Appgate SDP vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

Appgate and Cisco are both solutions in the Microsegmentation Software category. Appgate is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.5, while Cisco is ranked #4 with an average rating of 9.5. Additionally, 100% of Appgate users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Appgate SDP and Cisco Secure Workload are competitive products in cybersecurity. Appgate SDP is favored for cost-effectiveness, while Cisco Secure Workload is renowned for its feature-rich offering.

Features: Appgate SDP offers dynamic identity-based access control, seamless system integration, and is designed for scalability. Cisco Secure Workload provides comprehensive workload protection, advanced telemetry, and detailed security insights into network activities.

Room for Improvement: Appgate SDP could enhance its telemetry and analytics for deeper insights. Improved granularity in access controls and more robust application dependency mapping would benefit users. Cisco Secure Workload could reduce complexity in its deployment, streamline its feature set for easier management, and offer more intuitive user interfaces.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Appgate SDP has a straightforward deployment process and responsive customer support, allowing quick implementation. Cisco Secure Workload may be more complex to deploy due to its extensive features, but it offers robust support to assist with such challenges.

Pricing and ROI: Appgate SDP is noted for its affordable initial costs and ongoing expenses, providing good ROI for budget-conscious organizations. Cisco Secure Workload has higher upfront costs, justified by its comprehensive features, offering solid long-term ROI for those needing extensive security infrastructures.

To learn more, read our detailed Appgate SDP vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Appgate SDP vs. Cisco Secure Workload

April 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

iboss

Featured Reviews

Matt Crockford

Head of Cybersecurity at SES Water

It's easy to roll out, and their understanding of our business made it seamless

One aspect we value about iboss is its simplicity. Their customer service is brilliant, and they are super responsive and knowledgeable. It's easy to roll out, and their understanding of our business made it seamless. We were impressed by the solution's mental health function, which can detect if someone needs help. It scans what users are browsing and flags warning signs so we can check to see if they are okay. We've had to use it a couple of times. The user interface is highly intuitive. Our IT team picked it up with minimal training. It's arranged so that it's easy to find where things are. Another advantage is the single pane of glass console, which gives you visibility into what's happening. We're not fully there yet because we haven't implemented zero trust, but we're excited about the possibilities from the demos we've seen. We launched a POC of iboss' ChatGPT Risk Protection feature two weeks ago. AI is a great tool, but you need to be careful what you put into it. My biggest fear is employees inputting sensitive corporate information or customer PII data into one of these chatbots. I was impressed by our trial of the feature. It's exactly what we wanted. Now, when a user goes to ChatGPT, there's a banner warning them not to share information, and we can block conversations containing customer data like bank details and email addresses. I don't want to stop people from using it, but we need visibility. We've only tried it on a test group of 15 people. You can configure it to look for specific keywords or integrate it with your DLP policy if you have that configured

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IgnitiusMolepo

Senior IP Network Defense at MTN

Helps us manage traffic-related issues and streamlines access management for the network

Appgate SDP has significantly streamlined our access management, providing a notably efficient solution compared to traditional VPNs. The simplicity of the SDP platform is a standout feature; instead of navigating through intricate details, users can seamlessly connect to the company's network or switch to the internet with minimal effort, unlike VPNs which often involve waiting for connection handling and unblocking. Recognizing the robustness of SDP, we made strategic decisions to minimize reliance on VPNs, reserving only two for administrative purposes. In a scenario where Appgate SDP significantly improved our network security posture, the platform played a crucial role in fortifying defenses against major threats. The encryption algorithms utilized by SDP provide a high level of security to our network architecture. Compared to Cisco, SDP proves to be most critical in protecting resources with the help of role-based policies. It only provides selective access to the application. The dynamic policy engine significantly enhances our access control mechanisms. It has single sign-on and multifactor authentication features. It makes processes faster and easier. It has helped our IT team to manage the workload with ease. It gives an intelligent solution whenever they face traffic-related problems. I rate it a nine out of ten.

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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

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"Technical support is pretty sharp and very responsive."

"iboss is among the few products providing inline filtering where no application is needed on the device. It operates on the network side and is not device-based. This feature was one of the main reasons why we stayed with them for so long."

"Our primary use case for this product is DLP,"

"Valuable features: Within the filter: Controls (Web categories, applications, and Allow/Block list) and Network (local Subnets). Within the reporter: Logs (Event Log) and Reports."

"Its initial setup was straightforward."

"From a use-case scenario, what I like the most is the plug-in. I like the fact that we can do the filtering of these devices offsite independent of the network they are connected to, and we do not have to have traffic coming back inside our network."

"First of all, the security policies are essential. I do not have to rely solely on Active Directory for our users."

"It was a very easy product to install. It can be deployed very fast."

More iboss pros

"The interface is really friendly. It's simple to understand."

"The flexibility of the tool is valuable. It is very robust. It has a very robust configuration capability."

"It is a scalable solution...The support answers your questions very fast."

"The simplicity of the SDP platform is a standout feature; instead of navigating through intricate details, users can seamlessly connect to the company's network or switch to the internet with minimal effort."

"One of the most important features is stopping lateral movement across our network."

"It is pretty stable."

"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."

"Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time."

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

"By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself."

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

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

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

"The product provides multiple-device integration."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"The area I would like to see improvement in is the ability with in the reporter to navigate directly to the content the user is traversing. It is kind of there, but it's not perfect. Quite frequently, I receive links that lead me to pages with error messages."

"The solution could be stronger on the integration side and offer more cloud applications like G Suite or Oracle."

"Our biggest problem with their service was it did not recognize the device and filtering did not always work correctly."

"I am currently doing a PoC of the zero trust aspect of it. Compared to other similar solutions, it is hard to get around each feature. It takes a while to get used to it."

"Their on-premise hardware's network interface is capped at one gigabit, which is sort of a problem. If you stand a filter up where all traffic flows through that, according to them, in order to go above a gigabit, you have to have multiple devices, which in today's IT seems a little bit silly. They could easily put in an SFP port into their device that could accommodate 10 gigs or at least offer a box."

"If they could implement an extra security layer preventing access to iboss from the open internet, it would be great."

"Our biggest problem with their service was it did not recognize the device and filtering did not always work correctly."

"Fold that in with the risk intelligence they're getting from all of the different subscriptions they are a part of. Now, these security companies subscribe to things like emerging threats, databases, etc. You can fold all this intelligence to decide what's happening on an endpoint. I would love to see them start moving into that space. That would compete directly with Microsoft. Maybe that's why they haven't. Having that ability native within the solution would be great. The other area in which I would love to see improvement is more detailed descriptions of why they block websites."

More iboss cons

"They could provide a single-box solution to manage tools for 4000 users. Additionally, they could add extra features to enhance remote micro connection."

"The user interface should be improved as it is not very easy to work with the updates."

"One thing that kind of sticks out to me is the ability to do a proper non-split tunnel. VPN tunnel-wise, it is not really a true unsplit tunnel, but I think that's just because of the way it's designed. A split VPN basically allows your system to talk to other systems without being forced down the tunnel. A VPN running in a non-split tunnel mode forces all the traffic down the tunnel to wherever you're VPNing to. It forces the traffic down so that the traffic is subject to the firewall and rules that you have in your corporate environment and such. It helps to prevent remote malicious folks that may be talking directly to that box from piggybacking into the corporate environment through it. They do it partially, but it would be nice to see more of an enterprise-level solution there."

"It would be better to connect to an application portal from any device. Documentation and support could be better."

"One limitation is that it's harder to provide access to multiple applications in the company with Appgate, but that's probably because of poor management."

"On the cloud, when you make some changes, it may be difficult."

"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."

"The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."

"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."

"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes."

"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 is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

"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."

"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The overall pricing for iboss is very competitive and transparent."

"It is probably in line with other solutions, but I do not deal with the financial side."

"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."

"We have not priced the solution recently, but they were competitive with other vendors in the past."

"We had the cost of purchasing a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs. However, the following year, the cost of just licensing was similar to what was paid the previous year for a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs."

"It is not expensive, and it is also not cheap. iboss is priced right in the sweet spot for the number of features it offers."

"The pricing is according to the market price. It is not a very cheap solution. They have some very aggressive promotions to sell the product in the market."

"It is a pretty expensive tool. It is maybe about $20,000 per year for a hundred users or so."

"We pay $100 per user per month. One license for the site is around $17."

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

16%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Computer Software Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about iboss?

Content filtering is the most useful feature of iboss.

See all answers

What needs improvement with iboss?

Our biggest problem with their service was it did not recognize the device and filtering did not always work correctl...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for iboss?

We used it for student and faculty filtering on campus.

See all answers

What do you like most about Appgate SDP?

The simplicity of the SDP platform is a standout feature; instead of navigating through intricate details, users can ...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Appgate SDP?

The pricing is according to the market price. It is not a very cheap solution. They have some very aggressive promoti...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Appgate SDP?

They could provide a single-box solution to manage tools for 4000 users. Additionally, they could add extra features ...

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 discov...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...

See all answers

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Compared 7% of the time

Fortinet FortiClient vs Appgate SDP

Compared 6% of the time

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Compared 19% of the time

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Compared 18% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

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Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

iboss

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

ZTNA

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

April 2025

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Also Known As

iBoss Cloud Platform

No data available

Cisco Tetration

Overview

iboss offers a comprehensive security platform designed for diverse use cases such as web filtering, data loss protection, corporate proxy services, and URL filtering.

iboss integrates advanced features to address dynamic security needs, leveraging its strength in SASE, ZTNA, AI initiatives, and cloud integration, while ensuring seamless operations for remote work. It excels in historical forensics, malware protection, and flexible cloud deployments. Users benefit from comprehensive traffic scanning, robust malware detection, and PaaS capabilities that reduce hardware management. An intuitive admin console ensures efficient management with content filtering and low false positives. SSL decryption enhances security, while DLP protects data in AI conversations. Deployment is rapid and scalable, allowing effortless integration with emerging technologies.

What features does iboss offer?

Granular Web Filtering: Provides precise control over web content access.
Traffic Scanning: Monitors data through multiple ports for security breaches.
Malware Detection: Ensures superior protection against malware threats.
PaaS Capabilities: Eliminates need for hardware management.
SSL Decryption: Enhances data protection by decrypting secure connections.
DLP Capabilities: Safeguards data during AI interactions.

What benefits and ROI should users consider?

Scalability: Adapts quickly to growing demands and emerging tech integration.
Rapid Deployment: Reduces time to implement security measures.
User-Friendly Admin Console: Facilitates efficient operations management.
Low False Positives: Increases accuracy of threat detection systems.

iboss finds significant application in sectors such as education, where web filtering for K-12 is crucial, and in corporate environments requiring robust proxy services and URL filtering for network security. Its adaptability is essential in scenarios demanding flexible, decentralized security frameworks, particularly for remote work setups.

iboss

Appgate SDP is a network access control tool for local and remote access, multifactor authentication, and micro-segmentation. It is a flexible, robust, and configurable tool with good documentation, interface improvements, and ease of deployment.

It helps organizations prevent lateral movement across networks and servers and provides a more granular access control structure than traditional VPNs. Appgate SDP's valuable features include the ability to hide servers, good support, stability, scalability, and stopping lateral movement. It is currently being used as the main VPN solution for many companies.

Appgate

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

More than 4,000 global enterprises trust the iboss Cloud Platform to support their modern workforces, including a large number of Fortune 50 companies.

United States Air Force FINRA Weight Watchers Rackspace DataDog SageNet Verdant Norwegian Cruise Line VoiceBase The Third Floor

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Buyer's Guide

Appgate SDP vs. Cisco Secure Workload

April 2025

Free Report: Appgate SDP vs. Cisco Secure Workload

Find out what your peers are saying about Appgate SDP vs. Cisco Secure Workload and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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