"The most valuable features of this solution are the integrations and IPS throughput."
"Feature-wise, we mostly use IPS because it is a security requirement to protect against attacks from outside and inside. This is where IPS helps us out a bunch."
"If configured, Firepower provides us with application visibility and control."
"Firepower NGFW has improved my organization in several ways. Before, we were trying to stamp out security threats and issues, it was a one-off type of way to attack it. I spent a lot of manpower trying to track down the individual issues or flare-ups that we would see. With Cisco's Firepower Management, we're able to have that push up to basically one monitor and one UI and be able to track that and stop threats immediately. It also gives us a little more granularity on what those threats might be."
"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."
"The Adversity Malware Protection (AMP) feature is the most valuable. It is also very easy to use. Every technical user can operate this solution without any difficulty. The dashboard of Cisco Firepower has every tool that a security operator needs. You can find every resource that you need to operate through this dashboard."
"I have access to the web version of Cisco Talos to see the reputation of IP addresses. I find this very helpful. It provides important information for my company to obtain the reputation of IP addresses. The information in Talos is quite complete."
"The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control."
"Overall, the pricing of the solution is very good. The product offers good value."
"This is an easy solution to deploy."
"The payment function for applications is good."
"The most valuable feature is the web filter."
"The management console is pretty simple, so anyone who understands networking can initially deploy the solution."
"This product is definitely scalable."
"The application control features, such as Facebook blocking and Spotify blocking, are the most valuable."
"Some of the key features of the solution is that it has good reporting, you can receive many details from the connection, for example, clients and website information."
"It is a brilliant product. It is a Unified Threat Management (UTM) system. It has got about 11 security services that take care of your perimeter security. It takes care of any kind of cyber threats that could come in. It takes care of creating VPNs between two SonicWalls instantly and very easily. It has got spyware in it as well as a firewall. It has also got a gateway antivirus and an application firewall that can block things from outside."
"The functionality is the same whether it is on hardware or a virtual appliance. The interface is the same. It's nice that it's standardized."
"The DPI-SSL is the solution's most valuable aspect. It's handy."
"The most valuable features are that it is reasonably-priced and works well."
"It's very flexible and meets our customer's needs."
"Compared to Cisco, SonicWall NSa is much easier to configure."
"The prices are similar to other vendors and the support is good."
"The most valuable features of this solution are the GUI pre-filtering and the ATP (advanced threat protection)."
"It's mainly the UI and the management parts that need improvement. The most impactful feature when you're using it is the user interface and the user experience."
"The initial setup was a bit complex. It wasn't a major challenge, but due to our requirements and network, it was not very straightforward but still easy enough."
"The price and SD-WAN capabilities are the areas that need improvement."
"On the VPN side, Firepower could be better. It needs more monitoring on VPNs. Right now, it's not that good. You can set up a VPN in Firepower, but you can't monitor it."
"One of the few things that are brought up is that for the overall management, it would be great to have a cloud instance of that. And not only just a cloud instance, but one of the areas that we've looked at is using an HA type of cloud. To have the ability to have a device file within a cloud. If we had an issue with one, the other one would pick up automatically."
"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."
"They need a VTI. I know it's going to be available in the next software version, which is the 6.7 version. However, the problem with that is that the 6.7 is going to deprecate all the older IKEv1 deployment tunnels. Therefore, the problem is that we have a lot of customers which are using older encryptions. If I do that, update it, it's not going to work for me."
"The change-deployment time can always be improved. Even at 50 seconds, it's longer than some of its competitors. I would challenge Cisco to continue to improve in that area."
"The biggest "gotcha" is that if the client purchases what they call the UTM shared bundle, which has unified threat management on both, it's not as easy to manage if you have more than one firewall."
"Sometimes you do need to know some CLI commands, so it's a bit harder for technicians or new people that don't know it."
"The support is the main thing that needs to be improved."
"The initial setup is complex."
"The search tool needs improvement. It's very difficult to search for policies right now."
"It should be more stable. There should be full integration within Fortinet products themselves as well as with other third-party products. Especially when you're not dealing with SIEM and the correlation of the security box, we want Fortinet to be able to share that information with as many other products as it can."
"The performance and speed are aspects of the solution that could always be improved upon."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"We're not particularly fond of the way it generally performs. We are finding ourselves rebooting often. There are freeze-ups and that kind of thing. The stability needs to improve exponentially."
"We still get phishing emails that manage to come through from time to time."
"The pricing for this product in India is high and the fees should be reduced."
"The anti-spam requires a specific Java version on the server side (do not update it, otherwise it will break)."
"The scalability is something that should be improved."
"Having to deal with too many lower-level people in technical support means that it takes longer to resolve issues, so escalating support tickets should be faster."
"In terms of improvement, features like App Control do not work properly"
"It doesn't require much improvement. The only improvement area is that cloud reporting, assessment reporting, and other reporting features should be available with the subscription. They should provide reporting features with the subscription base, which is currently not there. We bought the reporting tool, but there are some complications. They have made some changes to the application, and now the reporting management is completely on the cloud."
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Fortinet FortiGate is ranked 1st in Firewalls with 101 reviews while SonicWall NSa is ranked 17th in Firewalls with 38 reviews. Fortinet FortiGate is rated 8.4, while SonicWall NSa is rated 7.8. The top reviewer of Fortinet FortiGate writes "Stable, easy to set up, and offers good ROI". On the other hand, the top reviewer of SonicWall NSa writes "A rugged solution capable of defeating advanced threats". Fortinet FortiGate is most compared with Cisco ASA Firewall, pfSense, Check Point NGFW and Meraki MX, whereas SonicWall NSa is most compared with Meraki MX, WatchGuard Firebox, SonicWall TZ, Cisco ASA Firewall and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls. See our Fortinet FortiGate vs. SonicWall NSa report.
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