Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

We were looking to consolidate some of our equipment and technology. When we switched over, ASA was a little bit more versatile as firewalls or VPN concentrators. So, we were able to use the same technology to solve multiple use cases.

We have data centers across the United States as well as AWS and Azure. 

We use it at multiple locations. We have sites in Dallas and Nashville. So, we have them at all our locations as either a VPN concentrator or an actual firewall.

Cybersecurity resilience is very much important for our organization. We are in the healthcare insurance industry, so we have a lot of customer data that goes through our data center for multiple government contracts. Making sure that data is secure is good for the company and beneficial to the customer.

It provides the overall management of my entire enterprise with an ease of transitioning. We have always been a Cisco environment. So, it was easy to transition from what we had to the latest version without a lot of new training.

• Speed
• Its capabilities
• Versatility

When we first got it, we were doing individual configuring. Now, there is a way to manage from one location. We can control all our policies and upgrades with a push instead of having to touch every single piece.

We have been using ASAs for quite a number of years now. 

We have other things around it going down, but we really don't have an issue with our ASAs going down. They are excellent for what we have.

There is rarely maintenance. We have our pushes for updates and vulnerabilities, but we have never really had an issue. 

It is very scalable with the ability to virtualize, which is really easy. We do it during our maintenance window. Now, if we plan it, we know what we are doing. We can spin up another virtual machine and keep moving. 

The technical support is excellent. I would rate it as 10 out of 10. When there has been an issue, we have had a good response from them.

Positive

We were previously using a Cisco product. We replaced them awhile back when I first started, and we have been working with ASAs ever since.

We did have Junipers in our environment, then we transitioned. We still have a mix because some of our contracts have to be split between vendors and different tiers. Now, we mostly have Apollos and ASAs in our environment.

I was involved with the upgrades. Our main firewall was a Cisco module, so we integrated from that because of ASA limitations. This gave us a better benefit.

The deployment was a little complex at first because we were so used to the one-to-one. Being able to consolidate into a single piece of hardware was a little difficult at first, but once we got past the first part, we were good.

We have seen ROI. When I first started, everything was physical and one-to-one. Now, with virtualization, we are able to leverage a piece of hardware and use it in multiple environments. That was definitely a return on investment right out of the gate.

The licensing has definitely improved and got a lot easier. It is customizable depending on what the customer needs, which is a good benefit, instead of just a broad license that everybody has to pay.

It is a good product. I would rate it as 10 out of 10.

Resilience is a definite must. You need to have it because, as we say, "The bad guys are getting worse every day. They are attacking, and they don't care." Therefore, we need to make sure that our customers' data and our data is secure.

It depends on what you need. If there is not a need for multiple vendors or pieces of equipment per contract, you should definitely look at what ASAs could be used for. If you are splitting, you can consolidate using this product.

We use it to control the traffic between our inside and outside networks. 

We use the same firewall for the vendor by creating an IPv6 HyperSec VPN between the company and the vendor. 

It is a security solution. We needed to protect our traffic from the outside to inside. That is why we are using this firewall.

Cisco ASA is pretty good. We use it for Layer 3 and as our main firewall, protecting the entire organization. All our Internet traffic goes through it.

Their CLI is pretty good. 

In order to do an upgrade, we need to upload the software to the firewall, then upgrade the secondary and do a failover. Uploading this software into the firewall is old technology. For example, if you look at the Cisco Meraki firewall, you can schedule the software upgrade. Whereas, here we can't.

Recently, we have been having an issue with the ASA firewall. We haven't found the root cause yet and are still working on it. We failed over the firewall from active to passive and suddenly that resolved the issue. We are now working to find the root cause.

I have been using the Cisco ASA firewall for the last four years.

It is pretty stable. I haven't seen many issues during the past four years.

It has the scalability to replace the firewall with a higher model number.

The scalability meets our needs and future needs.

The technical support is really good. If we open up a case, they are pretty good. As soon as we open up a case, they assign a case manager. Also, they have an engineer on call. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

They had this firewall when I joined the company.

We also have Palo Alto that we use as a firewall for Layer 2.

I haven't really used the GUI features that much.

We have not integrated with any other Cisco solutions yet, but we have been thinking about integrating with Cisco Umbrella.

I would rate the solution as eight out of 10.

Remote access through the VPN wasn't available in the old firewall that we used, so that was a value-add. That's one way Cisco ASA has impacted our company. Also, from an administrator's perspective, newcomers have a shorter learning curve working with the ASA firewalls.

Also, when we deployed it on the data center firewalls, we did some microsegmentation using different subnets for the whole environment, including UAT and production. We didn't have segmentation before, but with the growing security needs, we segmented the servers. For each of the subnets we made different gateways on the firewall. That helped us achieve the requirements of the latest standards.

Thanks to the IPS, the malicious traffic has dropped. Initially, when we deployed the IPS, it gave us some problems. But after a week or two, it worked very well. I used a balanced security policy when I integrated it with the FMC server. On the FMC, the GUI gives me a very good, extensive view of what traffic is getting dropped and at what time. It gives me all the visibility that I need.

• The normal firewalling features are very good. You can easily create objects and work with them. 
• The AnyConnect software for remote VPN is an added feature on the firewall that works very well in our environment.
• The IPS is another important feature that I use. It doesn't impact the overall performance of the ASAs.

All of these features work fine.

Cisco ASA works very nicely from an administration perspective. The management of the device is very nice. The ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager) is the software that we use and it is very easy to configure using the GUI. If you are familiar with the ASDM software, it's very easy for anyone to handle. The CLI isn't different from other Cisco CLIs, so that makes it easy as well.

Also, the visibility when doing packet inspection on the ASA, using the ASDM GUI, works well. You can go to the monitoring part and see the live logs, the syslogs. All the traffic events are displayed in the syslog. You can filter on whatever event you are interested in and it is visible to you in no time. It provides a real-time display of the traffic. Troubleshooting issues is very easy using ASDM. 

In addition, if you want to do some captures at the interface level, there's a packet tracer, a tool within the ASDM and the ASA, which is available on both the GUI and the CLI. That is on the newer firewalls as well and it's very nice. It shows you the life cycle of a packet within the firewall, from entry to the exit, and how many steps it goes through. It really helps while troubleshooting. I'm very satisfied with that.

The operation of the ASA is good but the problem is that whenever you require an upgrade, there are multiple pieces of software that you have to upgrade. Extensive planning is required, because if you upgrade one piece of the software it has to be compatible with the others as well. You always need to check the compatibility metrics.

For example, if the ASA Firewall's software has to be upgraded, it has to be compatible with the IPS software—the FireSIGHT software. So that has to be upgraded as well, in addition to the ASDM software that you use to manage the firewall using the GUI. Besides that, if you are using the remote VPN part of the firewall, there is the AnyConnect hidden software that also requires an update.

So upgrading is a very extensive exercise, both when you're planning it and when you are doing it. The upgrades are very lengthy. Then Cisco introduced FTD as a unified approach, and that was a leap forward, but it has its own issues.

I've been working as a Cisco partner for about four years. Before that, I was using Cisco firewalls as a network admin. I've been engaged with Cisco firewalls since 2015.

On the FTD (Firepower Threat Defense) model, I've been working with version 6.7. I haven't tried the latest 7.0 version.

The robustness of the ASA is very good. Whenever you upgrade it, it does very well. There are no hiccups or hitches, post-upgrade.

Cisco's TAC provides very good support. If you have any issues, you can contact them and they provide assistance. You need a subscription for that. The subscription comes with a notable cost but you get great value from it. I'm very satisfied with it. 

The tech support of Cisco is unparalleled if I compare it to any other product that I have used. I've been using Citrix, Juniper, and even Palo Alto, but the support that I get from Cisco is very good. It's easy to get support and the engineers get engaged. Sometimes they provide more than you need. For example, if there are design-level issues, they will tell you that it isn't implemented well and that there are things that need to be corrected. That's not their responsibility but they'll provide that feedback.

I consider Cisco support to be the industry standard.

Positive

I've seen Cisco deployed for five to seven years. The product life cycle is good and they're continuing to support things. If you add more features and utilize it to the maximum, using the remote VPN and the like, it becomes more cost-effective. 

Having the IPS part within one box also saves you on costs. Back in 2015, the IPS was a different box that had to be deployed separately. At that time, it cost more if I had to buy another IPS and a box.

Before ASA, we were using Juniper. It had a GUI, but the CLI part of Juniper was difficult. The network administrators required a little bit of a different type of expertise. Juniper was very good, but its CLI wasn't as simple as Cisco's. When somebody new comes into the company to work on the firewall, the Cisco learning curve is relatively short and easy.

Nowadays, everybody is working with Cisco. Juniper has almost been phased out. Some people use Juniper for certain reasons, but there's a very specific clientele for it.

We went with Cisco because it is very easy to operate. It provided next-generation firewalling when it came out with ASA plus Sourcefire IPS. That was very effective at that time, compared to the others.

These days, Palo Alto is matching Cisco and, in some ways, Palo Alto is better. From 2015 to 2018/19, Cisco was considered to be the best. The security leaders are always preferred and Cisco was a leader. That's why we preferred it.

We were also always happy with Cisco support. It was very convenient to get to Cisco support, and it was very prompt and effective. They really solved our problems.

The Nextgen firewalls have a good IPS, but that IPS part wasn't very configurable using the ASDM. Later, they introduced the FMC (Firewall Management Center) and we could integrate the ASA with the FMC and get the IPS configured from the FMC GUI. That was good, but you needed two things to monitor one box. For the IPS you needed an FMC server, and for the firewalls, you needed the ASDM or the CLI.

In terms of integration with other solutions, it is a simple firewall that is integrated with the syslog servers and the SNMP monitoring from the NMS. Those types of simple things work very well. I haven't worked with much integration beyond that. You can't attach that many feeds to it. That's more a function of the Next-Generation Firewall with the IPS and FMC.

SecureX is a relatively new cloud-based solution. It's been around for one or two years. It's offered for free if you have any Cisco security solution. It encompasses ADR and NDR. The clients I work with in Pakistan are mostly financial institutions. Because it's a cloud-based security solution, they are not interested. They want on-prem solutions.

One of the things that we have solved the most with this solution is the P2P connection that we have with different clients. It gives us greater connection security with good management of the configured rules. 

Likewise, it has made it easier for us to have this type of equipment under monitoring, and, since we have implemented them, we have not been presented with any performance problems in the equipment as they have not presented CPU or RAM saturation or that for some reason it fails without any cause. We all have them managed and monitored. We always receive an email notifying us if there's something that the equipment has detected as well.

The ASA firewalls have undoubtedly helped us to improve our infrastructure throughout the corporation and currently we have just over 50 firewalls - all of them in different parts of Mexico. 

This infrastructure has been improved since, in our corporation, we handle the dynamic EIGRP protocol, which Cisco owns, and this solution has given us a geo-redundancy in our company. In case of presenting a problem with a firewall or a link, it performs an immediate convergence where end-users do not detect a failure, helping us to maintain a 99.99% operational level at all times.

I am very happy to use this type of Cisco equipment in my infrastructure. It has given us the most value is the management of dynamic routing, in this case, EIGRP. This protocol, together with a series of additional configurations, has helped us to maintain an automatic redundancy in all our infrastructure, keeping us with very high numbers of operability and without failures that take more than 1 minute or that have not been resolved automatically. With this solution, we only speak with our suppliers either for a link or equipment report, and even if the box or circuit is out of operation, the operation continues to work without problems.

Today, ASA firewalls are leaving the market and are being replaced by firepower equipment - a technology with which I am not very familiar. However, in the training or research, I have done on this new product, I see that it has many additional tools such as centralization of the administration through a single team (in the case the firepower management). It is something that we do not have, yet we are already considering it since this type of technology will help us to have better management and better administration of the equipment through a single platform. The management of additional services with this new module will certainly help us to have the internet network much more secure with connections to the outside.

I've used the solution for more than seven years.

The solution is great in terms of stability.

The scalability is great.

Technical support is great.

We previously used Fortigate.

The initial setup was not complex.

We handled the implementation in-house. 

We've seen an 80% ROI.

Cisco is not cheap, however, it is worth investing in these technologies.

We always evaluate various other options.

We are using it as a firewall for our data center and headquarter. We are also using it for DR. We are using Cisco ASA 5500 Series.

It is a security device, and it is useful for securing our environment. It provides role-based access and other features and helps us in easily securing our environment.

It provides visibility. It has been helpful for packet inspection and logging activities for all kinds of packets, such as routing packets, denied packets, and permitted packets. All these activities are visible on Cisco ASA. There are different commands for logging and visibility.

We use Cisco ASA for the integration of the network. Our company is a financial company, and we are integrating different organizations and banks by using Cisco ASA. We are using role-based access. Any integration, any access, or any configuration is role-based. 

The remote access, VPN, and ACL features are valuable. We are using role-based access for individuals.

IPS is also valuable for intrusion detection and prevention. It is a paid module that can be added. I'm using it for security, VLAN management, segregation management, and so on.

It is easy to use. In our region and our country, Cisco is well known, and most of the companies are using Cisco products. We have been using Cisco devices for a while, and our company primarily has Cisco devices. So, we are familiar with it, which makes it very easy to use for us. Even when we compare it with other products, it is easier to use.

It is easy for us to manage it because it is a familiar product, and it has been a part of our environment. Now, other products are providing free training, free access, and free license, because of which things are changing. So, you can easily become familiar with other products.

Its licensing cost and payment model can be improved. Cisco doesn't provide training and certification for engineers without payments. Other companies, such as Huawei, provide the training for free. Their subscription and licenses are also free and flexible. Other products are breaking the market by providing such features. 

It doesn't support all standard interfaces. It is also not suitable for big companies with high bandwidth traffic. Its capacity should be improved.

Other products are becoming easier to access and configure. They are providing UI interfaces to configure, take backup, synchronize redundant machines, and so on. It is very easy to take backup and upgrade the images in those products. Cisco ASA should have such features. If one redundant machine is getting upgraded, the technology and support should be there to upgrade other redundant machines. In a single window, we should be able to do more in terms of backups, restores, and upgrades.

We have been using this solution for almost eight years.

It is stable. It needs to be configured based on the standards and functionality. We have one device that has been working for more than 10 years, which indicates it is stable, but it requires licenses to upgrade features.

It doesn't have an expansion card. So, it may not scalable for huge buildings. It also lacks a lot of standard interfaces. Other products are providing capacity for a data center. Other technologies are expanding their interface bandwidth from 10 gigs. In my opinion, Cisco ASA doesn't have this capability.

Their support is very good. We have a support license, so their support is very good. They are tracing us and following up with us to solve the problem on time.

Its setup is easy. We are familiar with Cisco ASA and other Cisco products, and they are easy to configure. A lot of resources are available on the internet, so it is easy to set up for anyone with basic training. It is easy in different types of environments, such as universities and colleges.

It generally doesn't take more than a day, but it also depends on the size of the organization. If an organization is very big and if you need a line-by-line configuration for access role and VPN, it can take a bit more time.

Cisco is constantly upgrading and providing features based on current requests. We usually plan deployments at the end of the year and at the beginning of the year. Everyone plans for new products, new configurations, and new expansions based on that.

Any security product provides a return on investment. Any gap in security may cost an organization more.

It is expensive. There is a cost for everything. There is per year license cost and support cost. There is also a cost for any training, any application, and any resource. Things are very costly to do with Cisco.

Other brands are cheaper. They are also more flexible in terms of training, subscription, and licensing. They give lots and lots of years free. They provide more than Cisco.

I would advise understanding its features, advantages, and disadvantages as compared to other solutions. It is simple, but its cost is a negative point. 

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall an eight out of 10.

The primary use case is mainly around perimeter security at the HQ and the branch. This will include using the Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS), using advanced malware protection for networks on the firewall, and remote access VPN as well as site-to-site VPN.

I work for a Cisco partner and managed service provider. We have a number of customers. Typically, the standard setup that we have is a Firepower Management Center Virtual, running in VMware, with physical FTD appliances (as the firewalls) on-premises.

We work with more mid-size organizations who typically have email security, web security, endpoint security, and perimeter security. In terms of products, that would be:

• Cisco Umbrella
• Cisco Cloud Email Security
• Cisco Secure Endpoint
• Firepower, for the perimeter. 

That would be a typical technology mix. Sometimes, some customers will consume something like Duo Security for multi-factor authentication.

We are primarily running ASA Firewalls with the FTD image. We are also running some Firepower 1000 Series. 

One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful. 

Cisco implemented a role-based access control for Firepower, so you can have very granular accounts. For example, a service desk analyst could have read-only access. If we have a security operations team, then they could have access to update IPS vulnerability databases. A network engineer could have access to update ACLs, not rules, which is quite useful. Also, you can selectively push out parts of the policy package based on your role-based access control. So, if you have one job role and work on one part of the configuration, and I work on another job role working on a different part of the configuration, then I could just deploy the changes that I have made without affecting what you are doing (or without pushing out your changes). It is quite nice to be able to do that in that way.

The most valuable feature is the Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System. For customers who don't have a SIEM platform, Firepower Management Center offers some SIEM-like functionality that clearly categorizes intrusion prevention alerts. So, they are rated with flags, from zero to four. If I see a level 1 flag, then this means that the attempted intrusion, not only relates to a real vulnerability, but we likely have a system in our environment somewhere that could be exploited by that vulnerability. In that sense, it helps us quickly target which intrusions should be investigated versus what is noise. A level 2 flag just identifies where an intrusion relates to a known vulnerability. It doesn't mean that you are vulnerable to it, because you may not have the particular hardware/software combination that the vulnerability relates to. Therefore, being able to quickly determine where to focus your investigation is important.

All Cisco security technologies have API integrations. We have all Cisco security products for all our customers integrated into SecureX for overall visibility of threat detections across all security appliances. Cisco Advanced Malware Protection is a good example. It is not just a product but a capability that has been integrated into multiple products or technologies. We see in Firepower that we can benefit from Advanced Malware Protection at a network level, but that same technology is also available on email security as well as endpoint security. So, if a threat is detected in one place that can be blocked everywhere, almost at the same time, then the integration is very good. 

If we look at something like Cisco Umbrella, then we see Umbrella integrated with Cisco Meraki appliances, both on firewalls and access points. So, there does seem to be a good level of integration.

Integrations are primarily API-driven. You just generate an API. You have an identifier and generate an API key. It is normally five minutes or under to integrate something. Cisco has SecureX, which is their security management platform. They also have Cisco SecureX threat response, which is a threat hunting tool. With both of these tools, they can take the API keys from any Cisco products as well as some third-party products, then you can integrate them in just a couple of minutes. It is pretty easy.

FlexConfig is there as a bridge for features that are not yet natively integrated into Firepower. It is a way of allowing you to be able to configure things that wouldn't otherwise be possible until the development team can add them into Firepower's native capability. There is still some work that needs to be done around FlexConfig. There are still quite a few complex things, like policy-based routing, that have to be done in FlexConfig, and it doesn't always work perfectly. Sometimes, there are some glitches. It is recommended that you configure FlexConfig policies with Cisco TAC. It would be good to see Cisco accelerate some of those configurations that you can only do in FlexConfig into the platform, so that they are there natively.

I have been using it for around 18 months.

The product has significantly improved over the last two years. I am aware that the Cisco product team has made significant strides forward in addressing oversights that may have previously existed in the platform. I don't have that much in the way of improvements now. We are running the latest code, the 6.7 code, on all our environments. It addresses so many issues that previously existed in earlier versions of the code. From 6.6, the code has improved significantly and introduced many feature benefits.

The new code, 6.6 and higher, seems to be very stable. Now, you don't need to deploy the entire policy package every time you make a change. You can just deploy the segment of the configuration that has been changed. This has increased how quickly you can deploy the configuration, which is a good improvement. We seem to have less bugs and glitches in the newer code. I can't think of any real bugs or glitches that I have seen since we have been running 6.6. With 6.5 and earlier, there were some problems. Now, it seems to be very stable.

The thing that restricts the scalability would be Firepower Management Center. It is constrained by how many events it can record. It suits customers who have a smaller number of sites, like a dozen or maybe 20 sites. You can still record your connection and intrusion event history for a significant period of time. But, if you are talking about a customer with hundreds of firewalls, then Firepower Management Center probably is not the right proposition.

If I am a customer with a dozen sites, I probably don't have the money to pay for a dedicated SIEM platform. So, Firepower Management Center is great for me because it is like a mini SIEM from a perimeter security perspective. I can store my connection and intrusion event history. I can get an idea of which IPS intrusions are things I should focus my attention on. These are the things that a SIEM could help you with. I can manage my firewalls from a single management location, which is really good. However, if I am a customer who has hundreds of firewalls, then it is not really scalable because I wouldn't be able to store the amount of intrusion and connection events that I would need for those firewalls.

Cisco Defense Orchestrator would probably be the better option if you had an environment that had hundreds of sites with hundreds of firewalls. Even if you acknowledge that Cisco Defense Orchestrator doesn't store events per se, it just allows you to manage and deploy policies to the firewalls, when you have an environment with hundreds of firewalls, then you will definitely have the budget for a SIEM platform. At that point, you would be scaling by having separate platforms for separate functions rather than one platform to do everything.

Firepower Management Center is great for some customers with whom we work because they don't have hundreds of sites with hundreds of firewalls. They just have somewhere between two and 10 sites. So, it is a good fit for that kind of customer.

Cisco Talos is one of the largest private security, threat hunting, research organizations, but non-governmental. It is quite powerful when we explain to customers the threat intelligence injected into Cisco products. I have attended some Cisco Talos workshops, webinars, etc., and they do seem to be amongst the best in their field. So, I have a high degree of confidence in Cisco Talos, and it is one of the most powerful capabilities that Cisco has as a security vendor. You could have the best features for a product, but if the security intelligence is not good nor current, and if it can't accurately predict new threat trends in a timely way, then it still may not help you.

The technical support is absolutely brilliant. When I call Cisco TAC and have a case, every single engineer that I get assigned to any case is an expert in their field. I feel like they understand the product that we are talking about inside out. I have never raised a case for Firepower and not been able to get a resolution. I have a high degree of confidence in them.

The support may not be one of the features documented in the data sheet, but I have worked with other vendors where their quality of support is not comparable. When you are looking at the total cost of a solution, you need to look at more than what the face value of the product is. You need to look at:

• How complicated is this going to be to configure? 
• How complicated will this be to operate? 
• How long will it take me to get a resolution if I have a problem? 

From my experience with Cisco TAC, the resolution will always be very quick. More often than not, it is within a couple of days, if it is a P3. If it is a P1, then it is the same day. I couldn't ask for better.

I find the initial setup fairly straightforward. I wouldn't say it is simple, but it is not a simple piece of technology. You have different policies for different areas of the system, e.g., you have a policy for access control, NAT, FlexConfig, remote access, VPN, etc. There are a lot of policies that you either have to create or configure. However, it is fairly intuitive. Once you have done it once, you know where everything is.

If we assume the most basic variables, one FMC and one FTD on the same LAN, then the FMC can be provisioned with the policies in a day. The appliance can be imaged and added to the FMC with the policies pushed out on another day. If you add remote access VPN into the mix, especially if you have an Active Directory integration, I would probably add another day. You could probably have a working setup in three to four days, depending on if you have any issues with the licensing portal. 

It is very easy to deploy site-to-site VPN tunnels between Firepowers. I appreciate that Cisco deprecated all legacy cypher standards. This means you need to use the modern, robust cipher standards that cannot be broken right now. This is a good thing. However, if you are using two Firepower devices, then it is easy to set up a site-to-site VPN tunnel and use the strongest cipher standard, which is also good.

We normally always try to pre-stage, spinning up virtual FMC and VMware, then configure as much as possible before adding an appliance in. It can be a bit more challenging if you have a lot of FTDs at different sites because you need to be aware that you may be managing a device on an internal IP address while you are pre-staging, but that address may change when you deploy the solution. You just have to think that through, in terms of how Firepower Management Center will keep its connectivity to the device once you deploy it. So, if Firepower Management Center and appliances are all on the same local area network, then it is straightforward. However, it is when you have multiple appliances at different sites that it can be a bit more tricky to make sure that the connectivity is maintained when you deploy. I think some more guidance around this would be good. We have a process that works for us, but it took a bit of figuring out with Cisco TAC to make sure we were not missing anything. If they could maybe document it a bit better, that would be good.

Normally, someone like myself could set everything up, so you wouldn't need a big team. However, if you are doing integrations with something like Active Directory, then you need the person who administers that system to be involved. Likewise, if you are doing site-to-site VPN tunnels with third-parties, then you probably need someone from that third-party organization involved. Most of the configurations can be done by one person. You do need to let the Firepower discovery run for around two weeks before you then run the recommendations around which IPS rules to apply, but it would be possible to just select one of the base policies and leave it at that.

You could choose to run the network discovery, which you should do anyway because there are added benefits, for two weeks then choose the Firepower recommendations. However, if you didn't have time to do that, or that wasn't an option for some reason, you could just choose one of the base IPS policies, like Security over Connectivity or Balance, and that would work out-of-the-box.

Everyone who uses the platform has felt more confident in their perimeter security. The Firepower platform makes it very easy to keep track of what software revision you are on, what your revision is versus what the latest is. It makes it really easy to schedule tasks to download the latest geolocation and vulnerability updates, automate backups, and copy backups to a remote location. Operationally as well as from a security perspective, everything has been positive in terms of the feedback.

I like the Smart Licensing, because it is more dynamic and easier to keep track of where you are at. If we have a high availability firewall pair and they are deployed in active/standby rather than active/active, I would expect that we would only pay for one set of licenses because you are using only one firewall at any one time. The other is there just for resiliency. The licensing, from a Firepower perspective, still requires you to have two licenses, even if the firewalls are in active/standby, which means that you pay for the two licenses, even though you might only be using one firewall any one time. This is probably not the best way to do it and doesn't represent the best value for money. This could be looked at to see if it could be done in a fairer way. For example, you can only deploy MX firewalls in active/standby. There are no other options. You only need one license for those firewalls because you can only use one at a time. This seems quite fair. They may need to look again at this from a Firepower perspective.

I work for a Cisco partner, so we are very Cisco-focused. Most of our customers consume predominantly all Cisco solutions. We have some customers who may have the odd product that is not Cisco, but a majority of their security suite will be Cisco.

I have some experience with budget firewall platforms, like SonicWall and WatchGuard, but these are not really comparable to Cisco in terms of being direct competitors. It would be like me trying to compare a performance car against a budget economy car. It is not a fair comparison.

I would probably ask, "How long do you want to keep the connection and intrusion events for?" You need to remember that Firepower Management Center can only keep a certain amount of events. I think you need to have that in mind as one criteria to make your decision against. 

You need to look at what hardware platform you are going to be deploying. We have a lot of customers who are running ASAs, but they are running the Firepower Threat Defense image on their ASA. For all intents and purposes, those ASAs act as FTDs. Now, try to remember those ASAs were never designed originally to run the FTD code. Now, they can run the FTD code, but some of the dedicated Firepower appliances have a split architecture. So, they have separate physical resources, CPU, and memory for running the traditional firewalling capabilities versus the next-generation firewall capabilities, like IPS, AMP for Networks, and AVC. Maybe, have a think about the hardware platform, because you need to try to assess what throughput you are trying to put through the firewall and how that will impact the performance of the box.

There is definitely some advantage moving to the dedicated Firepower appliances rather than putting the Firepower code on an ASA. Although, it does allow you to leverage an existing investment if you put the FTD code onto the ASA, but you need to be mindful of the limitations that it has. Also, if you are looking to do SSL decryption, then you need a much bigger firewall than you think you need because this puts a lot of overhead on the appliance. However, this would be the same for any vendor's firewall. It is not Cisco specific.

If 10 is the most secure, then our customers are typically in the middle, like a five, in terms of maturity of their organization’s security implementation. This will be because they won't necessarily have things like Network Access Control, such as Cisco ISE. They also won't necessarily have security analytics for anomaly detection, like Stealthwatch or Darktrace. For some of these more sophisticated security technologies, you need to be a large enterprise to be able to afford or invest in them.

While Firepower provides application visibility and control, we don't use it much simply because we use Cisco Umbrella. Firepower gives you application visibility control on a location-by-location basis. So, if we have a firewall at the head office or a firewall at the branch, then we get application visibility control by firewall. However, because we use Cisco Umbrella, that gives us very similar application and visibility control but on a global level. So, we tend to do application visibility and control more within Cisco Umbrella because we can apply it globally rather than on a site-by-site basis. Sometimes, it is useful to have that granular control for an individual site, but it is not something that we use all the time.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of 10.

It is for defense, protecting workloads from a distributed type of an environment. On-premises, we are hosting several different distributed user session type environments. In our case, it is remote desktop services, which enable users to go out and browse the Internet, in some cases to do legitimate services, and in other cases, it is more of a personal browsing session. In this case, the primary purpose is to protect those user sessions when they are accessing the Internet. The secondary use case is to protect these services and applications from inbound threats, e.g., Internet scanning, Internet exploit attempts, any sort of attack, reconnaissance, or anything of that nature coming from the public Internet.

Firepower is an add-on to Cisco ASAs that enables intrusion prevention detection and some additional advanced functionalities. We have both.

We have two on-premise data centers where Firepower is deployed.

In terms of logging, that has been a big benefit because it is a fairly straightforward and easy process to log results. We stream through a folder and that information goes out to Splunk. It delivers immediate value. While Firepower reporting is generally pretty good, there is some delay, as far as when information shows up and updates the internal Firepower reporting mechanism. What we found is if this information is streamed into a SIEM, then it can immediately apply additional enrichment on top of it and build slightly more relevant, near real-time reporting, in comparison to doing it directly from Firepower. In terms of value for Firepower data, the ability to stream that out as a log, then characterize and enrich it within the SIEM that is where we gain the most value from a security perspective.

The solution’s ability to provide visibility into threats is good. Combined with Cisco's own trend intelligence characterization as well as the creation and application of that sort of tag into the stream of data that Firepower detects, that immediately tells us which threat type it is: 

• Does it belong to a threat group? 
• Is it an IP block list?
• Is it a URL block list? 
• Is it a known threat? 
• Which threat list does it belong to?

All this additional information is definitely useful. We treat it personally as set and forget because we are in the block mode - intrusion prevention mode. We don't let threats in. We err on the side of being overly protective. This is opposed to letting in threats, then detecting, identifying, and taking action on stuff that got through. Instead, we just block it. In our day-to-day operations, normally what was blocked is generally useful, but it's not operationally important.

It is set up to automatically apply the blocks and use the threat intelligence delivered by Talos as well as the intrusion prevention rules. All of that is entirely automated.

It has improved our organization's security posture dramatically. It has definitely given us modern protection and peace of mind in terms of attacks against our infrastructure from known or emerging threats, so we can be protected against them.

Intrusion prevention is its most valuable feature because of its effectiveness. Cisco is the largest security company and one of the largest threat intelligence services with Talos. Cisco can identify and immediately apply any new threat information into signature sets for their Intrusion Prevention tools, including endpoint. In our case, we are talking about Firepower. That scope is what results in is an almost immediate application of application prevention signatures against any upcoming network attacks. So, if there is a new vulnerability, some sort of high critical value globally, the Cisco team is typically able to identify and write corresponding detection or prevention signatures, then apply them across their toolset.

It is one of the fastest solutions, if not the fastest, in the security technology space. This gives us peace of mind knowing that as soon as a new attack comes online that we will be protected in short order. From that perspective, no one really comes close now to Firepower, which is hugely valuable to us from an upcoming new attack prevention perspective.

We are using Cisco Cloud Email Security and DNS security from Cisco as well as endpoint protection. The integration between these products is pretty good. The benefit is the ability of all these disparate tools to talk to each other and be able to take action, sort of feeding each other with newly intelligent detection mechanisms and passing that information on to the next tool, then taking action on that next tool based on information identified on the first tool. That is really the biggest benefit of using the ecosystem. So, we've optimized it. We leveraged Cisco's tech response, which connects with each of these tools. We definitely find value every day.

It was very easy to integrate with the SIEM, which is really our primary use case. Besides the Cisco ecosystem, it is integrating with a standalone separate SIEM solution, which is Splunk in our case. This was an easy, simple approach to accomplish. We had no issues or problems with that.

Try to understand if there is a need, e.g., if there is a need to log this information, get these logs out, and forward to some sort of a SIEM technology or perhaps a data store that you could keep it for later. There is limited data storage on the appliance itself. So, you need to ship it out elsewhere in order for you to store it. The only point of consideration is around that area, basically limited storage on the machine and appliance. Consider logging it elsewhere or pushing it out to a SIEM to get better controls and manipulation over the data to generate additional metrics and visibility.

In some cases, I could see how SIEM is not an option for certain companies, perhaps they either cannot afford it, or they do not have the resources to dedicate a security analyst/engineer who could deploy, then manage the SIEM. In most cases, Firepower is a useful tool that a network engineer can help set up and manage, as opposed to a security engineer. To make the solution more effective and appealing, Cisco could continue to improve some of the reporting that is generated within the Firepower Management Console. Overall, that would give a suitable alternative to a full-fledged SIEM, at least on a network detection side, application identification side, and endpoint identification and attribution side. Potentially, a security analyst or network engineer could then simply access the Firepower Management Console, giving them the visibility and data needed to understand what is going on in their environment. If Cisco continues to improve anything, then I would suggest continuing to improve the dashboarding and relevant operational metrics present within the platform, as opposed to taking those logs and shipping them elsewhere.

About four years.

Once it is deployed, not much staff is required as long as the intrusion rules are specifically configured to automatically update. That is the primary thing. Then, the continuous periodic updates from Cisco apply operating system patches just to make sure that critical vulnerabilities are patched and operating system optimization is applied routinely. Strategy-wise, I would patch quarterly unless there was a critical vulnerability that Cisco would discover, then apply a patch against it. At which point, we would then patch our appliance.

The stability is very good. As far as I can tell, we don't have any issues with availability or stability.

Cisco accounts for scalability by having different hardware recommendations, depending on what the throughput is, the required coverage is in terms of number of devices, the amount of traffic, etc. In our case, I don't see any issues. We are appropriately sized, but I could see how if someone's environment doubles, then someone should account for that by either procuring another appliance and separating some of the traffic flows or getting a bigger, more powerful system that can handle increase in throughput.

We try fitting to an ecosystem mentality. For example, we have four different Cisco products, which is technically a single ecosystem. If you were to think of it that way, then it is four different tools from Cisco. Then, there are two additional ones on the network, which makes six. There are additional two or three for an endpoint, plus another two or three for email, and another two or three for identities. So, I would say there are probably around 20 security solutions total.

The network team as well as the security team use it. Combined, that is approximately six people.

We are perfectly sized. I don't think there will be a need to increase the footprint or anything like that, at least for a while.

I know that people typically say TAC is hit or miss. In my case, it was always a good experience. Whether it was Firepower related for licensing questions or email, I have never had any issues with Cisco TAC.

Cisco Talos is very good. They are very well-regarded and well-known. I respect the team. They know what they are doing. They are one of the best overall. They are probably the best threat intelligence organization out there. Their visibility is unparalleled, because the data that Cisco has access to and the telemetry that it's able to gather are quite amazing.

Almost all networks globally in the world are built with the Cisco products. The telemetry that it generates gives Cisco unparalleled visibility, and Talos steps into that. They are able to apply their analytics over that data and identify emerging threats before practically anyone else, but Microsoft. From that perspective, my organization appreciates what Talos is able to do. Cisco's intelligence is delivered through Talos, applying it to other products that are not Cisco, but we haven't gone down that path yet.

We started with Firepower. It was one of the first products that helped secure our organization. We are close to sort of an advanced maturity, primarily compliance-driven. We are not there yet, but we are close to it. We are somewhere sort of in the high to middle area. We have sort of a high compliance-driven security and close to the compliance-driven area, but still slightly below it. We are still fine-tuning and implementing some security technologies. Then, within a year's time, these will be simply managed and audited.

In my current place, I did not help set it up, but I did set it up previously as a dedicated intrusion detection and prevention tool with another security engineer. Honestly, the setup was pretty straightforward. This was a couple of versions behind. It definitely has well-understood requirements from a virtual machine and resources required perspective. No questions that came up.

For the dedicated intrusion appliance, we needed to identify where the most benefit would come from, so we identified the network space. The sort of choke point where we could apply the Firepower appliance in order to inspect the most traffic. In terms of efficiencies, the primary goal was to identify how to maximize the visibility using Firepower. We deployed it in a choke point and ensured that most of the traffic for the company goes through this intrusion appliance and the initial deployment occurred in a visibility mode only - No blocking, intrusion detection only. Then, with time, as we got comfortable with all the traffic that was being seen with a signature application across the traffic and understood the chances for false positives were low to none. At that point, we put it into prevention.

If we needed to address something with Cisco directly regarding Firepower support, that was also addressed fairly quickly with no issues.

The automated policy application and enforcement saves us at least a third of an FTE per day. In terms of time, that is about 30 percent per day. By deploying the solution, we are saving $600 a week, which is significant.

In some cases, resources, like a security engineer, are actually hard to come by because they are expensive. Substituting some of that engineering time with an effective technology, like Firepower, is probably a good strategy.

I know that licensing for some of the advanced solutions, like Intrusion Prevention and Secure Malware Analytics, are nominal costs. 

I have used one of Cisco's competitors and am fairly familiar with it: Palo Alto. I am also familiar with the Barracuda solution. I would say Palo is comparable with Firepower to some degree. The Barracuda solutions that I've used are nowhere near as close in terms of capability, metrics, user interface, or anything like that to Cisco.

Palo Alto and Cisco are about the same in terms of application visibility, user assignments, and attributions. They are comparable. On the threat side is where I think Firepower is better. It's able to identify and characterize better. It's also able to deliver metrics around that information in a clearer fashion. As an example, it is easier to extract fields and values in the log. It seems that the design of the appliance was focused around security, which is evident in how that information is being presented, both in the Firepower Management Console as well as in the log.

On the IT infrastructure side, we are using Cisco hardware for the network. Then, as a security team, we are looking at adding Cisco's incident response solution, but we have not done it yet.

Firepower provides us with application visibility and control. We don't utilize it to the fullest extent. We rely on some additional tools like DNS, to identify applications being used across our endpoints. However, the Firepower deployment primarily protects the servers. So, on the servers, it is a controlled environment. Therefore, we do know the applications and services being used and deployed out of the servers.

Applying something like this to protect yourself from the Internet, which is where most of the threats come from, besides email. It guarantees that you are able to refocus your energy on internal processes: endpoints, people, etc. Intrusion Prevention is effective because it helps security teams refocus their efforts to build out other components, such as security pillars of the organization.

The solution is effective. My initial exposure to Cisco started through Firepower, since then I have understood that Cisco is moving towards an ecosystem approach. Basically, Firepower represents what I think Cisco stands for.

I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10). 

It does what it needs to do and does it great with a good sense of confidence, allowing the team and me to focus on other things. If needed, we can always leverage that data to derive different values from it.

We use them for site-to-site VPN solutions as well as other VPN activities, and for general application security.

We needed a good VPN solution and, as our network grew, we had more applications that were virtualized and that can be spun up. We needed a solution that would keep us ahead.

Cisco ASA provides great security for our applications.

One of the best features is the ease of use. It's also easy to teach new engineers to use the ASA CLI. When I first started learning firewalls, Cisco was the first one that was taught to me and it was pretty easy to grasp. When I'm teaching other engineers to use Cisco ASAs, the results of their learning are immediate.

It needs to provide the next-generation firewall features that other vendors provide, like data analytics, telemetry, and deep packet inspection.

Also, the ASAs need to be improved a little bit to keep up with the demand for high bandwidth and session count applications.

I've been using Cisco ASAs for about 11 years.

It's reliable. It doesn't have all the features of some of the newer firewalls, but it's very reliable. It doesn't break. It's pretty rock-solid.

We have at least a pair in every one of our data centers. We gateway our applications around the firewall system, meaning all application data goes through firewalls.

We have good support from Cisco for the ASAs. That helps us out a lot. Some of our ASAs are pretty old and technically not supported anymore, but TAC always helps us out.

The initial one, for me, was a little bit complex because I hadn't done it before. It was inline and an active/standby pair, so it involved a little bit more than just deploying one firewall. 

We had some documentation written and we tested it in the lab and then the deployment took about four hours.

We deployed it alongside different solutions and then we cut over to it when it wouldn't impact the customers.

The maintenance involves doing code upgrades periodically to keep up with the security environment requirements. One person handles that.

We deployed with a consultant from Cisco support. Our experience with them was good. They provided a lot of documentation ahead of time to help us with our configuration.

From our side there were two people involved. One was doing the configuration and the other person was checking to make sure there were no errors, looking at IPs and the like.

The licensing is straightforward and simple, so we don't have to keep relicensing every year as we do with other applications.

We use Juniper as well.