Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

Telindus, our company, is an integrator. We sell Firepower and we do use it ourselves. I use all the different versions of the product. 

We either replace our customers' other brands of firewalls with Firepower, or we upgrade their old Cisco ASA Firewalls to the new Firepower firewalls. The type of device we advise them to install depends on the customer's requirements and the throughputs needed.

Our primary use case for Firepower is for big networks.

The most important feature is the intensive way you can troubleshoot Cisco Firepower Firewalls. You can go to the bit level to see why traffic is not handled in the correct way, and the majority of the time it's a networking issue and not a firewall issue. You can solve any problem without Cisco TAC help, because you can go very deeply under the hood to find out how traffic is flowing and whether it is not flowing as expected. That is something I have never seen with other brands. That is why, when people move from another brand to Cisco, they never leave Cisco. They see that advantage.

Something I like about Firepower, in general, is that it still relies on the old ASA code. That's something customers really like because when they go into the CLI, they remember, "Oh, that's the ASA, that I am familiar with," but it's enriched with all the next-gen features of Snort. When a customer has knowledge of the ASA codes, they can do intensive troubleshooting because they know the device.

Customers also like Talos, which is the intelligence behind all of Cisco's security products, including Firepower. Talos is very good and is actually the most important part of a security product. It's important that you have something in the background that is continuously enriching intelligence so that you get information about upcoming threats on time. That keeps you protected as soon as possible when a Zero-day happens. Something that customers like about Cisco Firepower, in combination with Talos intelligence, is that full-time people are working in the background to provide information to Cisco security products.

Customers really want visibility into their networks. For example, they want identity management and that is something you can use Firepower for. With it, in addition to an IP address going somewhere, you can also see the username. That's a big advantage of Firepower, and can be set up quite easily.

Also, in very large networks, our customers use Cisco DNA Center. They have automation orchestration for their access network and that works seamlessly with Cisco Firepower firewalls. Security Group Tags can be used from DNA to an edge Firepower firewall. That way, they have microsegmentation within their access network for DNA. And they can extend that to their firewall rules for Firepower. 

Our customers also use Cisco ISE to get user information. ISE is connected to DNA Center. That is something that Firepower works seamlessly with, and we do sell it a lot. We sell a lot of Cisco's other security equipment, and they all send their information to SecureX. Having more Cisco security products means your security information is becoming enriched within the SecureX platform. The integration among these Cisco products is more than easy. Cisco documents everything, in detail, when it comes to how to integrate the different parts. I've never had an issue with integrating Cisco security products with each other.

And for smaller networks, like those our government customers have, what they like about Cisco Firepower, and why they purchase it nine out of 10 times, is its ease of use and the reporting in Firepower Management Center. That is something they really like. They can look up things themselves and they like the SecureX integration.

The Firepower FTD code is missing some old ASA firewalls codes. It's a small thing. But Firepower software isn't missing things that are essential, anymore.

I've been using Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall since it came out; from the time Cisco started to use the name Firepower and they bought Snort. That's when they put in the next-generation features. 

Firepower is rock-stable. So far, I have not seen any failed firewall. The only thing that was not quite stable in the past was Firepower Management Center, but since version 6.6 that has also been rock-stable. I haven't had any failed components in the last couple of years. I did have them two years ago and further in the past, where firewalls were not functioning and needed a reboot, but since 6.6, the stability is very good. We don't have priority-one tickets anymore.

In the Netherlands, where I work, we don't have very big customers requiring very high throughput. So I cannot say anything about clustering where you can pile different ASAs or Firepower devices together to increase performance when you require it. 

But scalability, in general, is pretty hard. Competition-wise, sometimes it's hard to sell Cisco security products because, in my opinion, Cisco is quite honest about the real throughput they are able to provide. Other vendors may be giving figures that are a little bit "too perfect." Sometimes it's hard for us to sell Cisco firewalls because a customer says, "Well, when I go to other brands they say they have double the throughput for half the price." Well, that's great on paper, but... 

In general, after we have installed Cisco firewalls, our customers are very pleased by the performance. They also like that they can tweak settings to get more performance out of the firewall by enabling specific policies for specific traffic, and by disabling inspection for very internal data center traffic. That provides a big boost to the overall firewall performance. When a customer complains that we didn't scale it correctly, and they say it's not performing as well as they expected, I'm always able to tweak things so that it performs the way the customer requires.

I have interacted with Cisco's technical support many times. Nowadays, it sometimes takes a while to get to the person with the correct knowledge, but that is happening in the world in general. First-line people are common around the world and they are trying to figure out if an issue is actually a second-or third-line issue. But when you do reach the correct department, and they know that you are knowledgeable and that you are really facing a high-priority issue or a strange behavior, Cisco's support does everything it can to help you fix things, including involving the development department. I'm very happy with their tech support.

Most of the time we replace Sophos, Check Point, SonicWall, and Fortinet firewalls with Cisco firewalls. Customers really like the overall integration with SecureX. They see the advantage of having more security products from Cisco to get more visibility into their security. We also replace old, non-next-generation firewalls from Cisco; old ASAs.

The initial deployment of Firepower is a straightforward process. For me, it's pretty easy. If you have never worked with it, I can imagine it might be complex. 

Cisco makes it easier all the time. You can now deploy a remote branch by managing the device on an external interface. In the beginning, with previous software versions, that was hard. You needed to configure the file as a remote branch, but for that you needed the central Firepower Management Center to configure it and you didn't have a connection yet. It was a big issue to set up an initial firewall remotely when there was no connection to the Management Center. But that's been fixed.

In general, you just put down some management IP addresses and configure things so that the devices see each other and it starts to work. It's far from complex.

Generally, the initial setup takes four hours. The implementation strategy depends on the customer. I always have a conversation with the customer upfront. I explain how the connectivity works for Cisco Firepower, and then I say that I want to be in a specific subnet field. Then I start configuring the basics, and that is the part that takes about four hours, for Firepower Management Center and two firewalls in HA. Then, I start to configure the firewalls themselves, the policies, et cetera.

I have experience with SonicWall, Fortinet, Juniper, and Sophos firewalls, among others. We work with Fortinet and Palo Alto. It's not that we only do Cisco. But I can say from my experience that I am really more convinced about Cisco products.

What customers really like about Cisco, the number-one thing that they are really happy about within Firepower—and it was also in the old ASA code, but it's even more a feature in Firepower—is that the configuration is in modules. It's modular. You have different policies for the different functions within your firewall, so that your access control policy is only for your access lists and that's it. You have a different network address translation policy. It's all separated into different policies, so a customer knows exactly where to look to configure something, to change something, or to look at something which is not working properly.

Also, with Cisco, when a customer is not totally certain about a change he's going to make, he can make a copy of the specific access control policy or the NAT policy. If something doesn't go right, he can assign the copied policy back to the device and everything is back to the way it was. 

These are the biggest advantages our customers see. When a customer doesn't have any knowledge about firewalls, I can explain the basics in a couple of hours and they have enough familiarity to start working with it. They see the different modules and they know how to make a backup of a specific module so that they can go back to the previous state if something goes wrong.

My advice is "buy it." A lot of people prefer a specific brand and it's fairly hard to convince them that something else, like Cisco, is not bad, as well. They are so convinced about their existing firewall that they want to keep that brand because they are familiar with it and they won't need to learn a new firewall. It's hard for a customer to learn how a firewall works in the first place.

But my advice is that people should read about how Cisco security, in general, is set up and how it is trying to protect them with Talos. They need to understand that Cisco security is very good at what it does. They shouldn't blindly believe in what they have at the moment. I always hear, "My firewalls are good enough. I don't need Cisco. I will just buy the same ones, but new." Cisco Firepower is superior to other firewalls and people should not be afraid to dive in. By educating themselves about the firewall, they will be fine in managing it.

Practically speaking, Cisco firewalls are easier to manage than the firewalls they have at the moment, but they need to make the leap and try something else. That is the hardest part. When I do show them what they are capable of, and how you can configure all kinds of different things, they start to understand.

We don't have many customers that use other vendors' security products together with Firepower. We convince nine out of 10 customers to go over to Cisco fully. We do have customers who don't do that, and then we try to find a way to get the solutions to work together. For example, we try to integrate other brands' switches or firewalls with Cisco security products, but most of the time that is pretty hard. It's not the fault of Cisco. It requires that the other brands speak a protocol language that will support integration, but in the end, it's not perfect and the integration does not work very well. The majority of the time, we are not able to integrate into other security products. Cisco is using standard protocols, but the other vendor is abusing some sort of protocol and then it doesn't work well.

I don't prefer using applications in firewall rules, but our customers do use the application visibility and control, and it works perfectly. Firepower is very good at recognizing the application and is very good at showing you the kind of application that has been recognized. Customers use that in their access control policy rules, and I have never heard bad things about it. Cisco Firepower works very well in recognizing applications.

I get questions from customers because they do not understand threat messages generated by Firepower. Sometimes, it's hard to read what exactly the message is saying. In my opinion, that is not something that is specific to Cisco security or Firepower, rather it is an issue with security in general. Most networking people get these fancy firewalls and they get fancy security events. It's hard for some of them to understand what is meant, and what the severity level is of the message. It's more that a networking guy is trying to read security events. Firepower is doing a good job, but customers sometimes have problems understanding it and then they stop looking at it because they don't understand it. They assume that Firepower is taking the correct actions for them.

Firepower is not a fire-and-forget box. It is something you actually do have to take a look at. What I tell customers is, "Please enable Impact-One and Impact-Two messages in your mailbox, and if it's really something that you cannot understand, just forward it to me and I will take a look for you. Most of the time they are not very high-impact messages. There are only one or two high-impact messages per month.

There are customers who say, "We want you to review the messages in Firepower once a week." I have a look at them when I have time. We try to help the customer check security events once a week or so. That's not great, but it's always a question of finding a good balance between the money a customer can spend and the security aspects. When we do monitor all the events, 24/7, for a customer, you can imagine that it is quite expensive.

I configure every customer's automatic tweaking of IPS policies so that the IPS policy is enabled for the devices seen by Firepower, for recognition of what kinds of clients and hosts are in the network. Other than that, we do not do a lot of automation within Firepower.

Since 7.0, I don't have a lot of things to complain about. If I do have suggestions for improvements, I will give them during the beta programs. The speed of the FMC is very good. The deployment time is much better. They added the policy deployment rollback. That was something I really missed, because if I destroyed something I was able to undo that. Now, for me, it's actually almost perfect.

We use it for malware and IPS.

The automated policy application and enforcement have freed up time for us, on the order of 30 percent.

Also if one Cisco antivirus implementation is the subject of an attack, all other Cisco implementations get that information rapidly, in real time. All the other firewalls are in sync when it comes to malware attacks, through the update of the database. That is good.

The visibility it provides into threats is good. Every day we find lots of malware attacks targeting our network, but they don't get through to the network.

The dashboard is the most important thing. It provides good visibility and makes management easy. Firepower also provides us with good application visibility and control.

Cisco Talos is well known around the world and everyone trusts Talos for malware intelligence. It is number one. It is also the most secure for Snort rules. It is more secure than others because its real-time analysis is better.

In addition, Firepower Management Center is helpful. 

We also use Cisco ISE and the integration between it and Firepower is okay.

I've been using Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall for four or five years.

It's a stable product.

The scalability is good.

Their technical support is good. When my NOC or my engineers have needed support the feedback I've had is that tech support has been good at critical moments. They have given us good service.

There was no issue with the initial setup. It's straightforward because Cisco gives us lots of documentation. It's not a big deal, for me. In four or five years I have deployed 35 to 40 Firepowers for financial organizations and corporate offices.

We also use Palo Alto, Fortinet, Sophos, and Check Point.

One issue with Firepower Management Center is deployment time. It takes seven to 10 minutes and that's a long time for deployment. In that amount of time, management or someone else can ask me to change something or to provide permissions, but during that time, doing so is not possible. It's a drawback with Cisco. Other vendors, like Palo Alto or Fortinet do not have this deployment time issue.

The other issue is the upgrading process, with Cisco. Sometimes, if we use a standalone device we need to create maintenance windows at that time and we need to restart Firepower. But with other vendors, like Palo Alto, there is no need to update in that way.

If they mitigated these two things, Cisco would be number-one in the world in the security domain.

We have not integrated Firepower with Cisco SecureX because it needs IOS 6.6. It's a limitation. If we have an external device, we would need downtime and in a financial organization, management will not allow us the downtime.

In my experience, the deployment procedure with Cisco is not the easiest, it's not plug-and-play. I hope that Cisco will give us that type of implementation.

Overall, I would rate Firepower at eight out of 10.

We use it for intrusion prevention and in our VPN that is connected to our head office. It provides protection and security and node clustering. It gives us all the security features that we need within our environment.

The features that are most valuable within the firewall are the IPS as well as the Unified Communications. We also really like the dynamic grouping.

An area for improvement is the graphical user interface. That is something that is coming up now. They could make the product more user-friendly. A better GUI is something that would make life much easier. Traditionally, Cisco products have been command-line-based.

The Cisco ASA Firewall has been in our environment for the past seven years.

The product is very stable. We've not had any challenges with it in all this time. It performs very well.

We have 2,000 users who connect through this product. We are planning to increase use as we go, toward the end of the year.

The technical support has been excellent. When there have been any issues, they've always been there for us.

The initial configurations were straightforward, not complex at all. It took us just two days to finalize things.

We did most of the setup in-house, but we also had assistance from our partner.

We pay annually and there are no costs in addition to the standard fees.

When you compare Cisco ASA Firewall with Sophos, they are more or less the same in terms of functionality.

Cisco ASA Firewall is very stable and very reliable. It requires very minimal support, once you configure it and put it in your environment. You don't need to attend to faults or issues. Once you install it and plug it in, it is good to go.

We have been using the ASA Firewall for a long time, and it is an advanced product for our current use. In terms of improvement, there's not much that can be done to it. It is a solid product, very effective, and it does its job well.

We are using Cisco ASA Firewall 5525 for network security. We needed a network security solution that can take care of the network security and URL filtering. We also wanted to create site-to-site VPNs and have remote VPNs. For all these use cases, we got Cisco ASA, and we are pretty happy with it.

The remote VPN and IPsec VPN or site-to-site VPN features are valuable. The clustering feature is also valuable. We have two ISP links. Whenever there is a failover, users don't even get to know. The transition is very smooth, and the users don't notice any latency. So, remote VPN, site-to-site VPN, and failover are three very powerful features of Cisco ASA.

Cisco has the best documentation. You can easily find multiple documents by searching the web. Even a child can go online and find the required information.

There is huge scope for improvement in URL filtering. The database that they have is not accurate. Their content awareness and categorization for URL filtering are not that great. We faced many challenges with their categorization and content awareness. They should improve these categorization issues.

It is very reliable.

It is scalable. Cisco is pretty popular with organizations, and many customers are using it. It is suitable for all kinds of customers. It can cater to small, medium, and large organizations.

I have interacted with them many times. I have been on a call with their technical support continuously for 48 hours. They were very prompt. In terms of technical support and documentation for switching, firewall, and routing solutions, no one can match Cisco.

Its initial setup was very straightforward. Its documentation is very easily available on the web, which is very useful.

Their pricing is very aggressive and good. Even a small company can afford it. I am happy with its pricing. Its licensing is on a yearly basis.

I would recommend this solution to others if they are not specifically looking for URL filtering and want to use it for their infrastructure. It is a perfect and very reliable solution, but it lacks when it comes to URL filtering. 

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

I am using Cisco ASA 5525 for netting, routing, and site-to-site VPN. We have two sites. I am using Cisco ASA Firewall on one site and Check Point Next-Generation Firewall on another site.

We have integrated it with Cisco Anyconnect. This feature has been very good for us during the lockdown.

Netting is one of the best features. We can modify it in different ways. Site-to-site VPN is also an awesome feature of Cisco ASA.

The biggest advantage of Cisco products is technical support. They provide the best technical support.

Cisco should work on ASDM. One of the biggest drawbacks of Cisco ASA is ASDM GUI. Cisco should improve the ASDM GUI. The configuration through ASDM is really difficult as compared to CLI. Sometimes when you are doing the configuration in ASDM, it suddenly crashes. It also crashes while pushing a policy. Cisco should really work on this.

We have been using this solution for one and a half years.

It is stable and reliable. If you are looking for security from Layer 1 to Layer 4, Cisco ASA is good, but if you are looking for Layer 7 security, deep security, and malware detection, this is not the right product. You have to use some other product.

We have more than 400 employees. We are currently not thinking of increasing its usage because we need more security, and Cisco ASA is not good for Layer 5 to Layer 7 security.

The biggest advantage of a Cisco product is technical support. They provide 24/7 support on 365 days. Their technical support is one of the best. I would rate them a ten out of ten.

Cisco ASA is very not complex. It is a very simple firewall. If you are configuring it through CLI, it is easy. If you configuring it through ASDM, it will be more difficult for a beginner engineer.

It takes around two to three days to cover all the parameters. It is very easy to deploy in an existing network, which is one of the main advantages of Cisco ASA.

We are happy with its price. Licensing is on a yearly basis for technical support. There is one license for technical support. There is another license for IP Version 2 VPN and IPS.

I considered pfSense, but when I checked the reviews, pfSense's reviews were really bad, so we purchased Cisco ASA.

I am very happy with this product in terms of netting, routing, and VPN functionalities. If you are a small organization with around 100 people and you are not thinking of Layer 7 security, deep security, and malware detection, Cisco ASA would be very useful and cost-effective for you.

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

We currently have this solution hosted in a service provider's premises. They give us the link for our infrastructure and that is how we manage our equipment. We use the VPN feature to connect with our clients. 

The most valuable feature we have found to be the VPN because we use it often. Additionally, overall the solution is user-friendly and especially the ASDM GUI.

The solution has not had any layer upgrades. It does not have layer five and upwards, it only has up to layer four. This has caused some problems for us.

In the future, it would be wonderful to have an antivirus, log analyzer, and PDF/Excel data exportation features build into the solution. The data export would be great to be able to look at the access list.

I have been using the solution for four years.

The solution is stable up to a point. We have had some troubles making VPN connections with other technologies, such as Check Point. We have some of our clients that have Check Point equipment on their side, and sometimes the traffic ceases. We then are forced to reset the tunnel in order to get the traffic back.

Currently, we have approximately 20 site-to-site VPNs operations.

We have had no issues with technical support.

We are currently using a Check Point solution because this solution lacks by not having an application layer.

The initial setup is can be complicated if you are not familiar with the command line. There is documentation available by Cisco and once you are trained it is not difficult at all.

We use implementation consultants for the full deployment and it took approximately two weeks to complete.

My advice to those wanting to implement the solution would be that implementations sometimes do not go as planned. You need to do your research to be prepared. 

We are evaluating other solutions because this one is getting close to its expiration. There are no other technologies out there that offer better features than this ASA solution.

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall a six out of ten.

We primarily use the solution to operate that LAN environment over the internet and use the public and private networks separately. It's a very good firewall in terms of security, in terms of certain scenarios, and also from an ethical hacking point of view. Both are available in our environment. Both are doing great.

Cisco, obviously, gives you a great amount of reliability which comes in handy. The brand is recognized as being strong. 

Even in very big environments, Cisco comes in handy with configuration and offers reliability when it comes to managing multiple items on one platform. You are able to integrate Firepower and all AMP. With so many items to configure, I haven't yet done them all, however, I hope to.

It's great for securing the network. You learn a lot.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The solution is very stable.

The scalability of the solution is very good.

Most of the firewalls almost 90%, 95% of the firewalls will move to GUI. This is the area which needs to be improved. The graphical interface and the monitoring level of the firewall need to be worked on. 

Most of us are using the monitoring software where we get the alarm, then details of the servers, et cetera. This aspect needs to be much updated. 

From just the security point of view, in the security, it needs to be updated every day and every week. It is getting better day by day, however, from a monitoring point of view is not the same view as we have on the different monitoring servers or monitoring software, such as PRTG and Solarwinds. It needs to be changed and improved.

Cisco has launched its multiple products separately. Where there's a new version of the hardware, there is Firepower in it. However, there must be a solution for an integrated version that includes everything in your network and your firewall as well so that you can manage and integrate from the same web portal without going to every device and just configuring it and just doing everything separately. 

It would be ideal if a solution can be configured separately and then managed centrally on one end.

We have more than one Cisco firewall and it is difficult for me to integrate both on the single UI. If I have three firewalls and one is a normal firewall, I need to configure everything separately. I can't have it on the same port or integrated on the same single IP or bind it something like it.

We've mostly used Cisco solutions for two or three years at this point. Our old Cisco devices were due to be changed, and we moved over to ASA.

The firewall is stable, however, every two, three, or four years, you have to change the hardware and therefore get an updated version of the firewall.

This is something which companies have been doing for the sake of a new product and launching a new device. Yet, the stability needs to be considered where you have to upgrade for every two, three, four years and change the product and go for the new updated version. What I mean is that there is stability, however, obviously, it's not long-term.

The firewall is very scalable. Most contact versions are available depending upon the organization you have. It works for very large organizations. They are scalable for many scenarios. The scalability obviously is there for sure.

Cisco technical support is one of the best around. They have the most advanced and most experienced level of tech support I've been in contact with. Whether it is a hardware or software issue, the tech team can support you and help. They are very helpful and knowledgeable. We are quite satisfied with the level of support on offer. 

We also have experience using FortiGate.

The Cisco firewall is straightforward. It isn't a complex implementation. Obviously, you have to bind your IP on the port and then you must go on to configure for security and something like that. It's easy for me to configure a firewall at such a level.

If you pay for the hardware, you get the Firepower and if you don't, then you get the Cisco Firewall. 

We are just a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Obviously, you need to have one tech person on your online when you are configuring it, or just implementing when you are integrating with your live environment and organization. My advice is that the configuration is easy when a network engineer like myself handles it. A trained person is more than capable of the task. Other than configuring, a less technical person can manage the solution.  

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.