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Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center vs FireMon Security Manager comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary
 

Categories and Ranking

Cisco Secure Firewall Manag...
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
7th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
FireMon Security Manager
Ranking in Firewall Security Management
4th
Average Rating
8.2
Number of Reviews
53
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of September 2024, in the Firewall Security Management category, the mindshare of Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is 0.7%, down from 0.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of FireMon Security Manager is 16.0%, down from 16.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Firewall Security Management
 

Featured Reviews

Ajay Dand - PeerSpot reviewer
Jan 23, 2024
Efficient and effective network security offering centralized management and robust security features
The Cisco Management Center provides centralized management for a variety of Secure devices and policies. Typically, Cisco's centralized management is facilitated through the DNA Center platform, offering different flavors of DNA solutions. Although Cisco Prime has been utilized to some extent in the past, the predominant method for centralized management revolves around Cisco DNA. In our organization, we utilize Cisco Firewalls along with Fortinet for monitoring and analyzing work traffic. Cisco continues to maintain its position as one of the top leaders in the industry. With a strong lineup of products, Cisco's brand reputation in-network services and equipment is widely accepted and trusted. Selling Cisco products is generally easier due to their established name and reputation. The Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center offers numerous benefits, including the stability and quality of its products, which feature almost all the latest market-leading features. This ensures a long product life cycle, reducing the need for frequent tech refreshes. Cisco's robust lifecycle management and clear roadmaps enable customers to plan refreshes and replacements without unexpected downtime, contributing significantly to operational efficiency. Moreover, Cisco's exceptional support minimizes customer losses due to unplanned downtime, while ensuring smooth transitions and upgrades. Working with a single vendor significantly reduces the complexity of future security operations. This approach eliminates situations where products from different vendors fail to communicate effectively, leading to disjointed management and increased reliance on technical support for troubleshooting and break-fix tasks. Cisco Secure products, particularly the Cisco Secure Firewall, offer robust defense mechanisms against denial-of-service and distributed denial-of-service attacks. In many instances, despite the occurrence of such attacks targeting customer networks, the impact on operations was significantly minimized due to the presence of Cisco Secure Firewall at the perimeter. While these attacks were detected, their disruptive effects were mitigated effectively, highlighting the critical role of the Cisco Secure Firewall in safeguarding customer operations.
AU
Apr 26, 2023
Can help organizations automate firewall policy changes across large multi-vendor enterprise environments
FireMon's real-time compliance management is good. The ability to evaluate the overall security measures of our organization is beneficial. However, not essential for small to medium-sized companies like ours. These features are also provided by OEMs. For example, Palo Alto and other firewall solutions offer similar features on their devices. This includes the ability to identify unused or excessively permissive rules. Generating compliance reports is a straightforward process. These are auto-generated reports that are produced once we forward our traffic to the SIEM devices. The devices automatically generate standard compliance reports that we can customize if necessary. This feature is advantageous because it saves time and ensures that the necessary reports are generated. FireMon can help organizations automate firewall policy changes across large multi-vendor enterprise environments. FireMon can impact the cleanup of firewall rules in a large enterprise environment. With FireMon, it is possible to view shared rules and assign tasks to different users within our team. Additionally, tagging is available which allows us to easily revisit and save alerts on these rules. This feature is particularly useful for large organizations. FireMon helps save us significant time by accurately creating, approving, and deploying firewall policy rules and eliminating duplicate rules. FireMon helps us identify errors in misconfigured policies by displaying the errors in the dashboard allowing us to remove those rules.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"The most valuable feature of the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is the UTM."
"The solution has a great UI and a policy deployment mechanism, and all the configuration is easily manageable for the firewalls."
"The policy management capabilities streamline security tasks by facilitating policy configuration. This ensures the impactful implementation of security policies during product installation, enhancing overall security measures."
"The tool's deployment is not complex."
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the intrusion prevention system."
"It's a fine solution in terms of scalability."
"The applied policy inside the firewall is good."
"The platform's most valuable feature has been its centralized management capability, which allows us to monitor and control multiple devices from one location."
"The automation that the platform provides to create tickets reduces human error and more generally, reduces the operational overhead."
"Firewall auditing is very important. We also use the solution for rule traffic analysis, traffic flow discovery and hidden/shadow rules within over 100 firewalls spanning five different brands."
"The unused objects is another nice feature, where it digs a little bit deeper into comparing the logs that it sees versus the configurations that it sees... The unused objects feature will go through in a pretty detailed way and show us which ones aren't being used. Or, if they are used, it will show us how often they're used."
"The most valuable features are Policy Optimizer and Firewall Manager for different brands of firewall."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting capability because everything that we do is a result of our being able to query a report, based on our environment and our PCI compliance efforts."
"In one report, FireMon tells us there are, say, 1,000 rules that can be taken out and it gives us the ability to disable those for a year and to track when we made our changes. After a year, we can go back and eliminate the rules, to bring the configuration down to an almost human-readable level."
"Compared to other applications, it is user-friendly. The appearance of the menus and titles is clear and they are easy to follow. Of course, it requires some experience through using it, to go through everything, but it is not very difficult. It is an easy application to use."
"It is a good product. Previously, we were using only spreadsheets to compare the usage, but now with FireMon, we are able to clean up or review the policies to some extent. It is still a work in progress, but we are at a good stage now."
 

Cons

"It's not very user-friendly and can be somewhat disorganized."
"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center could improve by being less expensive."
"The product could be improved by simplifying its user interface and reducing complexity."
"Cisco firewalls use old ESR or a Linux system, and there are problems with encryption. When we switch on encryption, the throughput goes down."
"The first version had a lot of bugs, but the recent versions have sorted them out."
"The product's setup could be easier."
"I had a challenging time trying to size the firewall on the cloud. Maybe the information is there, but I couldn't find it easily. Usually, it depends on the cloud provider itself, whether you use AWS or Azure. These guys give you the information, so this part is not as detailed."
"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center's logging functionality could be improved."
"A phone app would be nice. This is the reason why it is not perfect yet."
"We've had recurring issues managing FireMon's internal backups. Sometimes, the space allocated for the backup is full, and there is no process where it deletes files that are older than I certain date. It's just waiting for the storage to get full and then it's cleaned up. It isn't something that creates serious issues for us."
"To my knowledge, there's no cloud component to FireMon whatsoever. We're on the hook for any updates to versioning of the operating system or the application that runs on the operating system. It would be nice if it was a little bit more automated."
"Policy Planner requirements section is good, but could use some improvement to allow flexibility to enter different types of requests (modifying an existing policy, object or service group, for example) in a structured task format that can be auto-verified."
"Our firewalls have multiple paths through them and FireMon falls short a little bit because it's not Palo Alto-centric. I don't think FireMon has kept up with where Palo Alto is at. They started out being Check Point-centric for years and they've never really fully embraced the nuances others, like Palo Alto or Fortinet, have. They don't handle a lot of the capabilities and attributes that Palo Alto does yet. They're working on it. They're getting there."
"We have not used the Policy Planner but even so, we have identified areas of improvement with it during our testing. For example, it could be better when it comes to ease of integration or ease of policy automation. Another problem is that there is a console where it has too many options and is not very straightforward. Essentially, controlling it could be made more seamless."
"The stability has been fairly decent, but there have been a few issues. My coworker has had some issues in the past where he has had to work with support."
"It comes as a Linux appliance on a server and we're not a Linux shop, we're more of a Windows shop. It would be great if they could automate or integrate the backups into it and other things through their GUI interface, just to make the management of Linux a little more transparent."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"My license offers all the protection, like malware protection, VPN protection, IDS, IPS, and endpoint protection."
"Technical support is an additional annual cost and is not included with the license."
"Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center has the best price on the market."
"I rate Secure Firewall Management Center eight out of 10 for pricing."
"I rate the tool's pricing a four out of ten. The licensing costs are yearly."
"The solution’s pricing is reasonable."
"One of the advantages of Cisco is its range of flexible licensing options."
"The solution is not expensive."
"It's a good value. From a licensing standpoint... it's very simple to understand, and gives us a good bang for the buck."
"The pricing is very good, very straightforward. It also came in cheaper than AlgoSec and Tufin."
"Pricing model seems fair."
"Pricing is reasonable."
"We pay for it yearly."
"Regarding additional costs, if you want things like Policy Optimizer, extra features, that's extra."
"We don't license all of the devices in our network, so it does not provide us with a comprehensive visibility of all devices in a hybrid network at this time."
"The pricing was very good during our initial year, but they increased it this year a little bit. The price is okay. It is not cheap, but it is still average."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
21%
Government
18%
Financial Services Firm
13%
Engineering Company
6%
Computer Software Company
20%
Financial Services Firm
16%
Manufacturing Company
8%
Energy/Utilities Company
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center?
The platform has significantly enhanced our organization's operations by providing secure communication channels between different office locations.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center?
As for pricing, the tool is expensive for us. I'd rate it eight out of ten on a scale where ten is the most expensive.
What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center?
We use the suggested standard policies that come with the equipment. We don't put much effort into customizing these policies, which we know is a risk. We're moving to a more advanced IT area that ...
What do you like most about FireMon?
I like the Security Manager console where we can see any changes that have been made or pull the results of an assessment and control the policies that we implement.
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for FireMon?
It's a good value. From a licensing standpoint, our only limitation is the number of devices that we manage. Our environment is small. We have fewer than 20 enterprise firewalls, meaning it's hard ...
What needs improvement with FireMon?
We've had recurring issues managing FireMon's internal backups. Sometimes, the space allocated for the backup is full, and there is no process where it deletes files that are older than I certain d...
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
Convey, MGM Resorts International, Southwest Airlines, Alkami, Costco, Aetna, IBM, Verizon, Wells Fargo
Find out what your peers are saying about Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center vs. FireMon Security Manager and other solutions. Updated: September 2024.
805,335 professionals have used our research since 2012.