Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) Reviews

We used it mainly for network access control and full stream for devices.

The product is expensive. It would also be a good add-on to have some machine learning.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for one year.

The product is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The initial setup is straightforward.

It's also recommended for clients during deployment. You're making everything very efficiently managed within the policies. The deployment is also very smooth, allowing you to configure your rooms easily. Once the initial setup is done, it becomes straightforward to understand, especially regarding Windows maintenance.

It was deployed to protect the network from unauthorized users but does not contribute directly to operational efficiency.

Cisco ISE doesn't come cheap but it's still valid working.

We recommend it to our customers.

Cisco ISE provides authentication for various applications. It can integrate with other applications to manage access, including Privileged Access Management for those applications. For a comprehensive environment, Cisco ISE should be able to integrate and provide asset management for an IT organization or any organization.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use Cisco ISE Identity Services Engine currently for TACACS and posturing.

The product elevated my organization’s security level, helped us meet some guidelines, and made our life easy.

We found all the features of the product to be valuable. We have no complaints about it. Posturing is valuable to my organization. Now, we're improving our whole environment to go into a Zero Trust policy, and Cisco Identity Services Engine plays a huge role in it. We're defense contractors, so we support DOD and have specific stakes and a baseline to go with. Our strict environment requires us to do certain things, and the solution plays a role in it.

They should improve their licensing. Licensing is always trouble with Cisco, and Cisco Identity Services Engine is no different. The way the product is licensed could be improved.

I have been using the solution for almost three years.

The solution’s stability is good to go so far. Some vulnerabilities had popped up like any other solution, but Cisco remediated them. There was no problem.

We haven’t even scraped to the surface of what the tool could do. It's very scalable, and we will try to use it as much as we can in the future.

We have had no issues with the product’s customer support so far. We had a neutral experience with support.

Positive

We have seen a return on investment in terms of not pursuing any other solutions. We didn't need to look further. The product did what it does for us now. We are very content with it. We don't have to invest further into something else.

The solution’s pricing is okay.

The tool secures our infrastructure to a certain point. However, we're not using it in terms of detection. My team is only four people, and we take all the tasks together.

The solution did not help us consolidate tools. However, it does help us with TACACS. TACACS was a big thing that we needed. We are trying to get rid of NPS and RADIUS, and we will probably use the product in the future for Certificate Authority. It could probably consolidate tools, but it's not doing it now. However, it will in the future.

The product has absolutely improved our cybersecurity resilience. With all the posturing we're doing and the Zero Trust policy we are bringing, it prevents other users from insider threats. It helps big time with insider threats. It's a big thing for us in our specific programs.

Give it a shot because we did give it a shot. People at first said it was very pricey, but it wasn't really as pricey as people say it is. It's worth trying it. Zero Trust will be mandated later, especially if you're in the government. The product will play a big role in it.

One of our team members was pursuing a certification in CCMP security. He was specifically on the Cisco Identity Services Engine track. We got that for him to demo and test it out. Eventually, it became part of our product. TACACS, Posturing, and Certificate Authority could be the reason why we chose the solution. We are using it now for 802.1X. All port security is not a thing anymore for us.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

We use Cisco ISE to authenticate users or devices onto the network and then drop them into the appropriate VLANs to isolate them and maintain network segmentation.

Cisco ISE has been a great tool to segment our traffic and get the users into the right VLANs. It definitely does free up a lot of time from manual configurations.

It has definitely improved our security a lot. We used to be a single flat network, and now, we are a segmented network where we have all our different traffic isolated so that in case we do get a breach, not all the customers are affected.

Cisco ISE has been great for securing our infrastructure from end to end so that we can detect and remediate threats. We've already seen it detect some devices that we didn't know about, and they quarantine those devices, allowing us to take the appropriate security actions against them.

Our IT staff has been freed up for other projects with Cisco ISE because we're able to do a little bit more automated configuration. We just throw out a single configuration to the ports, and then the users get dropped into whatever VLAN they need to be in without us having to go to each site and configure these things manually. On a usual workday, it has freed up at least a couple of engineers for two to three hours.

Our cybersecurity resilience has improved with Cisco. Users are now segmented. We have firewalls in between, so we can take a look at all the traffic. We have quarantine enabled in there so that if we get a device on our network that we don't recognize, we can lock it down.

The feature that I found most valuable is profiling. We use that to profile certain types of devices, and then depending on the manufacturer, drop them into the appropriate VLAN without us having to go in and manually add the devices.

We would definitely like to see a little bit of an improvement in the web GUI navigation. Some of the things are a little bit hidden in the drop-down menu. If we could get a way to get to those quicker, it'd be much more useful.

We've been using Cisco ISE for about three years.

So far, from what we've been using, we haven't had any problems even with any of the additional patches that we've added. It has been great.

Scalability-wise, it's great. We have plenty of space to add additional nodes. Right now, the ones we do have are not being utilized to a hundred percent, so if we ever do need to add additional, it seems pretty straightforward.

Cisco support has been pretty good over the years, helping us get this stuff up and running. It has definitely taken us a while, and some of the cases have been pretty long, but Cisco support has been pretty good. I'd rate their support a nine out of ten.

Positive

We weren't using anything in place of Cisco ISE previously. We were pretty lacking in that department. When we got Cisco ISE, we improved our security significantly.

We went for Cisco ISE based on a suggestion from one of our vendor partners who helped us with our network refresh. They said that Cisco ISE was something that they had used previously in lots of larger deployments, and they had seen great success with it.

I was involved in its deployment. It was pretty straightforward. A lot of the issues that we ran into were related to coordination with the users just because it was a change for them, but the actual deployment and everything else were pretty straightforward.

We used MTT. They were great. They walked us through the whole process. They designed the network refresh for us as well as the Cisco ISE integration portion of it.

We've seen an ROI. We've freed up some hours, so those engineers who were previously doing more mundane tasks are now able to do something else.

I don't know too much about the actual pricing on it. The licensing part is pretty straightforward. It's a lot more simple than some of the other Cisco licensing models. In that aspect, it's great.

Overall, I'd rate Cisco ISE a nine out of ten.

We are on-prem at twelve separate sites with one main node.

We utilize Cisco ISE for authenticating both our employees and residents at our senior care center. We authenticate them either against LDAP or our network.

Cisco ISE provides us with enhanced network access control, allowing us to manage the VLAN assignments for both our residents and employees. Additionally, Cisco ISE enables us to exercise control over the devices permitted to connect to our network.

I am not aware of the extent to which we leverage Cisco ISE to remediate threats, but it serves as our first line of defense for access. It has been extremely beneficial. Our clientele consists of senior residents, and having some level of control over the devices they connect to the network has had a significant impact. 

Cisco ISE has helped to free up the time of our IT team for other projects.

Sometimes, there are instances when Cisco ISE simply fails to function without any apparent reason, and regardless of the investigation we undertake, the logs indicate that everything is functioning properly, making it somewhat inexplicable. However, after a while, it spontaneously begins functioning again. Therefore, I believe it is not a widespread problem, but when it does occur, it can be quite frustrating.

The support specifically for Cisco ISE has room for improvement.

I have been using Cisco ISE for two years, and the company has been utilizing the solution for ten years.

For the most part, Cisco ISE is stable, good, and functional. However, when it fails, we are left clueless as to the reason behind it, and that's the frustrating aspect.

Cisco ISE scales exceptionally well. However, we have encountered issues while updating to the latest version. It is a significant endeavor due to the extensive scope of our deployment. Nevertheless, I believe this challenge is not unique to us; it appears to be primarily related to the scale of the deployment. Currently, we have nearly 15,000 devices.

The times I've had to contact technical support for Cisco ISE, the experience has been somewhat unsatisfactory. I get the feeling that, at least on the surface, they perform tasks that I can do myself, such as reviewing the logs and identifying the issues. Moreover, given the integration of Cisco ISE with various network components, it's difficult to confine troubleshooting solely to that aspect. Therefore, I desire improved support specifically for Cisco ISE. I would rate the support for Cisco ISE as a six out of ten, whereas for other products in their portfolio, it would receive a nine out of ten.

Neutral

I am not aware of the current price for Cisco ISE, but considering it is a Cisco product, it is likely to be quite high. However, I do not have control over the checkbook.

We evaluated Aruba ClearPass, which was something we considered. However, since we are committed to Cisco throughout our infrastructure, we didn't believe it was worthwhile to replace it with another solution without being certain that it would be better than Cisco ISE.

Aruba ClearPass had a slightly better reputation among the people we surveyed in our industry. We frequently compared it to how college campuses manage their systems because our use case is very similar. In terms of functionality, I believe it was mostly the same. The key difference seemed to be the level of stability.

I give Cisco ISE an eight out of ten. Without knowledge of how the other implementations or competing offerings function, I believe Cisco ISE performs admirably in its intended role. Moreover, I am aware that without it, we would encounter significantly greater challenges. Therefore, I consider it to be great.

Our organization utilizes Cisco products extensively, which, in my opinion, is the reason behind the organization's decision to choose Cisco ISE.

I believe we would have a much more open network if it weren't for Cisco ISE. We would be restricted to only using PSKs, and we wouldn't have a true understanding of what our residents are connecting to the network. I think that's likely the most significant aspect of the implementation.

Cisco Identity Service Engine (ISE) is used mostly for endpoints. If you want to know the profiling and what endpoints are connecting to your company, then ISE is a good solution because it has built-in signatures. Therefore, it knows what kinds of devices are getting added into the network.

You can install it with any cloud provider, e.g., AWS or Azure.

You can install ISE locally. If your site is critical, like in manufacturing, you need to make sure that ISE is a part of the local site. Usually, people install data centers, but you can also install at critical sites.

One of the advantages is that you can easily find rogue endpoints. For example, if you don't want to allow any endpoints where you don't know the people plugging into what kind of devices, ISE can give you a big, clear picture, e.g., what kind of endpoints are getting connected to your network. That is one of the advantages.

From our company perspective, or any company perspective, you need to be PCI compliant and follow HIPAA laws. Therefore, ISE is really instrumental from a cybersecurity perspective. You need to comply if you are PCI compliant and utilizing credit card transactions. ISE can help you become compliant from that perspective.

There is a new trend: a zero-trust kind of architecture. If a company really wants to improve their security, ISE can upscale the security in their network by creating an access policy. This ensures that if the device is not allowed to access something then ISE won't let that device access that resource. This is mostly for segmentation security.

Cisco could improve the GUIs on their hardware.

I have been using Cisco ISE for about seven or eight years.

The stability is good.

You can scale your ISE. You can use ISE for a company of any size: for a small company, a mid-size company, or a large company. ISE can be installed in a cluster-distributed environment. Thus, there is a lot of scalability and resiliency when using ISE.

I would rate the scalability as eight or nine out of 10.

Cisco support is awesome. I would rate them as eight or nine out of 10.

Positive

We did not previously use another solution.

Initially, it is always challenging. Once you get the gist of the deployment, it becomes normal and straightforward afterwards.

Definitely make sure you install ISE in a distributed fashion. Make sure there is a lot of high availability. Otherwise, if your ISE goes down, then you won't be able to authenticate your endpoint. It is better to install ISE in a high availability solution.

We have definitely seen ROI as we are getting compliant. When you are compliant, you get fewer fines from PCI and those types of organizations. 

It is not that pricey.

We have Zscaler, but it is not operating in the same zone as ISE.

Use ISE if you want to build more resilience within your organization.

I would rate the solution as eight or nine out of 10.

We use it for wired .1x, wireless authentication, VPN, and multi-factor authentication. We wanted to have a consistent experience for authentication and authorization of endpoints across the network, as well as security.

As a water utility organization, we're considered critical infrastructure by the feds. Everyone needs water. So it's important for us to protect our industrial control systems, our SCADA systems. ISE helps us do that by segmenting them off from the rest of the network.

And by eliminating trust, it helps us with audits, including CJIS because we have a law enforcement division, and trying to conform to the NIST standards. A lot of government agencies are becoming more familiar with the Zero Trust model and ISE makes our audits go a lot faster and a lot smoother than they used to.

The endpoint profiling feature is among the most valuable because it keeps me from having to manually maintain a MAC address bypass list to track endpoints. I can have ISE profile them for me and then put them in the right bucket.

In addition, ISE really adopts and is strong in the Zero Trust model where we consider everybody a foreign endpoint until they prove they belong on the network. ISE just seems to be built from the ground up to do that, whereas with other solutions, you have to "shoehorn" that in.

I also rate it pretty highly for securing access to our applications and network. If you have the good fortune of being a total Cisco shop, you can utilize SGTs, end to end, across the network. It can be a little tricky to get working, but once it does, it creates quite a consistent experience for any endpoint, even if it moves anywhere in the network.

I'd like to see the logging be a bit more robust in terms of what it has baked in. If I want to do any in-depth searching, I have to export all the logs to an external platform like Elastic or LogRhythm and then parse through them myself. It would be nice if I could find what I want, when I want it, on the platform itself.

I've been using Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine) for 10 years.

Now, the stability is pretty good. I've been working on it since the product launched and it was a bit sketchy. Its current state is really good right now.

The only thing we have run into was a bug when we ran virtual appliances, but that turned out to be an issue with our storage networking QoS policies. That wasn't really an ISE problem, it was more of a storage problem.

In terms of supporting a distributed network, it's pretty powerful. You can stand it up and cluster it and it scales out pretty well. You can put nodes wherever you want to service authentication requests. We're able to scale up or out and we can choose how and when we do that with either virtual or physical machines, meaning it's very flexible. 

It scales quite well. One of the things that Cisco is good at is keeping things pretty simple when you want to scale it. If you want to scale up, you get stronger admin and monitoring nodes. If you want to scale out, you get more policy service nodes. It's quite easy to stand them up, really anywhere, if you use virtuals.

We use it around our Fort Worth campus, which has about half a dozen buildings. By the end of the summer, we'll have it deployed to all of the rest of our five campuses. We have about 30 remote locations across 12 counties in North Texas and they're all using ISE. It works out pretty well.

We have it on-prem right now, but we are moving to a hybrid cloud platform on Azure for a lot of our applications, so we're starting to do proofs of concept with ISE in Azure.

TAC is pretty good. I would definitely suggest getting their solution support, which provides higher maintenance. That way, when you do get someone, you get someone who knows what they're doing. If you get the higher level of support, you get some really smart people who can fix things pretty quickly.

Positive

We used to use Aruba ClearPass. It was somewhat clunky to use and it didn't integrate well with third-party platforms. If you used Aruba, it worked great. If you didn't use Aruba, and were pointing things at ClearPass, it had some issues. We found that ISE typically handled things a little bit better. We could point anything at ISE and take care of it.

The initial deployment was pretty straightforward. It's very simple to just turn the box on and plug into it. You go through a couple of settings and then you can log in to the GUI and pull in all the other nodes that you want.

After the gear came in, it took us about a day to deploy it. I started by implementing it at the local campus. That way, if I broke anything, I could just walk down the hall and not have to drive anywhere.

I stood up the first cluster, and then it was another engineer and me who worked on deploying it out to all the buildings. We started out in monitor mode, to see what it would do if we had turned it on. Once we had remediated anything that looked like it was authenticating incorrectly on the wired network, we went to closed mode and that's where we are now.

Return on investment falls in line with the business vision of securing our resources and protecting them against cyber attacks and nation-state attacks. It's hard to put a monetary value on clean water.

Licensing is a disaster. It's a mess and I hope they fix it soon.

In addition to ClearPass, we looked at Forescout. At the time we looked at Forescout, it was more of an inline product and we weren't looking to add more infrastructure between parts of the network to try to do inline authentications. It seemed easier to do it on the switch ports and have them talk to ISE.

It's a very strong platform, especially now that we're on version 3.1. It's definitely my go-to. I would recommend it over any other NAC platform.

It requires a lot of technical knowledge to actually get it off the ground and running. It's not quite as intuitive as it could be, but it's still a solid platform.

We are using it in-house for phone profiling and for users' computer authentication needs.

The policy and segmentation that we use are currently based on the users and their domains. Let's say different domains, such as HR or finance and procurement. We have policies where users are assigned VLANs or specific requirements and are directed to corresponding policies where services are activated. They have access to specific services based on their domain or vertical.

Many Cisco ISE features are good. It offers automatic profiling of phones and computers, enabling administrators to identify and categorize devices seamlessly. Additionally, Cisco ISE can block anonymous devices attempting to connect to the network. This includes unauthorized attempts from non-domain computers or users trying to obscure their identity to gain network access. Cisco ISE ensures such attempts are thwarted by enforcing full identification authentication.

I struggled with spoofing, specifically the max spoofing feature, which I believe has started working after version 3. Before that, it was not that effective. They could incorporate some AI features.

I have been using Cisco ISE for over three years.

The product is stable.

I rate the solution’s stability a out of ten.

Scalability is also good. I haven't seen any problem because I currently have a new deployment for the ISE and other branches. Getting an integrated access setup is easy, and scalability is also fine. Initially, the scale upon the licensing part and that sizing is low. ISE's existing policies pretty much work very well. There are no significant changes you have to make.

We have more than a thousand users using this solution.

ISE support is good.

The initial setup is straightforward. They are very easy to manage and not complicated at all.

We have received all our files from the client and deployed them. Currently, we are using single active nodes. We have one Primary Admin Node, which is active, and one Policy Service Node. We don't have a secondary admin node for administrative purposes. We have an active operational node. The deployment is pretty simple. You download the file from Cisco, import it into your Cisco ISE, and follow the prompts to set it up based on your requirements, including IPs, basic security needs, DNS servers, etc. Once the initial setup is complete, you can begin creating policies.

Cisco ISE protects your environment from potential physical attacks. This ensures that your environment and users are fully safe, thus enhancing your overall security posture as a first line of defense.

We don't have the full license. An enterprise license includes Apex and device management. We secured it for one of our new branches where the deployment will start. We have a full enterprise license, including Apex and device management, to cut costs.

The problem is we have a team of five. I look into the security and infrastructure part.

Integrating Cisco ISE depends on the specific products you're working with. Each integration may present unique challenges that require individualized solutions. There isn't a one-size-fits-all checklist for potential issues.

They were looking to protect their assets, such as devices, from somebody. If they have an environment exposed to users who frequently come to their office, and it's not a very closed environment, then Cisco ISE is very much required. It's the first place where the attack starts. From a risk and compliance perspective, ISE is essential.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the solution for RADIUS authentication, device authentication, and TACACS. We also use it for Wi-Fi and guest portals.

I like the logging feature. I like that I can look at the logs for authentication issues.

I don't like the fact that we can see the logs only for 24 hours. Maybe that happens because of the way we set it up.

I have been using the solution for six years.

The stability solution is really good. Once we get it up and running, it's great. We have to do a major upgrade, and I'm not as thrilled with the upgrades as I am with just a day-to-day job integration. Upgrades aren't my favorite thing.

The product’s scalability is great. We do not have any issues. We could scale it up without any problems.

Sometimes support is better than others. It depends on who you get. Some guys are really sharp, and for some guys, it takes a little bit longer to get the thing escalated.

Neutral

We used Secure ACS, which was a Cisco tool. Cisco discontinued support for it, so we switched to Cisco Identity Services Engine.

The product runs. It does what it needs to do, and we don't have to touch it most of the time. From that standpoint, we have an ROI.

The product didn't really have a whole lot of competitors at the time. Aruba ClearPass was probably the only other competitor. We were getting rid of Aruba from our wireless. Identity Services Engine was just farther ahead than ClearPass at that time.

We have a lot of things we use for detecting threats. We use the product more for authentication issues and stuff like that. We don't use it to identify threats per se. We have other tools.

The solution helps free up our IT staff. There are only a couple of us who are Cisco Identity Services Engine administrators. In that way, other people can do other things. Once we set up the solution, there's really not a whole lot of maintenance to it. I don't know how many hours it saves. It just works, and we don't have to touch it most of the time. It does its job.

We were using Cisco ACS before using the product. We changed tools and upgraded. The tool helps us improve cybersecurity resilience. We use it for RADIUS and to validate users. There are a lot of tools that we use. Cisco Identity Services Engine is a good tool. It does 802.1X and RADIUS very well. Cisco shop is the way to go.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.