We performed a comparison between Cisco ASA Firewall and FireEye Network Security based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"Another benefit has been user integration. We try to integrate our policies so that we can create policies based on active users. We can create policies based on who is accessing a resource instead of just IP addresses and ports."
"The main thing that I love the most is its policy and objects. Whenever I try to give access to a user, I can create an object via group creation in the object fields. This way, I am not able to enter a user in the policy repeatedly."
"It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs."
"We have not had to deal with stability issues."
"I like the firewall features, Snort, and the Intrusion Prevention System (IPS)."
"This solution helped us to identify the key areas where we need to focus to block traffic that is malicious to our organization."
"There are no issues that we are aware of. It does its job silently in the background."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"One of the most valuable features is the GUI front end, which is very easy to use. But I'm also a command-line guy, and being able to access the device via command-line for advanced troubleshooting is quite important."
"The ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager) which is the graphical user interface, works out, and Cisco keeps it current."
"The solution is excellent for enterprise-level networks."
"It is pretty stable. I haven't seen many issues during the past four years."
"It's a flexible solution and is well-known in the community."
"Cisco tech is always good and helpful. I would rate them as 10 out of 10."
"The most important feature is the VPN connection."
"Its security and filtering are most valuable. Every layer of data that comes into the organization goes through it. After setting up the criteria, it automatically filters the traffic. We don't have to check it often."
"The sandbox feature of FireEye Network Security is very good. The operating system itself has many features and it supports our design."
"The server appliance is good."
"The most valuable feature is the network security module."
"It is stable and quite protective. It has a lot of features to scan a lot of malicious things and vulnerabilities."
"Very functional and good for detecting malicious traffic."
"It protects from signature-based attacks and signature-less attacks. The sandboxing technology, invented by FireEye, is very valuable. Our customers go for FireEye because of the sandboxing feature. When there is a threat or any malicious activity with a signature, it can be blocked by IPS. However, attacks that do not have any signatures and are very new can only be blocked by using the sandboxing feature, which is available only in FireEye. So, FireEye has both engines. It has an IPS engine and a sandbox engine, which is the best part. You can get complete network protection by using FireEye."
"The solution can scale."
"I also like its logging method. Its logging is very powerful and useful for forensic purposes. You can see the traffic or a specific activity or how something entered your network and where it went."
"The configuration in Firepower Management Center is very slow. Deployment takes two to three minutes. You spend a lot of time on modifications. Whereas, in FortiGate, you press a button, and it takes one second."
"We cannot have virtual domains, which we can create with FortiGate. This is something they should add in the future. Additionally, there is a connection limit and the FMC could improve."
"The only drawback of the user interface is when it comes to policies. When you open it and click on the policies, you have to move manually left and right if you want to see the whole field within the cell. Checkpoint has a very detailed user interface."
"Cisco Firepower is not completely integrated with Active Directory. We are trying to use Active Directory to restrict users by using some security groups that are not integrated within the Cisco Firepower module. This is the main issue that we are facing."
"I would like it to have faster deployment times. A typical deployment could take two to three minutes. Sometimes, it depends on the situation. It is better than it was in the past, but it could always use improvement."
"I think they need to review their whole UI because it feels like it was created by a whole bunch of different teams of developers who didn't fully talk to each other. The net policy screen is just a mess. It should look like the firewall policy screen, and they should both act the same, but they don't. I feel like it's two different buildings or programming, who don't talk to each other, and that really annoys me."
"A major area of improvement would be to have more functionality in public clouds, especially in terms of simplifying it. The high availability doesn't work right now because of the limitations in the cloud."
"The ability to better integrate with other tools would be an improvement."
"It lacks management. For me, it still doesn't have a proper management tool or GUI for configuration, logging, and visualization. Its management is not that easy. It is also not very flexible and easy to configure. They used to have a product called CSM, but it is no longer being developed. FortiGate is better than this solution in terms of GUI, flexibility, and user-friendliness."
"In the future, I would like to be able to use an IP phone over a VPN connection."
"Sometimes, it is not easy to troubleshoot. You need to know where to go. It took me quite awhile. It's like, "Okay, if it doesn't go smoothly here, then go find the documentation." Once you do it, it is not so bad. However, it is sometimes a steep learning curve on the troubleshooting part of it."
"The virtual firewalls don't work very well with Cisco AnyConnect."
"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."
"Its configuration through GUI as well as CLI can be improved and made easier."
"When we first got it, we were doing individual configuring. Now, there is a way to manage from one location."
"I would say that in inexperienced hands, the interface can be kind of overwhelming. There are just a lot of options. Too much, if you don't know what you are looking for or trying to do."
"Technical packaging could be improved."
"They can maybe consider supporting some compliance standards. When we are configuring rules and policies, it can guide whether they are compliant with a particular compliance authority. In addition, if I have configured some rules that have not been used, it should give a report saying that these rules have not been used in the last three months or six months so that I disable or delete those rules."
"I heard that FireEye recently was hacked, and a lot of things were revealed. We would like FireEye to be more secure as an organization. FireEye has to be more protective because it is one of the most critical devices that we are using in our environment. They have a concept called SSL decryption, but that is only the packet address. We would like FireEye to also do a lot of decryption inside the packet. Currently, FireEye only does encryption and decryption of the header, but we would like them to do encryption and decryption of the entire packet."
"It is an expensive solution."
"FireEye Network Security should have better integration with other vendors' firewalls or proxies, such as Palo Alto and Fortinet. Files that are being submitted should happen through the API or automatically."
"It is very expensive, the price could be better."
"Technical support could be improved."
"Its documentation can be improved. The main problem that I see with FireEye is the documentation. We are an official distributor and partner of FireEye, and we have access to complete documentation about how to configure or implement this technology, but for customers, very limited documentation is available openly. This is the area in which FireEye should evolve. All documents should be easily available for everyone."
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Cisco ASA Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 88 reviews while FireEye Network Security is ranked 8th in ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) with 7 reviews. Cisco ASA Firewall is rated 8.4, while FireEye Network Security is rated 8.8. The top reviewer of Cisco ASA Firewall writes "Includes multiple tools that help manage and troubleshoot, but needs SD-WAN for load balancing". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FireEye Network Security writes "A reliable and complete network protection solution that protects from signature-based and signature-less attacks and has powerful logging". Cisco ASA Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate, Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Meraki MX, pfSense and Juniper SRX, whereas FireEye Network Security is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Zscaler Internet Access, Fortinet FortiSandbox, Check Point SandBlast Network and McAfee Advanced Threat Defense.
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