Cisco Secure Workload vs RedSeal vs VMware NSX comparison

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3,340 views|2,212 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
RedSeal Logo
30 views|21 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
VMware Logo
6,218 views|3,977 comparisons
88% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Workload, RedSeal, and VMware NSX based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, Cisco, Akamai and others in Cloud and Data Center Security.
To learn more, read our detailed Cloud and Data Center Security Report (Updated: April 2024).
769,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"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.""Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco.""A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution.""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.""Scalability is its most valuable feature.""Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack.""The product provides multiple-device integration."

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"This is the only solution in the world that gives you a digital resilience score.""The most valuable features are network mapping and configuration.""RedSeal integrates the network and gives us a visual or graphical overview of our network. If an organization is geographically dispersed, for instance, with one office in Canada and one office in the Philippines, the whole network, including all devices, is integrated into RedSeal, and you can see from where the traffic is going in and out."

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"The initial setup is easy and takes between one and five days.""Though I haven't been working a lot on VMware NSX, it's good to have. What I like the most about it is that its console is good, and it doesn't take a lot of effort in terms of doing my daily tasks on it or what it's meant for. VMware NSX is still a preferred product in the market.""The initial setup was straightforward. It follows a certain structure and you won't miss a step. It's all on the same level, step by step.""The most valuable feature of VMware NSX is the DFW (distributed firewall)""The microsegmentation is great, and the security team thinks it is great.""We like that everything is integrated.""The most valuable feature is the ability to create, develop, and deploy servers in minutes to hours, rather than days.""During our experience, the solution has been stable."

More VMware NSX Pros →

Cons
"The product must be integrated with the cloud.""The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved.""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.""I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications.""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.""The interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly.""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 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."

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"One of the areas of concern is the GUI. It is important to our customers that the GUI looks beautiful. It's a Java Client, so you have a Java dependency.""Sometimes, it required us to refresh the configuration. When we integrated any of the configurations into the device, sometimes, it could not detect the exact picture of that device. So, we had to reset the device to see that if it was giving true-positive results or false-positive results. In some cases, we were not able to get true-positive results. There was some kind of bug in that version. Its interface is not user-friendly and needs to be improved. It takes time to understand the interface and various options. Skybox has quite a user-friendly interface. They could provide a feature for compliance audit policy if it is already not there. A compliance audit policy ensures that all configurations are based on the best practices standards, such as CIS benchmarks standard or other similar standards. It provides visibility about whether your device configuration is based on best practices or not. Usually, such a feature is provided by other solutions such as Meteor or Tenable Nessus.""The dashboard should be improved to make correlating data easier to do."

More RedSeal Cons →

"The tool's setup is complex and we need support to implement it.""They could branch out to the physical layer.""The solution could improve by having a more streamlined setup.""VMware NSX could improve by having more compatibility with other none Window-based operating systems.""The integration with other brands is not the best.""The scalability is not perfect.""It could be cheaper!""I would like to have automating reporting built into common service management platforms, such as JIRA, Serviceaide, and ServiceNow."

More VMware NSX Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
  • "The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."
  • "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 price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
  • "The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
  • More Cisco Secure Workload Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The pricing is based on the number of endpoints and devices, and we have seen it range from mid-five figures to low six figures."
  • More RedSeal Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "Pricing and licensing could be improved as we are a government entity. Lower pricing could always help."
  • "We haven't had to hire a dedicated network engineer because NSX handles 90 percent of it. The reduced overhead in terms of managing networks has been the biggest plus."
  • "We have saved man-hours and decreased our security exposure."
  • "We can't go without NSX, so it's invaluable from this perspective."
  • "The solution is very expensive."
  • "The licensing fees are expensive and we pay on a yearly basis."
  • "It is an expensive product, but cheaper than some competing solutions."
  • "The price of this product is too high."
  • More VMware NSX Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:The product provides multiple-device integration.
    Top Answer:The product must be integrated with the cloud.
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    Top Answer:The product has valuable features for security and network extension.
    Ranking
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    235
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    7.0
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    30
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    6,218
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    3,977
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    Average Words per Review
    421
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Cisco Tetration
    VMware Nicira
    Learn More
    Overview

    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

    RedSeal’s network modeling and risk scoring platform builds an accurate, up-to-date model of an organization’s entire, as-built network to visualize access paths, prioritize what to fix, so you can target existing cybersecurity resources to protect your most valuable assets. With RedSeal’s Digital Resilience Score, decision makers can see the security status and benchmark progress toward digital resilience.

    VMware NSX is a full-stack network and security virtualization platform that enables the virtual cloud network. NSX provides a software-defined process for networking that expands throughout cloud frameworks, data centers, and application structures. Users can join and secure applications within their container and multi-cloud infrastructure and their data center. With robust automated provisioning, the platform offers dynamic flexibility and scalability without compromising on network speed or agility.

    VMware NSX recreates the whole software network model so that users can create and deliver apps quickly and securely. Users can customize security policies and leverage IDS/IPS to block against lateral threats. These security policies can be managed throughout private and public clouds from one pane of glass, no matter where your applications run. By consolidating networking and security tasks into a unified platform, users can save up to one-third of their budget.

    VMware NSX Use Cases

    VMware NSX brings the operational model of a virtual machine to users’ data center networks and revolutionizes the foundations of network and security operations. There are a number of use cases, including:

    • Containers - Similar to VMs, users can offer unified, full-stack networking and security for microservices and containerized apps. This includes the ability to micro-segment, use container networking for Kubernetes, and offers complete visibility for microservices.
    • App Delivery - Users can deliver infrastructure as code while also accelerating app delivery with blueprints that can automate the management of security and networking resources.
    • Security - With zero-trust security in public and private cloud environments, users can reduce attacks, lock down critical apps, and design a logical DMZ in software.
    • Load Balancing - Users can update their data centers from legacy load balancers to software load balancers and SDN automation, creating savings of over 50%.
    • Multi-Cloud - Expand networking across clouds and streamline multi-cloud operations with multi-cloud use cases, including rapid workload mobility, seamless data center extension, and multi-DC pooling.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Through a policy-driven approach, VMware NSX provides VMware technologies to assist with network and security visualization in a unified solution. Users particularly like the distributed firewall and the management dashboard.

    Kolawole O., a systems engineer at a tech services company, writes, "NSX's stand-out function is the distributed firewall. The firewall system is just top-notch, and I haven't seen another solution like it."

    A head of business development and partners management at a comms service provider notes, "I really like the management dashboard, the tailor-made assurance, the telemetry, and the ease of integration with all other solutions of VMware, such as vSphere."

    Sample Customers
    ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
    United States Postal Service, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Interval International
    City of Avondale, Lumeta, Kroll Ontrack, Heartland Payment Systems, Baystate Heallth, Exostar, Tribune Media, iGATE, NTT Communications, Synergent, California Natural Resources Agency, Bloomington Public Schools, Columbia Sportswear, Join Experience S.A, Schuberg Philis
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider44%
    Media Company11%
    Energy/Utilities Company11%
    Computer Software Company11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company29%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Government6%
    Insurance Company5%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Government21%
    Computer Software Company13%
    Financial Services Firm11%
    Healthcare Company8%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Retailer10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise47%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise70%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business13%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise75%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business18%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise67%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise55%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise65%
    Buyer's Guide
    Cloud and Data Center Security
    April 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about VMware, Cisco, Akamai and others in Cloud and Data Center Security. Updated: April 2024.
    769,236 professionals have used our research since 2012.