides website security by preventing DDoS attacks, acting as an application firewall, managing content delivery, and monitoring APIs. It adapts to threat profiles and is used for fast media delivery and identifying malicious activities.

Akamai App and API Protector offers strong protection, adaptable security features, and efficient traffic management. Its WAF blocks IP addresses and country-specific threats while preventing SQL injections. Companies utilize it for scalable CDN services and comprehensive traffic analysis. Known for its cost-effectiveness and user-friendly dashboard, this protector stands out for its customizable rules and technical support. Users also highlight the ease of integration and detailed attack insights available through its advanced dashboard.

What are the key features of Akamai App and API Protector?

DDoS Protection: Strong defense against Distributed Denial of Service attacks.
Scalable CDN: Manages content delivery efficiently under high traffic loads.
WAF Capabilities: Blocks specific IPs and countries, prevents SQL injections.
Traffic Filtering: Analyzes and controls incoming requests to maintain security.
Adaptive Stream Delivery: Adjusts content delivery to meet bandwidth needs.

What benefits should users expect?

Cost-Effectiveness: Provides robust security tools at a competitive price.
Enhanced Security: Comprehensive protection against cyber threats.
Scalability: Easily handles increasing traffic and data loads.
Ease of Integration: Simple integration with existing systems.
Insightful Analytics: Offers data-driven insights into traffic and attack patterns.

In media, Akamai App and API Protector ensures smooth streaming by handling high bandwidth demands. E-commerce companies use it to guard against fraud and data breaches. Financial sectors rely on its ability to protect sensitive transactions. Implementations in healthcare focus on safeguarding patient data while maintaining compliance with regulations.

Akamai

Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Cisco

Sample Customers

Douglas Omaha Technology Commission, ZALORA, PrintPlanet

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Buyer's Guide

Akamai App and API Protector vs. Cisco Secure Workload

July 2025

Free Report: Akamai App and API Protector vs. Cisco Secure Workload

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