Cisco Secure Workload vs Symantec Data Center Security comparison

Cisco Secure Workload vs. Symantec Data Center Security

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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

Cisco Secure Workload

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

7th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (14th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (9th)

Symantec Data Center Security

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

11th

Average Rating

7.6

Reviews Sentiment

5.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 14.0%, up from 12.5% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Symantec Data Center Security is 1.5%, down from 3.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

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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Atul-Vats

Consultant at Tata Consultancy

Offers a complete system lockdown feature and the ability to restrict users but has a complex policy structure

The negative aspect of that particular product is the fact it has a very, very, very complex policy structure. A user or administrator making the policy in the DCS should have a very thorough knowledge of the operating system or policy making. You have to be very specific about the data structure. If you want to secure a Linux server, an administrator should be very confident about how the directory structure of Linux, how Linux works, and where it puts the important logs. You have to be very cautious about the complete path, and you have to write it over there in the policy part. If you are not very specific, there will be a lot of noise in the system. You're going to receive thousands of events that are false positives. The fine-tuning of the policy is a very complex thing in the DCS itself. Another negative aspect that I have observed is if the product gets installed on the kernel level of any non-Windows server, it has some issues, comparability issues. Sometimes the product doesn't work properly, so it shuts down the machine and crashes the system. There are many cases in which I've observed the DCS crashing the system.

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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

"The most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility."

"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."

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

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

"It's stable."

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

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

"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."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

"The advantage of Data Center Security is its ease of use and that it serves as a single unified platform, where I can apply all my security policies to protect that server."

"The tool will then detect any anomalies, such as an intruder who has breached the network, which can trigger the system lockdown feature if it's enabled and meets the defined threshold."

"Good file integrity monitoring features."

"The granularity of applying the policies is valuable."

"The most valuable feature is the endpoint protection system."

"The most valuable feature is the centralized console, which can handle different products that we have."

"The monitoring in the management console allows us to find out what is going wrong, and it gets reports even before the user reports it."

"The real strength lies in its straightforward approach, offering just two key policies: prevention and detection."

More Symantec Data Center Security pros

Cons

"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."

"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."

"It has an uninviting interface."

"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'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."

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

"The product must be integrated with the cloud."

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

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

"There is plenty of room for improvement with this product, and it could start with platform metrics."

"A user or administrator making the policy in the DCS should have a very thorough knowledge of the operating system or policy making. You have to be very specific about the data structure."

"Adding more compatibility with common products like Microsoft would be a plus."

"Could have better reporting capabilities and better support."

"It would be advantageous if Symantec or Broadcom, given the rebranding, could simplify the process, enabling users to leverage the antivirus functionality more easily."

"This solution clashes with Microsoft defender, which results in performance degradation on the machine."

"The product blocks certain processes, even after allowlisting them."

"The support is very bad. They're not fast at all. Trend Micro's support is much better."

More Symantec Data Center Security cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Compared to some other solutions, such as CrowdStrike, Symantec is more expensive."

"The product is a bit costly."

"It is notably more expensive when compared to other solutions."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Manufacturing Company

20%

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?

The product provides multiple-device integration.

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...

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

What do you like most about Symantec Data Center Security?

The granularity of applying the policies is valuable.

What needs improvement with Symantec Data Center Security?

Agent management is a challenging task. We cannot do it from the console. We will have to use other tools.

What is your primary use case for Symantec Data Center Security?

One key use case for data center security is protecting files within the data center. This is especially important for Linux systems, where locking down specific files is essential to prevent unaut...

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Compared 57% of the time

Symantec Endpoint Security vs Symantec Data Center Security

Compared 33% of the time

VMware NSX vs Symantec Data Center Security

Compared 10% of the time

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Product Reports

Cisco Secure Workload

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Symantec Data Center Security

Download Symantec Data Center Security product report

Also Known As

Cisco Tetration

No data available

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

Cisco

Docker containers make it easy to develop, deploy, and deliver applications where containers can be deployed and brought down in a matter of seconds. This flexibility makes it very useful for DevOps to automate deployment of containers. Symantec Data Center Security: Server Advanced provides agentless Docker container protection that allows you to achieve the performance benefits of Docker without sacrificing security. Full application control enables administrator privilege de-escalation, patch mitigation, and protection against zero day threats in today's heterogeneous data centers.

Broadcom

Sample Customers

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Information Not Available

Cisco Secure Workload vs. Symantec Data Center Security