Cisco Secure Access Reviews

We are about to start up with Cisco Secure Access now. We started this last year, but we have a lot of Umbrella that we are moving over to Cisco Secure Access. The main use cases for Cisco Secure Access are mostly the internet, but we are also looking for the client part, including ZTNA and so on, to move over that part from the traditional SSL VPNs.

The feature of Cisco Secure Access that I appreciate the most is the visibility and the ability to have one rule set for all the traffic. You can see the LAN connections and get them with SGT tags. This means you have all the things, not just your managed clients streaming through the policy set.

The features I have mentioned benefit our company overall by giving us one single pane of glass. We can see all the rule sets. We are partners, so we are building for our end customers and they appreciate having one single control point of the network. This is the most important aspect.

I am not using the AI assistant feature of Cisco Secure Access much yet. I think it is a little bit limited right now. This is something that can be improved, and I think it will be.

I hope there will be a good way to transform Umbrella installations over to Cisco Secure Access to improve the transition. I have not looked much into that part yet, but I hope there will be a smooth transition. Otherwise, that is an improvement that needs to be made.

We are about to start up with Cisco Secure Access right now, with the migration beginning last year.

Before using Cisco Secure Access, we were using Umbrella, which is also Cisco. We used Umbrella and also have a lot of traditional VPN as a service, SSL VPN and so on. We are coming from that part and moving to ZTNA. We are in a transition.

From my point of view, the biggest return on investment when using Cisco Secure Access is that we have not reached that point yet. As we have end customers, it is more up to them to say, but we think that it would be a better improvement and a better experience for the users, and probably fewer tickets and easier troubleshooting. I think it will provide a return on investment in the big picture.

My experience with the pricing, the setup costs, and the licensing of Cisco Secure Access is that it is not cheap, but I do not have exact numbers on what it costs. Comparing to Umbrella, I think we are getting a more future-proof solution, and I hope it is worth the money.

We did not consider other solutions before choosing Cisco Secure Access because we are almost 100% into Cisco with our services. We are using Cisco SD-WAN and Catalyst, for example, and we are looking forward to integrating that with Cisco Secure Access also. We are also using ICE and so on. We are quite integrated into the ecosystem with the services we are delivering, so we will use Cisco Secure Access for that part.

The impact of Cisco Secure Access on our help desk ticket volume and the end-user experience has been evolving. I do not have numbers for the help desk, but I think it is going in the right direction.

The deployment of Cisco Secure Access requires that if you do the internet part, you have to get the customer involved. They have to know which applications work well with a proxy and so on. For the ZTNA part and the client part, it is the same. You have to know your traffic patterns and so on, and you may have to start with a bigger, more allowing rule set and turn it down afterwards.

My advice to other companies considering Cisco Secure Access is to look over their needs and see what great opportunities it can bring to the company. The single pane of glass could be beneficial. You will also get your services together in one appliance, and not so spread out. I would rate this solution an 8 out of 10.

On-premises

Our main use cases for Cisco Secure Access include everything, such as all of our switching and wireless.

I mostly work on the level one switching side. I deal with all the Catalyst 9300 switches and 9280 wireless routers.

It's pretty streamlined. Everything you need to find is in the GUI interface, and if you have any trouble, it's easy to navigate and get around. 

Cisco Secure Access has had a positive impact on protecting our organization from threats such as phishing and ransomware. It provides security and adds additional layers.

I perceive Cisco Secure Access's ability to provide secure access via standard HTTP2, and optionally QUIC protocol, as great and secure.

The licensing is confusing.

I have been using Cisco Secure Access for only a year since joining the company last year. However, the company has been using it for almost ten years.

We have not had any downtime.

Cisco Secure Access scales with the growing needs of my organization. It works effectively for our needs.

I would rate their technical support a nine out of ten. They are quick to respond and generally quick to find a resolution and figure out what's wrong.

Positive

I have not used another solution to address similar needs in another role.

It was already in place when I got here.

It is confusing. When you look at the prices, you have different licensing and years of licensing that you have to purchase. Additionally, it's unclear what service you get from those licenses regarding end-user support. We have a representative who has to walk me through it every time.

The advice I would give to other organizations considering Cisco Secure Access is to implement it as it's pretty straightforward. 

I would rate Cisco Secure Access a nine out of ten.

Cisco Secure Access serves as a replacement for customers' old VPN solutions while increasing security through Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). We had a chicken production client that identified their current VPN as the lowest hanging fruit for increasing security. Since the customer already had Secure Client or AnyConnect previously, introducing the ZTNA module into Cisco Secure Client felt quite straightforward. We implemented it step-by-step, side-by-side, and rolled it out for that customer, which improved secure access for both on-premises and cloud solutions and turned out to be very effective.

Cisco Secure Access offers seamless access and replacement for VPN; VPN can be quite clunky when you need to access cloud solutions. With Secure Access, you create tunnels to everything basically in the solution, simplifying things while improving security for our customers. I particularly appreciate the ZTNA story and accessing SaaS, on-premises, and cloud resources all at once.

Usability is one of the key factors in selling the product; it has to be easy to use. I think Cisco has done a good job there with Secure Client, and since many of our customers and a lot of the market are familiar with AnyConnect, showing them Secure Client, which is basically the same thing but with a new coat of paint, and telling them that it improves security while not being more difficult to handle is great.

Customers spend much less time troubleshooting VPNs because ZTNA works more stably, and therefore it has become a pretty good point of sales for us as a reseller to increase our revenue at the customer level, because it's an extra layer of security that you can add to an already existing networking solution. On the customer side, it increases performance and helps ease of use, and from the reseller side, it's a great product to add on to existing network solutions.

The customer's experience has gone from "Our VPN doesn't work and we need to troubleshoot it all the time" to "Our ZTNA does work and we don't need to troubleshoot it all the time." Cisco Secure Access has been very stable.

Cisco Secure Access's scalability is great; from a technical point of view, it's quite simple. However, from a licensing and cost point of view, there could be improvements in ease of licensing and better pricing.

The multi-organization management capability of Cisco Secure Access is excellent; it's a great feature that you can do with the multi-tenancy mode, and I think it's great that you can roll it out to separate organizations.

A more granular license approach would be beneficial, allowing customers to grow with half a module or one module at a time and add on the CASB, the DNS security, or the ZTNA. If they can do it granularly and grow slowly, I think that would be really advantageous for the sales process.

The license model can be simplified; it is a bit tricky to understand exactly which licenses you need. The cost was pretty expensive but also pretty reasonable, and if the cost could be brought down a bit, that would make it a much more attractive product for the Swedish market.

Customer support is decent; it is slowly getting better now with the new NIS2 and cybersecurity laws that are being implemented.

I have been using and reselling Cisco Secure Access for the past two years.

Customer support is decent; it is slowly getting better now with the new NIS2 and cybersecurity laws that are being implemented. I would give customer support a rating of five.

Neutral

We previously used Cisco AnyConnect VPN, so it was more of an upgrade rather than a switch; we switched from AnyConnect to Secure Client to SSE.

I do not have concrete numbers that I can share because I do not currently have them, but the customer's experience is that they are spending pretty much no time troubleshooting ZTNA, down from spending a lot of time troubleshooting VPNs. I would estimate it is probably in the 60 to 70% range of time saved when it comes to VPN troubleshooting.

We looked at FortiSassy, Cisco Secure Access, and the customer also looked at Cloudflare.

The AI access feature of Cisco Secure Access is really interesting. I do not think it is really there yet; the product has to mature a bit more for us to give it an honest evaluation. However, from what I have seen in the upcoming feature releases, I think it is a really interesting way to go for the AI agents in the solution.

We do not use VPNaaS in Cisco Secure Access.

I do not know how it has impacted incident resolution time because we have only used the Experience Insights feature in a proof of concept stage, and I have not yet done it in a full rollout.

The AI assistant feature in Cisco Secure Access has helped with the documentation and with administrative duties.

We have not integrated Cisco Identity Intelligence with Secure Access.

Everybody has a need for a VPN; VPN is not as secure as it once was because the market is moving fast. Cisco Secure Access and ZTNA is the way forward to ensure easy access and secure access to your preferred on-premises or cloud instances. I would suggest to customers that they allow us to help them by choosing ZTNA rather than VPN. I rate Cisco Secure Access an eight because an easier license structure, easier pricing structure, and better pricing structure would bring it to a ten.

Hybrid Cloud

Microsoft Azure

The main use cases for Cisco Secure Access are placing the product and attempting to place the product for the customer. People who do not have an SSE solution and do not know what it is need to be educated about it. I have to explain what it is and what the advantages are. There are two situations: people who do not know that they need it already and people who really need it and do not know which product to choose. Therefore, I guide them to a Cisco product.

The first targets for Cisco Secure Access are organizations with remote customers who are working from different places. They have many on-premises apps and many SaaS apps. The benefits are that people just need to connect and they have their whole environment available for everybody. It feels the same as if they were in the office, plus they are safe against malware.

A feature of Cisco Secure Access that I appreciate the most is its remote browser isolation. When I show them remote browser isolation, they see nothing different initially. Then, you have to look down right where there is a small Cisco blue square with text stating this page has been isolated, and suddenly the customers think that is wonderful. It is one of my favorite features because it puts a browser in the background. Many customers already have something similar to browser in a box, but it is local. When I explain to them that they can have the same feature in the cloud, which is safer, they appreciate it.

The good thing about Cisco Secure Access in terms of multi-organization management capability is that if you have multiple organizations, they were working with different softwares. Now they just work with one software, which is beneficial. It is pretty easy to manage. That is why I prefer to use it. Since you have one software, you do not need different teams. There is just one team working on the software. You can have two teams as a backup, but ultimately it is just one team for one software, which is good.

I am not using the AI assistant feature for Cisco Secure Access because it is not working properly. Sometimes if you write something very basic such as where can I find the connectors, it responds to go there. However, as soon as I target a specific case, it responds that it is unavailable at the moment.

Regarding the AI Access feature, I would say it has room for improvement. It is not bad; it is good, but it could be better.

In general, I think Cisco Secure Access can be improved. I have worked a lot with Cisco Secure Connect, which is very intuitive and easy. With Cisco Secure Access, things are very complicated. Everybody who has experience with Cisco Secure Connect and touches Cisco Secure Access responds with surprise and confusion about why this is needed and where to find things. I believe there is room for improvement. You have workflows, which is already good, but you can push the workflows even more. It is just the basics, and workflows with really specific problems and specific instances would be good.

I have been using Cisco Secure Access for two years.

Regarding crashes, bugs, or downtime, I do not think we faced any related to Cisco Secure Access as far as I remember. We saw downtime because customers were doing their own things, but not because of the software.

I do not know about the help desk ticket volume since in most cases, we are in direct contact with the customer. It could be, but I do not think so.

My experience with deploying Cisco Secure Access involves starting a proof of concept when the customer is almost ready to buy. I have a flyer that I set up to explain how it is going to work. Before starting the proof of concept, I create a questionnaire, asking how many private apps they have and how many remote workers they have, and I gather all the information. We usually conduct a proof of concept with the customers, meeting their requirements in a short amount of time. As soon as the customer is satisfied, they can test in real time how it is going to function. You also have to educate the customer on what is new, explaining how the traffic apps work, including blocking pages, warnings, and all features. It is fundamental during the proof of concept, as the customer has many questions about why certain things are done a particular way. That is pretty much how the deployment works. We do the proof of concept, present the software, take the formula to meet the requirements, put them in place, and as soon as it is ready to go, we make the switch and it runs.

I believe it is too soon to say that I have seen a return on investment from having Cisco Secure Access. The good thing with it is that you can also place other products, such as Cisco Duo for example. Today, I saw Neil present something at the convention, and now you can combine Cisco Duo directory with Cisco Secure Access. So, there will be a return on investment, but it is too soon.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Cisco Secure Access is positive. It is good because you want to push Cisco Secure Access, and regarding the price, it is very much below other products. So for the price, it is good now. I recommend keeping it that way.

Since I am working for the Cisco competence center, I did not consider another solution before choosing Cisco Secure Access. We just sell Cisco, so no Palo Alto, no FortiGate, no Zscaler.

I definitely use VPNs in Cisco Secure Access.

The transition from VPN to ZTNA with Cisco Secure Access has not really influenced users. People use the VPN to connect so they can directly access their on-premises apps. ZTNA is more for contractors and everything for the browser, but we do not really use it.

I use it in a client-based manner.

I am not really using the hybrid private access feature for varying the enforcement location for ZTNA private traffic right now.

My experience with the Insight feature, particularly digital experience and monitoring, is positive since ThousandEyes is already included in Cisco Secure Access. Customers can see a lot of details and monitoring, and they appreciate it. They do not usually use it, but they can see everything. So this is good.

It has impacted the incident resolution time since we have not had an incident regarding our customers. So, I would say it has potentially helped.

I have not integrated Cisco Identity Intelligence at this time.

For everything overall regarding Cisco Secure Access, I would rate it an eight. It is not a bad product, but for certain things, there is definitely room for improvement.

Our main use case for Cisco Secure Access is that we need a new way for our remote workers to work. We were working with VDI and remote desktop solutions, but these do not scale out for real-time traffic such as Webex.

The feature of Cisco Secure Access that I appreciate the most is the possibility to secure traffic at home on laptops, so they get secure access to the internet. We provide a good way to support all real-time applications. I also appreciate the GUI because it is very simple to use and does not require much time to learn.

The features of Cisco Secure Access benefit our company because we roll out very quickly. Customers are happy with the solution and we received positive feedback that they appreciate the way of working now. Real-time applications work much better, so they enjoy Webex now and can also use video.

Cisco Secure Access can be improved because, especially for administrators or troubleshooting, it would be beneficial to have more detailed GUIs with more logs. Currently there is very minimal information, so it would be helpful if there were more detailed information, particularly for administrators and troubleshooting.

We have been using Cisco Secure Access for one year, including a half-year proof of concept.

I have had experience with customer service and technical support already. It was not very good because we always have to escalate to engineering with our problems, so the TAC cannot help us.

Before Cisco Secure Access, I was using VMware Virtual Desktop Infrastructure. I switched due to cost because VMware raised costs significantly and we moved away.

My experience with deploying Cisco Secure Access is that the setup was very fast, especially when connecting to Entra with cloud solutions, which was very simple. We have our own IDM system, which was a little more tricky. Documentation is sometimes limited.

The biggest return on investment when using this product is that I can be proud of my work. Previously, they were doing video calls over virtual desktop and remote desktop, and they all said IT was not working. Now they see that IT is working.

I considered other solutions before choosing Cisco Secure Access and I tried Palo Alto as well. I chose Cisco Secure Access instead of Palo Alto because we use many other Cisco products and it is easier to combine them, such as DNA and Meraki.

I do not know yet how Cisco Secure Access deployment has impacted help desk ticket volume and end-user experience. We do not have many tickets at the moment, so it appears the customers are happy. We are in the rollout process and have not fully rolled out yet, but at the moment it looks good. We received positive feedback from our service desk.

At the moment, we are not using the AI assistant feature in Cisco Secure Access. We use the API, but not the AI. I would evaluate the effectiveness of AI supply chain risk management by stating that we do not use it, so I do not know at the moment.

We do not use the VPNaaS Cisco Secure Access feature. We use ZTNA. Cisco Secure Access has affected our transition to Zero Trust and least privilege principles as we started with small applications, not everything, but we can roll it out to different customers and it works well at the moment.

We are not using the hybrid private access feature for varying the enforcement location for ZTNA private traffic at the moment. It is only with customers' business devices, so no private devices. I use the Experience Insights feature, which is the Digital Experience Monitoring or DEM. It looks very interesting and you get a lot of information. Currently it is only for interest.

We have not integrated Cisco Identity Intelligence with Cisco Secure Access at the moment. The advice I would give to other companies that are considering this solution is to do a proof of concept first. Try all your applications you want to deploy and then you will succeed. Cisco Secure Access has not helped prevent users uploading sensitive and proprietary information to LLMs because we do not block this or check it. I would rate this review as a 9 out of 10.

I support the US government. From a customer perspective, the use cases tend to be where we are guarding edge devices that we don't have necessarily 100% positive command and control. The devices have data transport that traverses in some cases ISPs, so we can't really control who's adjacent to those networks. We often deploy in those types of environments. Where we can use dark fiber, we prefer to, but that's not always an option.

I'm probably pretty agnostic with respect to that. We have a federal mandate to reach these next-generation firewall requirements. Stateful packet inspection and things of that nature are the things that we're interested in. We have some programs adjacent to us that definitely do that, but my programs don't require that.

We get a significant discount with Cisco, and their support is definitely top-rate.

Cisco does a decent job with logging. Sometimes you may need to tweak a few settings, but with their more recent products that support Python and Java among others, you now have more programmatic control in the latest versions of IOS.

If the FTD devices themselves, the Firepower Threat Detection system, those are the firewalls themselves, the individual appliances, weren't so tightly coupled to FMC, I'd probably appreciate them as a product more. The learning curve was a little higher just because it's a large departure from their original ASA devices. If they could be managed individually as easily as they can be managed through FMC, I'd probably be a bigger fan.

I have used Cisco products for decades at this point. With respect to ASAs and FTDs, FTDs are fairly new, but I have used ASAs for the better part of a decade.

It is definitely top-rate. In fact, I know that my particular group didn't even have a service agreement in place for the better part of a year and those guys were still very responsive to emails and communications.

Positive

We've been using them so long, it's hard to remember being a newbie, but I don't find their products particularly hard to set up. They have great documentation.

In our deployments, all of our web-based access to any of those devices is actually cut off. We do everything through a secure socket. The only situation where we are compelled to use a web interface is for the FMC, specifically for configuration; however, our management is primarily conducted at the console level whenever possible.

We don't find them hard to manage, especially as a group. The bigger challenge was managing them outside of their FMC product. They prefer to be federated to some extent, and they really weren't designed to be individually managed. They prefer to be managed from a central location. But if you have an environment that lends itself to central management, for the most part, it's not an issue.

We acquire through an organization, and we are the ones that implement.

Price-wise, we get a significant discount with Cisco. I actually prefer Juniper products. From a professional perspective, I prefer Palo Alto and Juniper probably more than I do anybody else. But I can't make the argument when we get 50% and 60% discounts, which we don't get from Juniper or Palo Alto.

Because we operate with what could only be called a skeleton crew, a monitoring solution to the extent possible is dependent heavily on logging, which these applications allow. We do a heavy amount of logging and we do a great deal of log parsing through ELK stack and SolarWinds and Splunk. Any tool that provides telemetry through logging is a particularly good fit for us because we have to really automate our monitoring. We don't have the manpower to sit there and look at multiple applications and things on a regular basis. It all has to come to a central location and has to be pretty automated, red light, green light type stuff.

If you have the budget, make sure to get a solid understanding of what's out there. There might be some other products that you might prefer, but if your budget is constrained, you can make it work with Cisco products for sure.

I would rate the solution a 10 out of 10.

On-premises

We have a couple of traveling salesmen, not on a very wide scale, but they are mostly the ones on VPN. Whenever anybody is working remote or whenever my team has to do anything, we use the VPN to get there.

Cisco Secure Access makes it really easy for our traveling sales guys. They can have it on their phone, iPad, and on their laptop. We don't really have any problems with them. It's fairly user-friendly for them and also easy to set up on our side. When people are on vacation, they can still access critical resources through the VPN even in other countries. It makes it easy for me and my team whenever issues come up when we're not in office, as it enables us to work on them.

I appreciate the ease of use of Cisco Secure Access. I find it very easy to install. We have it installed via Intune on any new computers that we have imaged. So it is very easy to install and get started and get working.

Cisco Secure Access's ability to adapt to cyber threats using machine learning and behavioral analysis works pretty well. Cisco is pretty trusted worldwide, so I put a lot of faith in them.

I find deploying Cisco Secure Access pretty easy. We have it installing via Intune on any imaged device that we have. If there are occasionally times where I am not imaging a device and I am doing a manual setup, installing Umbrella and then the Cisco Secure client is fairly easy, just running the installer. It is a personalized installer, so I don't really have to input any information or data.

One main problem we have been having recently with Cisco Secure Access is that we have a lot of workstations out in our plant and they are all touchscreen devices. When you reboot the devices, a prompt will come up occasionally, not every time, asking the user to input a secure gateway. For some reason, the touchscreens don't work to click okay or close that box. Every time something happens, they have to let me know and then I have to remote in and click okay on that box. Touchscreen doesn't seem to work well with it across multiple different touchscreen displays, so not just one brand or anything. An improvement in that area would be nice.

I have been in my field for about three years, and in my current role for about eight months.

I have not seen any stability and reliability issues with Cisco Secure Access. The only issue we have is related to a specific software we use, which is FileMaker, which does not work well over VPN just because of the amount of data that is being transferred. It is typically very slow over VPN. Everything else works perfectly fine.

Cisco Secure Access scales very well with the growing needs of our organization. We have been rapidly expanding usage. Specifically, we have an office remodel starting pretty soon. We have been expanding it because we are going to have more people working remotely, people that never typically work remotely. We have definitely been expanding and adding some more users. It is pretty seamless and not terribly difficult to get it set up for everybody. It is making sure it is installed on their machine and making sure they can log in. It is scaling very well. We will definitely have more and more use as our company grows in the next year or two specifically. We will definitely have more and more people coming in that need VPN access.

I have not had to use any customer service for Cisco Secure Access client in general, but Cisco's customer support is very good. I would rate customer service technical support for Cisco Secure Access at a nine out of ten. I don't really have any issues. It is not super often that we have to reach out, but the RMA process is pretty simple.

Cisco Secure Access was widely implemented. Before that, I don't think there was anything else. Maybe there was a VPN just for IT to use to troubleshoot remotely, but I don't think there was anything before that.

I don't have any specific examples of return on investment with Cisco Secure Access, but I know we didn't have any traveling salesmen about three years ago. We specifically got Cisco Secure Access because we were having traveling salesmen across the United States. So it has definitely improved some value for that.

Cisco Secure Access was selected before I started, but I have to imagine it was probably the main one that they inquired about just because we run full Cisco stack. Just for ease of implementation, that is probably the main one they considered.

I have not used the Zero Trust Network Access feature myself. I am not sure if it is set up. It was set up before I started, so I have not specifically used it.

Regarding Cisco Secure Access's identity-based security measures, we only have it set up for a few users. So I don't have any specific examples of that.

I don't have any specific examples of how granular access controls have helped in managing user permissions.

I am not sure how to measure the impact of detailed analytics on my understanding of network vulnerabilities as it is a tough question.

I would give Cisco Secure Access an overall rating of eight out of ten. One of the main reasons we picked it is because we were already running full Cisco stack. I would say it might be different if you are not running full Cisco stack already. In which case, I would definitely check out some others. But if you are already on Cisco stack, it makes it really easy.

On-premises

Cisco Secure Access is a major part of our organization, focusing on networking, audio, and video, though we are not implementing it with proper security measures.

I use Cisco Secure Access as an on-premises solution.

For security, we use Cisco Secure Access for email security, endpoint security, networking, and gateway-level firewall, and we are also using Cisco Meraki.

Cisco Umbrella helps us with securing applications, and we are using Cisco Umbrella.

Cisco Umbrella is helping us significantly with securing standard applications, but not in a complete manner, as there are some gaps in the product which the product team needs to focus on.

My perception of Cisco Secure Access's ability to provide secure security via protocols such as HTTP, HTTP/2, and QUIC is that the overall impact is significant.

One of the advantages of Cisco Secure Access is the price, and we are able to get a unified dashboard, providing a single pane for everything.

After implementing Cisco Secure Access, I observed complete automation, a complete Zero Trust architecture, and complete automation of security.

It has worked well for protecting our organization from threats including ransomware, phishing, and spamming.

There is always room for improvement with Cisco products, and basically, the product is not as mature as others in the market.

The maturity level of this particular product is not as high as what we see in the market.

Concerns are related to marketing strategy mostly, and the licensing model is typically very confusing.

The ease of managing Cisco Secure Access is quite challenging; it is not user-friendly, and we have to involve too much time to review the information available in the dashboard, which can be confusing.

The integration of Cisco Secure Access is quite difficult; it has too much dependency and is totally dependent upon the current IT infrastructure. It is compatible with only Cisco products, and if we have multiple vendor products in the network, then integration becomes quite challenging.

I have been familiar with Cisco Secure Access for three years.

Cisco Secure Access is a stable solution, and there are no issues with stability.

It is scalable.

Cisco support is quite wonderful, and it is fine compared to Broadcom.

Before choosing Cisco, I considered FortiGate as an alternative.

I chose Cisco instead of Fortinet because, while FortiGate has everything, Cisco is a leader in networking and is more mature compared to Fortinet.

The deployment of Cisco Secure Access is moderate; it is neither difficult nor simple.

We have dedicated Cisco engineers, a team of two to three engineers, including myself.

My major concern is to justify not only the ROI but also the complete security model of our organization, ensuring there are no security gaps from edge to core to cloud.

We purchased Cisco Secure Access from the distributors.

I do use the Zero Trust Network Access feature of Cisco Secure Access.

Before choosing Cisco, I considered FortiGate as an alternative.

I chose Cisco instead of Fortinet because, while FortiGate has everything, Cisco is a leader in networking and is more mature compared to Fortinet.

The decision was more about Cisco's brand and complete branding.

The price of Cisco Secure Access is quite cheaper than VMware NSX.

I would rate this review as nine out of ten.

On-premises

Other

In my role as Head of AI, I focus on how Cisco Secure Access helps power some of the security-related guardrails for how a customer can safely use AI, particularly in the context of access to different tools and the recent conversations I have been having.

For us, the benefits we have experienced from Cisco Secure Access's identity-based security measures come from using it internally for accessing different tools, allowing us to understand who is connecting to various things on the network and how the data is being transmitted back and forth, which has been significant value.

The deployment model for Cisco Secure Access that we see is definitely hybrid.

As for how Cisco Secure Access scales with the growing needs of our organization, we are now seeing a lot more interest based on security concerns, particularly with Mythos Preview and GPT-5.5 Cyber. AI-powered risks are going to be a major concern for many customers, so having a solution like Cisco Secure Access is crucial.

I think being able to have the customer see what is being accessed and what should be accessed by their different employees or people connecting to their network is some of the biggest value-add of Cisco Secure Access.

While my security team would probably be the best one to answer that, alleviating some of the risk and increasing the trust for the customers has been the biggest value-add of using Cisco Secure Access's Zero Trust Network Access feature.

I think the platform's ability to adapt to cyber threats using machine learning and behavioral analysis is significant, as AI is a very fast-moving field. Currently, we are focused on how to integrate that with different customer solutions and build use cases on top of it, making Cisco Secure Access a foundational element of security.

Granular access controls have helped in managing user permissions by allowing us to turn on and off the different access points for employees or even guests coming into the physical office locations, especially with some of our customers, which has been significant amid AI-powered security threats and risks.

My measurement of the impact of detailed analytics on our understanding of network vulnerabilities all comes down to data, as that is the underlying information we need. With our internal AI tools, we look at that data to identify and categorize and prioritize levels of risks for customers, with Cisco Secure Access helping in that prioritization.

Giving the customer peace of mind has been one of the biggest benefits we have seen, and my security team probably knows more details on my side.

In my view, to improve Cisco Secure Access, any agentic AI applications or features should be added in. Providing customers with the freedom to choose which agentic AI features they can turn on and off would be very beneficial.

Professionally, I have been using Cisco Secure Access for about four years.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Cisco Secure Access by saying I do not think we have experienced downtime, crashes, or performance issues, as the Cisco teams and our partner representative have been very good at working with us or providing warnings if anything might happen.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate customer service and technical support at eight or nine because it has been very good and I have been impressed with the level of support that Cisco provides.

Regarding my experience with deploying Cisco Secure Access, the high-level discovery process has been very helpful. While I think the security team can provide more details, the value proposition is pretty clear. On the delivery side, understanding how we interact with the customer's team is crucial.

Before selecting Cisco Secure Access, we considered Palo Alto's similar solution, but that is really the only other one I would mention that is in the mix where we see some customers go in that direction.

In my evaluation process, what stood out positively and negatively when comparing Cisco with other options comes down to whether they are already a Cisco customer, as that has been the biggest factor in fitting within the Cisco ecosystem.

Prior to adopting Cisco Secure Access, we had to consider integration. If the customer has something outside of the Cisco ecosystem, some integrations work better, which is what we recommend to customers not already looking at Cisco Secure Access or who are not Cisco customers.

I would rate Cisco Secure Access overall at either an eight or a nine, as a lot of customers inquire about what other solutions beyond access can be integrated, which is why I appreciate how it pairs with or is included in Cisco AI Defense. My advice to other organizations is to approach it as a holistic journey or perspective, considering how security supports various customer value and use cases, especially regarding AI. I have rated this product an eight out of ten overall.

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

My company's use case for Cisco Secure Access is for teleworkers in general and for third parties.

The most valuable feature of Cisco Secure Access is the possibility to work from anywhere, along with the posture for the host, so the check on the posture. Cisco Secure Access has helped improve my organization overall by changing the way we work; we can work from everywhere.

To improve Cisco Secure Access, I would suggest simplifying the need for different components that Cisco has tried to implement; for example, to have Cisco Secure Access, it is necessary to have AnyConnect, ISE, and Duo, meaning there are various products that need to integrate to achieve the same result, unlike the all-in-one compact products from other vendors.

Inside the Cisco ecosystem, to have Cisco Secure Access, you need several components, which are different products; integrating these Cisco products for the zero trust network presents the main problem, especially since we have many applications that are on-premises, and for the latest version of Cisco Secure Access, the traffic must go to the cloud and then come back to access on-premises applications, creating delays and performance concerns.

I have been using Cisco Secure Access for three years.

The stability of Cisco Secure Access is acceptable; it's very comfortable and perfect. There is no downtime for Cisco Secure Access; we are very happy with it.

We can scale with our business needs. Scaling Cisco Secure Access is a main pain point, as it requires integrating different products which makes it not so easy.

I have engaged with their customer service or support. My impression of Cisco support is very positive; we are very happy, and the SLAs are perfect. I would rate Cisco support as a 10; it's always a 10.

Positive

We have evaluated other products before.

We have used Zscaler and Fortinet products as well. We chose Cisco Secure Access over Zscaler because we were more used to Cisco; we were traditional and we believe in Cisco.

I do not use the AI Assist feature of Cisco Secure Access yet. I do not use VPN as a service for Cisco Secure Access, but we use AnyConnect. We do not use the Experience Insights feature of Cisco Secure Access, like the digital experience monitoring powered by ThousandEyes. I have only integrated the ISE, the Cisco Identity Secure Engine, with Cisco Secure Access so far.

The ISE has impacted our incident resolution time. The impact comes from the nice dashboard of ISE, which allows us to view the problem and generates reports on the issue, so it helps the resolution time. I am aware of the pricing and licensing. Comparing to other vendors, I find the licensing part for Zscaler much easier, while from the price perspective, I would say Cisco is more affordable; however, Cisco Secure Access offers different products to achieve the same goal, whereas Zscaler is all-in-one and much easier to integrate.

We need more of a hybrid cloud model for Cisco Secure Access, as many companies still operate on-premises and require that traffic for on-premises applications stays local instead of routing through the cloud. I would rate this review a 10.

Hybrid Cloud

Other