Cisco Secure Access Reviews

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

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

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

As of today, my main use cases for Cisco Secure Access are VPN solutions, and I'm looking forward to having more SASE solutions.

Indeed, I would say that since the VPN solutions that we have delivered and that our customers are consuming today are not that flexible, if we can transform them to SASE solutions instead, we could make more policy-based access and level up the security.

Since we are a partner to Cisco and we are working in the business-to-business with our customers, they rely on us to be a trusted advisor and a solution partner that can deliver secure solutions for their needs, and secure access is very much a part of securing their environments.

I do not use VPN in Cisco Secure Access yet.

In some customer solutions, we have done ZTNA, and we are very eager to get more of these SASE solutions in this ZTNA.

The feature I like the most about Cisco Secure Access is the posture of devices, to make sure that everything that is connected to my network is okay in terms of patching and all that part, ensuring that the device is okay if they are about to connect to my network.

For ZTNA, it is both client-based and clientless.

Overall, if I have to rate Cisco Secure Access from one to ten, with one being worst and ten being best, I would give it an eight.

In general, what can be improved about this solution is to not change the name of everything every year, as Cisco marketing are experts at making changes to everything, and I don't understand what this is; that was the AnyConnect VPN, and now it's Cisco Secure Access, and what's tomorrow? I would suggest trying to keep the names of products and services for some years.

Since I'm a pre-sale, I discuss Cisco Secure Access or the legacy of solutions for also more than ten years.

I did not use the customer service at any point.

I didn't think about another solution before choosing this one since we're moving into many services more and more, and we're basing the managed services on Cisco solutions; I would prefer to use as much of Cisco ecosystem in our managed services, as it's easier for us as a service provider to handle the customer needs if we can have everything in one ecosystem.

We have partnered with other vendors like Check Point and Fortinet, but I would prefer Cisco if possible.

I don't think it's complicated to describe the experience deploying Cisco Secure Access; my technicians say it's quite straightforward.

You have to ask an engineer whether the documentation about how to do it is good.

Since our customers buy it, there is a return on investment; I don't know the time frame for a complete ROI, but it exists.

I cannot speak to how Cisco Secure Access deployment has impacted the help desk ticket volume and end-user experience because I'm in pre-sales.

I am not using the AI assistant feature yet, but I am planning to in the near future.

I haven't tried it, so I can't really evaluate it.

Regarding how it affected my transition to Zero Trust; since the transition is usually a customer project that takes a lot of time, our engineers know how to do it, but the customer is very reluctant to put the information into the solution that gives the security and the least privilege principles that we need; we can make the rules, but we need the information into the rules from the customer to make sure that the least privilege is working, and it's a tricky part.

It depends on the customer if I'm using a hybrid private access, since we are delivering it to many different sectors in the business-to-business area.

I'm not sure about varying the enforcement location for ZTNA Private Access.

I have no experience with the Experience Insight feature, which is a digital experience monitoring.

I don't think I have integrated Cisco Identity Intelligence with Cisco Secure Access.

I think the multi-organization management capability of Cisco Secure Access is moving in the right direction in terms of visibility and efficiency.

My experience is that Cisco has been in an area where there have been many different solutions for security, and now they are converging, but they are moving into more of a 360 view, and I have more or less everything in the same platform, so Cisco is moving in the right direction.

There is nothing else more technical I would like to add.

My overall rating for this product is an eight.

Hybrid Cloud

Other

Cisco Secure Access is used as a security tool within the tenant as a firewall and serves as a cloud-delivered Zero Trust access platform. It is used for Microsoft Intune as conditional access, Global Secure Access, and from Defender for Cloud Apps, working behind before it.

Cisco Secure Access provides application-level access. Usually, it's full network access, but with this tool, application-level access can be given. It removes the dependency of VPN, and then user authentications are continuously based on identity, device, and risk, which is an add-on there.

The Zero Trust Network Access feature is being used.

Cisco AnyConnect is used as a VPN tool for SASE purposes.

The integration of CASB functionality for exposing shadow IT within the company is smooth. Technical skill and knowledge are needed to evaluate, analyze, and deep dive on those things. From the tool's response, it is very good, and there is visibility on everything that is needed or necessary.

The integration of Cisco Talos influences threat detection and response capabilities. The integration of Cisco Talos is similar to every Cisco Umbrella, and the experience has been smooth. The knowledge, their KB, and FAQs are very good, and their support is very good. When in trouble, readily available documents or information are accessible.

Managing Cisco Secure Access in a single cloud management console is moderate in difficulty. Technical skills or an understanding at a base level or moderate level are needed to make it work, configure, and integrate it. The difficulty level is somewhere between easy and difficult.

Cisco Secure Access has been used for one and a half years.

The product has been stable with no crashes or downtime so far, and the SLA is good.

Cisco Secure Access is scalable.

The technical support of Cisco is good and up to the mark.

Positive

Regarding deployment and installation, it is straightforward, but having basics is necessary.

No negative aspects have been observed so far; everything seems good. The review rating for this product is 9 out of 10.

Public Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Our main use case for Cisco Secure Access is remote access to the company.

The features of Cisco Secure Access that I like the most are the DART, which is an engine that inspects the hardware and software on the end client.

I appreciate that feature because I can ensure that the user is connecting from a company device or laptop with all security features up to date before they can connect to our local network.

The reason my company needs Cisco Secure Access is security. We want to improve our security posture and achieve zero trust.

There may be features that need further development, such as AI or integration with other products, but I cannot provide specific recommendations for improvement.

I would say that over the last 15 years, Cisco Secure Access is the best solution for remote access because I work with other companies as well, but Cisco Secure Access is the best one. It works and does not require improvement.

Cisco Secure Access has impacted our help desk ticket volume and end-user experience because sometimes users encounter issues. Since we have many features activated, users sometimes cannot connect or attempt to connect multiple times, which generates service desk tickets.

I have worked with many technical engineers for Cisco Secure Access, and I think they are very professional and provide a good experience.

I would rate them a 10 out of 10.

Positive

I never seriously considered migrating away from Cisco Secure Access.

The deployment process of Cisco Secure Access is very easy because there is a wizard with seven steps that allows you to configure it, and it works without complications.

The biggest return on investment for me when using Cisco Secure Access is that you purchase it once and it works. That is why it is the best solution. You do not need to open cases or invest additional time. You simply configure it and it works.

I do not have information about the pricing, setup cost, and licensing because I am not from the sales or pre-sales team. What I know is that we are also using Cisco Duo for authentication and have a good price for our company with more than 2,000 users.

If other companies are using another company's solution, such as Palo Alto or Check Point, they should try AnyConnect and will see that it works better than other products.

In my company, from the beginning, we have used only Cisco Secure Access with no other options. From the start, it was Secure Client and AnyConnect. I would rate this product a 10 out of 10.