Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

I am an IT administrator and my job is probably 80% security analyst. We are a HIPAA environment, so we're a regulated industry and my job is to keep us from being breached. It's extremely difficult and an ever-changing, evolving problem. As such, I spend a couple of hours a day just reading everything threat report from every source I can get. 

We have a pair of 2110 models, with high availability set up.

There are multiple licenses that you can get with this firewall, and we subscribe to all three. A few months ago, we made the decision to do an enterprise agreement just because of the amount of security software we have. We subscribe to the threat, the URL, and the malware licensing. We use it for IPS, URL blocking, IP blocking, and domain blocking.

We've embraced the Cisco ecosystem primarily because I think they made some very intelligent acquisitions. We talk about security and depth and they've really done a good job of targeting their acquisition of OpenDNS Umbrella. It's all part of our ecosystem.

I take the firewall information and using SecureX, Cisco Threat Response, AMP for Endpoints, and Umbrella, I'm able to aggregate all that data with what I'm getting from the firewalls and from our email security, all into one location. From my perspective, being a medium-sized organization, threat hunting can be extremely difficult.

This product enriches all of the threat data, which I am able to see in one place.

There's nothing I personally have needed to do that I haven't been able to do with the firewall. It integrates so tightly into how I spend the majority of my day, which is threat response.

Much of this depends on any given organization's use case, but because I was an early adapter of Cisco Threat Response and was able to start pulling that data into it, and aggregate that with all of my other data. As I'm doing threat hunting, rather than jump into the firewall and look in the firewall at events, I'm able to pull that directly into Threat Response.

The ability to see the correlation of different event types in one place, these firewalls have definitely enriched that. You have Umbrella, but there are so many different attack types that it's good to have the DNS inspection at the firewall on the edge level too. So, the ability to take all of that firewall data and ingest it directly via SecureX and into our SIEM, where I have other threat feeds, including third-party thread feeds, gives our SIEM the ability to look at the firewall data as well. It lends to the whole concept of layering, where you don't have to have all of your eggs in one basket.

With our Rapid7 solution, I'm able to take the firewall data and dump it into our SIEM. The SIEM is using its threat feeds, as well as the threat feeds that are coming from Cisco Talos. In fact, I have other ones coming into the SIEM as well. So, I'm able to also make sure that something's not missed on the Talos side because it's getting dumped into our SIEM at the same time. All of this is easy to set up and in fact, I can automate it because I can get the threat data from the firewall.

In terms of its ability to future-proof our security strategy, every update they've done makes sense. We've been using one flavor or another of Cisco firewall products for a long time. Although I have friends that live and die by Fortinet or Palo Alto, I've never personally felt that I'm wanting for features.

We get the Security Intelligence Feeds refreshed every hour from Talos, which from my understanding is that they're the largest intelligence Security Intelligence Group outside of the government. My experience with Talos has been, they're pretty on top of things. Another driving factor towards Cisco: We get feeds every hour, automatically refreshed, and updated into the firewall.

If I had to rely on one security intelligence, which I wouldn't, but if I had to, I'm sure it would be Talos. The fact that it gets hourly updates from Talos gives me some peace of mind.

The real strength for the Cisco next-generation firewall is it'll do pretty much anything you want it to do, although it requires expertise and proper implementation. It's not an off-the-shelf product. For instance, there are some firewalls that may be easier to set up because they don't have the complexity, but at the same time, they don't have the feature set that the Cisco firewall has.

The firewall does DNS inspection, and you can create policies there.

The firewall integrates seamlessly and fully with our SIEM. We use a Rapid7 SIEM inside IDR and it now integrates seamlessly with that. Cisco's doing a lot more with APIs and automation, which we've been leveraging.

In terms of application visibility and control, I used the firewall and I also use Umbrella, but it depends on what it is that I'm seeing. One component that I use is network discovery. When you configure the policy properly, it'll go out and do network discovery so you're not loading up a bunch of rules you don't necessarily need. Instead, you're targeting rules that Cisco will say, "Hey, because of network discovery, we found that with this bind to whichever version server, we recommend you apply this ruleset." This is something that's been very helpful. You don't necessarily have to download every rule set, depending on your environment.

I have used it for application control. Right now, we're in the midst of doing tighter integration with ISE and the integration is very good. This is something that we would expect, given that it's a Cisco product.

I use the automated policy application and enforcement every chance I get. Using an automation approach, I would rather have a machine isolated even if it's a false positive because that can happen much faster than I can get an alert and react to it. On my end, I'm trying to automate everything that I can, and I haven't experienced a false positive yet.

Anything that's machine learning-based with automation, that's where I'm focusing a fair amount of attention. Another advantage to having Cisco is that their installed base is so huge. With machine learning, you're benefiting from that large base because the bigger their reach is, the bigger and better the dataset is for machine learning.

At some point, you have to trust that the data set is good. What's impressed me about Cisco is with all of our Cisco products, whether it's AMP or whatever, they're really putting an emphasis on automation, including workflows. For someone like me, if I get an alert in the middle of the night and I see it at 6:00 AM, it is going to be a case of valuable time lost, so anything that I can do to make my life easier, I'll definitely do it.

It would be great if some of the load times were faster. My general sense is that it's probably related to them taking a couple of different technologies and marrying them together. We are using virtual, so the way that I handled that was to throw more RAM in it, which these days, is pretty cheap. I could see some improvement with the speed of deploying policies out, although it's not terrible by any means. One thing about Cisco is whatever they're doing, it keeps getting better.

The speed of deploying policies could be improved, although it is not terrible by any means.

Another legitimate criticism of Cisco that comes to mind is that you need to make sure you've got your licensing straightened out. I haven't had any problems in a long time, but I know people that haven't used Cisco products sometimes can run into issues because they haven't figured out so-called smart licensing. Depending on the Cisco person you're working with, make sure you have all that stuff all set to go before you start the implementation.

That's an area that Cisco has been working on, I know. But licensing is a common complaint about Cisco. I suggest making sure that you have that stuff in place and you've got all your licenses all ready to go. It seems like a dumb thing, but my most common complaint about Cisco before we entered into our enterprise agreement was licensing. When it's working, it's great, but God help you if you've got a licensing problem.

They've been very reliable for us and we haven't had one fail, so we've never had to failover. That has been generally my experience with Cisco products, which is one reason that we tend to lean on Cisco hardware for switching, too. The reliability of the hardware over the years has been very good.

We have integrated these firewalls with other products, such as Cisco ISE, and it hasn't been a problem. ISE is a Cisco product so it would make sense that it integrates well, but ISE integrates with other firewalls as well.

Everything that I've done with these firewalls has been pretty seamless. We've had no downtime with them at all. They've been very rugged as we expanded usage through integration.

People knock Cisco TAC but in my experience, they have been very good. I've always found them to be extremely helpful. Friends that I have made from inside Cisco say, "Hey, you want me to look at this or that?", which is very helpful.

The big three solutions, Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto, are all really good but I tend to lean on Cisco versus the others because one of their strengths, in general, is threat intelligence. When you put a bunch of security people in a room then you have a lot of consensuses, but like anything, you'll have a lot of disagreements, too.

Each of these products has its strengths and weaknesses. However, when you factor in AnyConnect, which most people will agree is state-of-the-art from a security standpoint in terms of VPN technology, especially when it's integrated with Umbrella, it plays into the firewall. But, it always comes back to configuration. Often, when you read about somebody having an attack, it's probably because they didn't set things up properly.

If you're a mom-and-pop shop, maybe you can get by with a pfSense or something like that, which I have in my house. But again, if you're in a regulated environment, you're looking at not just a firewall, you're looking at all sorts of things. The reality is, security is complicated.

Cisco gives you lots of options, which means that it can be complicated to set up. You have to know what you're doing and it's good to have somebody double-check your work. But, on the other hand, it does everything from deep packet inspection and URL filtering to whatever you want it to do, with world-class integration. It integrates with Umbrella, AnyConnect, ISE, StealthWatch, and other products.

It is important to remember that a firewall is only as good as it's configured. Sometimes, people will forget to configure a policy, or they will create the rules but forget to apply them. It comes back to the fact that it's a professional product and it's only as good as the person who's using it.

I do some security consulting and I've seen many misconfigurations. People will write a Rule Set but forget to apply it to a policy, for example. There is no foolproof product and I think it is a challenge to say, "Wow, this firewall is better than that firewall." These things are complex, but Cisco has always, in my mind, set many kinds of standards. I don't know any serious security person that would argue that.

Especially AnyConnect with an Umbrella module attached, I think most people would argue it's state-of-the-art. I know that I would because it allows me to do a couple of things at once. It's not just the firewall; it's AnyConnect, and it's what you can do with AnyConnect given its functionality with Umbrella. It gets kind of complicated and it depends on the use case, and some people don't need that.

Again, what makes it difficult to say something about a firewall is, the configuration possibilities are so varied and endless. How people license them is different. Some people think, "I prefer the IPS License," or whatever. But again, I think to get the strength of a Cisco firewall is just that.

I found our setup straightforward, but you don't go into it blind. You have to be clear on your requirements and you need to take the setup step-by-step. Whenever I deploy a firewall, I have a couple of people to double-check my work. These are people who only work on Cisco firewalls and they act as my proofreaders whenever I am doing a new deployment.

Cisco's documentation is very good and it's always very thorough. However, it's not for a novice, so you wouldn't want a novice setting up the firewall for an enterprise. Personally, I've never had any issues with policies not deploying properly or any other such problems.

Talking about how long it takes to deploy, it's a good weekend if it's a new deployment. It's not just clicking and you're done. I haven't installed a Fortinet product, but I can't imagine any of them are easy to install. Essentially, I found it straightforward, but it is involved. You've got to take your time with it.

You need to make sure anything you do with your networking, that you have it planned out well in advance. But once you do that, you go through the steps, which are well-documented by Cisco.

Cisco is not for a small mom-and-pop shop because of the cost, but if you're in a regulated industry where a breach could cost you a million dollars, it's a bargain. That's the way I look at it.

We also use Cisco Umbrella, and I may use features from that product, depending on where I am.

Every firewall has its pluses and minuses, but because we've taken such a layered approach and we're not relying on one thing to keep us safe, I've never really gone, "Oh, I've had it." I've heard some complaints about Cisco TAC, but generally speaking, I've been able to configure them and do whatever I need to with the Cisco firewall. There's nothing in my experience with Cisco that leads me to believe that that's going to stop.

I've always felt comfortable with every Cisco purchase we've made and every improvement they've made to it. I think they keep moving in a positive direction and they're pretty good with updates and fixes. You can have 10 people, networking people or security people, and they'll all have different takes on it. That said, I've always been very comfortable. I don't stay up at night and worry about our firewalls.

One thing to remember about Cisco is that whatever they're doing, it just keeps getting better. In my experience with Cisco, I have yet to have a product of theirs that they haven't improved over time. For example, we bought into OpenDNS Umbrella before Cisco acquired them. At the time, I was wondering whether they were going to improve it or what was going to happen with it, because you can never be sure. Again, Cisco has done nothing but improve it. It's a far more mature product than when we picked it up five or six years ago.

While not directly related to the NGFW, it speaks to Cisco's overarching vision for security, which again, I'm always looking at layers. If you're thinking that you're going to secure an environment by buying a firewall, yes, that's a really important piece of it, but it's only one piece of it.

Cisco is a company that is really open about vulnerabilities, which some people could see that as a negative but I see as a positive. I do security all the time, so I'm always going to be paranoid. That said, I've spent so much time doing this stuff that I've developed a lot of trust in Cisco. Again, I think there are other great products out there, but Cisco has made it really easy to integrate stuff into this ecosystem where you have multiple layers of not perfect, but state-of-the-art enterprise security.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is, first of all, to know what you're doing. If you're not sure then get somebody that does. However, I would say that's probably true of any firewall. If your business relies on it, have all of your information ready beforehand, it's just all the straightforward stuff that any security person needs.

In summary, I think what I can say about them is there's nothing I needed to do that I haven't been able to do. I have incredible visibility into everything that's happening. We continue to leverage more features, to use it in different ways, and we haven't run into any limitations. I cannot say that the product is perfect, however, and I would deduct a mark for the interface loading. It's not terrible but sometimes, especially when you're doing the setup, it can chug away for a while. Considering what the device does, I think that it's a small complaint.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We use it to configure the perimeter firewalls. In FireSIGHT, we have two firewalls in a cluster with high ability, then we have five firewalls in Offices. We use those firewalls as a perimeter for Offices.

We have all the devices in the Firepower Management Center system. We always work with Firepower devices in Firepower Management Center.

We have offices around the world. We are in Europe, the USA, and South America.

We have border security with Firepower. We try to curb security issues by using this Firepower firewall.

The solution provides us with good working application visibility and control.

I have access to the web version of Cisco Talos to see the reputation of IP addresses. I find this very helpful. It provides important information for my company to obtain the reputation of IP addresses. The information in Talos is quite complete.

The configuration in Firepower Management Center is very slow. Deployment takes two to three minutes. You spend a lot of time on modifications. Whereas, in FortiGate, you press a button, and it takes one second.

Three years ago, the Firepower Management Center was very slow. The solution has improved a lot in the last couple of years. It is now faster. I hope that continues to improve. 

I have been using it for three years.

We have five devices. In Rome, we don't have a technician and didn't work when we started using it. We had to send a technician to Rome to reboot the system. Now, it is stable with no problems. Also, we lost the link to the high availability firewall in our data center. We only had one device there, and Solutel had to solve this issue.

The scalability is great.

We have five devices in four locations.

Three network administrators who work with Firepower, including myself.

I usually create an issue with Solutel, then they create a case with Cisco Talos or the Cisco technicians. I am happy with Solutel's support.

We deployed in several cities, but not the same day. 

The initial deployment was done by a Cisco partner, Solutel. Our experience with Solutel was fantastic. They are local partners for us and provided us with great service.

We realized that clearly we have issues of security with a lot of attacks. I don't know if it is because with the COVID-19 virus a lot of hackers are at home or working more hours. In the last year, we have seen attacks that are very big, and we need a barrier. So, we use a firewall to block these attacks.

The price for Firepower is more expensive than FortiGate. The licensing is very complex. We usually ask for help from Solutel because of its complexity. I have a Cisco account where I can download the VPN client, then connect. Instead, I create an issue with Solutel, then Solutel solves the case.

Our license for Firepower is their best license.

We have FortiGate firewalls, the security of Office 365 from Microsoft, Cisco Umbrella, and Kaspersky Anti-virus. We are also using Cisco ASA, Meraki switches, and a router from Cisco.

The Firepower Management Center tool is very slow. We also have the FortiGate firewalls and these tools for configuring the firewall are faster.

We have to make a change to our devices in South America. We are currently evaluating Cisco Firepower Series 1000 versus FortiGate. Firepower is more powerful than FortiGate, but FortiGate is more flexible and easier to configure. Because of our last issues with Firepower, it is possible that FortiGate is more stable.

It is a very powerful device. Firepower Management Center is a great tool, but it is a bit slow.

We don't have Cisco Umbrella integrated with Firepower. We tested Firepower's integration with Meraki Umbrella, but we don't use it because you need better firmware.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

We use it for the actual firewall and also site-to-site VPN.

Our company is always growing. Every day's a new day and there is always something new to learn. We are a mature organization, but we can never sit still. We have two company locations and we use Cisco Firepower as our main firewall at both locations.

Overall, for security, we use about seven tools.

Within our company, there are just two people that maintain this solution. Myself and the IT manager. I'm the network administrator.

We were the subject of a ransomware attack a little over a year ago. Due to our console, we're able to easily see where the threat came from, all the while being able to shut down the network but maintain our network on the other side — or the other side of the site-to-site VPN. Then we could fix what we needed to be fixed here, and then subsequently correct the issues on the other side.

The manageability through the FMC is superb. I have a single dashboard that I can manage my firewalls from. I can see and manage all of my objects and control all my policies. I can look at all my logs and control my whole network from one dashboard.

FirePOWER does a good job when it comes to providing us with visibility into threats, but I would like to see a more proactive stance to it. Maybe more of an IDS approach. I don't know a better way to say it, but more of a heavier proactive approach rather than a reactive one.

I have been using Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall for two years.

I have had little to no issues except with the first version that we had. There was a known issue with Cisco in the first version. When I went to do a restore, there was a known issue with something with the Linux kernel. It took us about two weeks to get the restore working. It was a scary moment for us, but we worked through it, and ever since we've had no issues, stability-wise.

I have contacted support multiple times and I have no problems with them. I think they do the best with what they have — especially with the pandemic this year. I think they've done everything they can do with what they have. They don't stop. They don't give up until the issue is resolved. They're really good with following-up too, making sure that the issue hasn't come back.

We have another product that monitors all traffic. It just sits back and idols in the background — It integrates, but it doesn't if you know what I mean. It's a separate dashboard, but it alerts us. We can control the security — level zero through one hundred. If a threat registers above 54% (we have the limit set at 51) it alerts us. If it's a specific threat, it can shut down services, ports, machines, authentication, and so on and so forth.

We also use AMP, Umbrella, SecureX, and Duo. They're pretty easy to integrate. I wouldn't say beginner level, but if you have a working knowledge of networks and security, you can easily get them integrated. Also, if you need help, Cisco's always there to assist.

We use Firepower Management Center — it's a wonderful tool. It has an awesome all-in-one pane of glass dashboard so you can manage multiple devices from one dashboard. It's also very easy to set up.

We used to use SonicWall. Cisco was purchased right before I came on board, but from my knowledge, we had issues with the licensing of SonicWall. We are a Cisco shop. Both my manager and I prefer Cisco over other vendors. We have more experience with Cisco and their customer support and the products themselves are just better in our experience.

The deployment was with all new networks, so the architecture was with a peer. We first sat down and discussed or laid out our network and what it would look like through IP schemes and everything else in that sense. We then figured out how many users we would have and decide what size of hardware we would need. We decided on what type of VPN connection and what certificates we would need. After that, once we were able to secure those tunnels and get communication going between our two locations, we then started tightening down our two networks as we have multiple networks within each location.

We had to decide what all needed to communicate with one another. Not every network needed to touch the outside world.

From start to finish, including production rollout for other areas, deployment took roughly one month. We did it all in-house.

Some maintenance is required involving security patches. Cisco is really good at deploying those or not deploying those, but putting those out and having release notes and upgrade paths and just the information behind all of their patches. Cisco does a really good job with that.

With any solution from anybody, I always think that licensing is a little high — but it's comparable to other companies. It definitely competes with the other vendors in the market.

If configured, Firepower provides us with application visibility and control.

The ability to futureproof our security strategy is definitely there. There are a lot of functions that we don't yet use. When I say we don't use a function, I mean that the functionality or the ability is not turned on yet simply because we have not gotten around to it. The ability is there, the capability is there. That also goes into the reasoning behind why we chose it.

Do your research, know your skillset, be comfortable with your skillset, and don't be afraid to challenge yourself.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

In general, we support more public fiscal entities. Most of them are quite sizeable at 5,000-6,000 employees. We use it mostly for remote access.

The clusters in data centers are great.

We enjoy the use of the remote access VPN. We have a mechanical firewall with IPS and we have no more than these. In general, ASA is for remote access and the mechanical firewall right now is more used for data centers. 

We work to combine customers and we have a lot of customers that use networking from Cisco. They buy Cisco firewalls due to the fact that all of their networks are working with Cisco features.

It would be ideal if the solution offered a web application firewall.

We've had some issues with stability.

The solution has some scalability limitations.

The firewall itself has become a bit dated.

The pricing on the solution is a bit high.

Some individuals find the setup and configuration challenging.

I've been using the solution for ten years or more. It's been at least a decade at this point.

Normally, we don't have any problems with stability. That said, when we have problems, it may be difficult to resolve quickly. The tech from Cisco is really good. However, we have some problems that take more time. Issues haven't come up very often. We've only had two or three problems over ten years that took a while to resolve. Largely, it's quite stable. 

We typically work with large public organizations. Our customers are quite big. Some are even up to 8,000 employees.

My view is that the ASA is for data centers. When you need more performance or something like that, this may be a problem. This is due to the fact that we don't have the ability to add more performance - more CPU or more equipment - in our cluster when we deploy the solution in a perimeter. It's complicated to expand the performance with ASA on the perimeter.

We have a good relationship with technical support. They're very helpful. Sometimes we get a solution and sometimes we don't, however, they are always available to help us deal with issues.

I have been working with this equipment for years, so for me, the initial setup is pretty easy. For customers who use the Cisco solutions for the first time, maybe it's complicated. They probably feel it would be easier to configure if there was a simpler graphical view or something like that. Often a complaint is that it's difficult to configure. However, I don't have that issue.

To deploy one solution, how long it takes depends on the customer or the size of the enterprise. For a large enterprise or large public entity, we need more time or more resources to deploy the solution. That said, it's not too difficult for us as we work a lot of time with ASA. We can go fairly quickly.

We support ASA 5508, 5585, and 5525 - all the versions of the firewall. Again, we built a HTAB machine too.

We've worked with Cisco for many years and I love working with them.

Right now, ASA is getting older. A better recommendation may be to use Firepower, a Next-Generation Firewall, no ASA. In cases for some remote VPN access, we recommend ASA, however, for all of the deployments, the recommendation now is to use a Next-Generation Firewall from Cisco Firepower. 

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten. That said, for remote access alone, I'd rate the product at a nine.

We primarily use the solution in order to create access rules. That's what I use it for mostly. Sometimes, if I need to do some mapping, I may also leverage this product.  

In terms of access, the solution is great at making sure that the firewall has the right IPs, or that the right IPs are passing through where they should be. 

The product does a good job of making sure that the connection is one that the user can trust. It keeps everything secure.

From what I've already done with ASA, I've noted that it's a very simple solution. 

It is a very user-friendly product. I started with the GUI version. There are different versions. You could have the CLA, and the GUI version if you like. Both are really user-friendly and they're easy to learn. 

We haven't been working with the product for too long, and therefore I haven't really found any features that are lacking. So far, it's been pretty solid.

One of the things that would make my life easier on ASA, especially for the CLA, is if it had an ASBN feature, specifically for the CLA. This would allow you to be able to see at once where a particular object group is being used without having to copy out all the object groups that have already been created.

I don't have to see all the object groups that have been created on that firewall. That's just something that I would really appreciate on the CLA, even though it already exists on the GUI.

I've been using the solution for six months now. It's been less than a year. It hasn't been too long just yet.

The solution has been quite stable.

Most of the clients that we deal with use this solution. No one has ever complained about having a breach or anything, to the best of my knowledge, even though we see some people combine different firewalls together, and use them alongside Cisco ASA. So far, we've not had any issue with Cisco ASA. It's reliable and keeps our clients safe.

I've never tried to scale the product. I haven't worked with it too long at this point. I wouldn't be able to comment on its scalability potential.

I've never dealt with technical support yet. I can't speak to their level or response or their knowledge of the product.

In the past, I've worked with Check Point and Fortinet as well.

I've been handling the implementation. So far, it's been good, even with no prior knowledge of the solution itself. It's my first time working with it.

On my team, lots of people are working on different aspects, and most of the setup is being done by those that have more knowledge about the firewall than we have. We don't have anything to do with the setup, we just make sure that we implement whatever connections the clients already have. It's already broken down that way, just to avoid as many mistakes as possible.

We already have a process for implementation based on the number of connections. The maximum we normally work on each connection is maybe 20 to 30 minutes. However, the process could be as little as one minute. It depends on how many connections we want to add at a time.

We're handing the implementation via our own in-house team.

I'm just handling the implementation and therefore don't have any insights on the pricing aspect of the solution. I wouldn't be able to say how much the company pays or if the pricing is high or low.

That said, the pricing isn't an issue. It's more about what's best for the customer or the client. We want to give the client the best service, and very good protection. If a client begins to worry about pricing, we can't exactly guarantee the same level of safety.

Our company has a partnership with Cisco.

We have different clients and therefore use different versions of the solution. Nobody wants to use an out-of-date version, and therefore, we work to keep everything updated.

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

We are using this solution for the site-to-site VPN tunnels and VPN Connections.

I like all of the features.

It is my understanding that they are in the process of discontinuing this device.

They are in the process of shutting down this ASA series and will continue with Firepower.

In the next release, it could be more secure.

I have been using Cisco ASA Firewall for six years.

We are not using the latest version.

It's a stable solution. I have not had any issues.

This product is scalable. We have 100 users in our organization.

We will not continue to use this solution. We will be upgrading to either Firepower or Check Point.

Technical support is perfect.

I was using Dell SonicWall before Cisco ASA Firewall.

The initial setup was straightforward. 

It's easy to install and it doesn't take a lot of time for the initial configuration.

It took an hour to install.

I completed the installation myself. We did not use a vendor or vendor team.

There are licensing costs.

I would not recommend this solution. The technology is old and they should move to Firepower or NextGen Firewall.

I would rate the Cisco ASA Firewall an eight out of ten.

We are an IT integrator. We include parts of the infrastructure as part of our services, which includes firewalls, routers, switches, and even some end-user devices. We are deploying Cisco, Palo Alto, and Aruba. We are a very big company, and we have probably about 300,000 employees all over the world.

We use this solution for security and for enabling site-to-site VPN. We have on-premises and cloud deployments, and we are using the latest version of this solution. It is 5500 or something like that. 

The configuration capabilities and the integration with other tools are the most valuable features. 

I really like this product. Cisco is one of my favorite brands, and I always think Cisco solutions are very reliable, easy to configure, and very secure.

It can probably provide a holistic view of different appliances because many customers do not have only one brand, besides the traditional SNMP protocols, to cover all their devices. There are some specific requirements in terms of configurations or actions that sometimes have to be done in a very manual way because of the different versions or brands in a customer's infrastructure.

It could also have some additional analytics capabilities. It has some very interesting ways to monitor the traffic and identify false positives from the architecture and the environment. It would be good if there is a way to patch with some other industry-specific solutions and synchronize some of the information, such as what other customers experience in their operations and probably share some additional information that could be leveraged or shared among the industry. Such information would be something interesting to see. It could have AI capabilities related to how the appliances could benefit from learning the current environment and different exposures.

I have been using this solution since the beginning of this company, which would be more than 20 years.

It is stable and reliable.

There is no real limit to the way they can scale. It is very easy to integrate additional firewalls or even nodes on appliances. Whenever needed, they are stackable. They are very flexible in that sense. Our clients are large businesses.

The service that we have received from Cisco has been reliable, fast, and efficient. They are very good. As long as you have a contract, you can rely on them. You should also have a technical team certified or at least trained on the infrastructure to provide in-depth first-level help. 

I have also used other solutions like Palo Alto. The capabilities are pretty much the same. It is just a matter of how they integrate with the overall landscape of the customers. Palo Alto seems to be the top end firewall these days, but the customers might have purchased Cisco in the past or have a DNA subscription using which they could probably take advantage of the security landscape that Cisco offers. It is more about what is the overall benefit rather than just the appliance.

They seem to be at the top end in terms of pricing, but they are worth the price. They are probably a little bit lower than Palo Alto. If the customers are relying on Cisco products and they are thinking more in terms of scaling to another layer in a year, it is pretty much in a good price range.

I would suggest to be sure that it smoothly integrates with the infrastructure that you have. Try to take advantage of the DNA subscription and the new monitoring features that it has. Be informed about what's new with this product.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a nine out of ten.

The way we've installed Firepower was for the migration process. For example, there was a data center consolidation, and therefore we had to move everything. We offer data center products to our customers across VPN funnels. We had to move away from older ASAs, so it's a lift and shift. We move older ASAs, which were dispersed in many sites, and we consolidated a couple of services in a single site. Firepower was left there in place. I came in and I took over the administration duties, and now I'm trying to put everything together in a way that it makes sense.

With Firepower, they have better hardware. It's fitted for more throughput, more load. I'm trying to centralize service delivery on this high-availability pair and move all the remote access to Firepower. Then, it's all part of a transition process from a hybrid cloud to a full cloud deployment on a cloud provider. It's mostly just a necessary pain, until we move away from our on-prem deployments. Currently, I'm working with Azure, etc. and I try to look at the main design of the whole process, even though it's going to take two years. 

COVID has also made everything very, very slow for us as we try to move away from our initial plan.

The 2100 models are extremely useful for us.

It's got the capabilities of amassing a lot of throughput with remote access and VPNs. 

They need a VTI. I know it's going to be available in the next software version, which is the 6.7 version. However, the problem with that is that the 6.7 is going to deprecate all the older IKEv1 deployment tunnels. Therefore, the problem is that we have a lot of customers which are using older encryptions. If I do that, update it, it's not going to work for me.

We've been using the solution for about a year.

The solution is pretty solid in terms of stability, however, I prefer Palo Alto. For the enterprise world, it's better to have Palo Alto. For the service provider field, Firepower is quite well suited, I'd say. That said, Palo Alto, is definitely the enterprise way to go. For a smaller deployment, you can also go with FortiGate. It's simple, however, it works for smaller offices.

The scalability of the product is pretty good. If you need to expand it, you can do so with relative ease.

The technical support is amazing. They do reply quickly, and often within an hour. It's been great. I've worked at Cisco before, however, with the type of contract we are in, I find it super fast right now. We're quite satisfied with the level of support.

I don't have any knowledge as to what the product costs. It's not part of the business I deal with.

Palo Alto, it's my understanding, is a little more expensive, however, it depends on the users and on the design. It always depends on the contract

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with Cisco.

It's a solid, reliable product, however, if it's right for a company depends on the use case and the size of the organization. For a startup, this might not be a suitable option.

Overall, I'd rate this solution nine out of ten. As a comparison, if I was rating Palo Alto, I would give it a ten out of ten.

The solution is primarily used for protecting the environment, or the cloud environments for our customers.

All the specific features you find within the NextGen firewall are quite useful. The touch intel feature is specifically useful to us. We deliberately choose this kind of product due to its set of features. 

The implementation is pretty straightforward.

The security market is a fast-changing market. The solution needs to always check if the latest threats are covered under the solution. 

It would always be helpful if the pricing was improved upon a bit.

In a future release, it would be ideal if they could offer an open interface to other security products so that we could easily connect to our own open industry standard.

We've been using the solution for about five or more years at this point.

The solution is stable. It's very reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze and doesn't seem to be plagued by bugs or glitches.

The solution can scale quite well. A company that needs to expand it can do so easily.

In our case, we have clients with anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 users.

We have our own in-house team that can assist our clients should they need technical support. They're quite knowledgeable and can handle any issues.

I also have experience with Fortinet and Check Point.

The implementation isn't complex. It's straightforward. However, it also depends on the specifications of the customer. Normally we check that out first and then we can make a judgment of how to best implement the solution.

Typically, the deployment takes about two days to complete.

In terms of maintenance, we have about five people, who are engineers, who can handle the job.

We deliver the solution to our customers.

You do need to pay for the software license. In general, it's a moderately expensive solution. It's not the cheapest on the market.

We're a partner. We aren't an end-user. We are a managed security provider, and therefore we use this solution for our customers.

We always provide the latest version of the solution to our clients.

Typically, we use both cloud and on-premises deployment models.

I'd recommend the solution to others. It's quite good.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at an eight.

I use it to protect my DMZ from external attacks.

Last year, we received a lot of linear service attacks in our environment during the Black Friday season. Cisco Firepower blocked every attack.

The Adversity Malware Protection (AMP) feature is the most valuable. 

It is also very easy to use. Every technical user can operate this solution without any difficulty. The dashboard of Cisco Firepower has every tool that a security operator needs. You can find every resource that you need to operate through this dashboard.

Its interface is sometimes is a little bit slow, and it can be improved.

When you need to put your appliance in failover mode, it is a little difficult to do it remotely because you need to turn off the appliance in Cisco mode. 

In terms of new features, it would be good to have AnyConnect VPN with Firepower. I am not sure if it is available at the moment.

I have been using Cisco Firepower for two years.

We use it specifically for DMZ, so we don't need it to scale it up. Because we are using this solution for a specific environment, we don't plan to increase its usage.

We have a few teams who use this solution. We have the information security team for reading the logs and policies. We have administrators, and we also have contractors for the network operation center to analyze some logs and reports. 

We have used their technical support. They are amazing. Cisco's technical support is the best.

We have used Check Point and one more solution. The main difference is in the IPS signatures. Cisco Firepower has precise and most updated IPS signatures.

The initial setup is easy. The deployment took two months because we didn't have Firepower previously, and it took us some time to plan and implement.

We used our reseller and contractor to deploy Cisco Firepower. They were good.

I would recommend this solution. I would rate Cisco Firepower a nine out of ten.