Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

Cisco Secure Firewall is used for securing perimeters, such as internal or external perimeters of the network.

I consider a valuable feature of Cisco Secure Firewall to be that it serves its purpose. ASA is nice, but it is outdated now. When it comes to FTD, complexity is one of the things. I am not sure they should build it from scratch.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped improve my company over the last 15 years. Nowadays, you cannot live without a firewall. We are currently moving to another vendor.

Navigating through Cisco Secure Firewall is not intuitive. Complexity is another significant issue that needs to be addressed.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for 15 years.

Cisco Secure Firewall is working with some bugs and glitches, but it is stable overall. ASA is a super stable firewall, even though it is outdated nowadays. FTD is working fine with some glitches.

Scalability depends on which Cisco Secure Firewall you are buying. For the enterprise level, it is scalable, but not significantly.

I have contacted Cisco support about these issues and opened many TAC cases for the firewalls.

I would evaluate Cisco support as good. Cisco is the best there. However, they need to rebuild this product. I love Cisco products, but when it comes to the firewall, I do not.

We are transitioning to Palo Alto.

I find Palo Alto to be much easier to operate and much more stable. If you want to incorporate FTD with another Cisco product, then you need to go with Cisco to have the full ecosystem. Since we do not have that requirement, we are going to another vendor, which is definitely easier to handle.

I have knowledge about the pricing and licensing.

A couple of days ago, I was working on a project and received a quote for the FTD 1230. For the same level with Palo Alto, even though we had a huge discount with Cisco, it turned out to be more expensive than Palo Alto. The pricing is quite expensive. My overall review rating for this product is 6.

My use case for Cisco Secure Firewall is because the old solution for the VPN access for the employees and also for the external contractors was already out of date, and there was no possibility of somehow prolonging it. So we did the search for a new solution and from the auction and bidding, Cisco Secure Firewall came.

I consider the most valuable aspect of Cisco Secure Firewall to be that we are basically using it only for termination of the VPN, so that's basically the most valuable thing for us.

If I could improve Cisco Secure Firewall in any way, I have no clue, to be honest. I really don't know what to improve. It's working as it should be. Maybe it would be nice to have a better overview regarding the logging, regarding the issues a client can have with the VPN. But I can understand that because the primary feature for the firewall is not the VPN; it's the firewall, but we are not using the firewall.

There is still room to improve. There can be some things that can be better, such as some of the menu and some of the visibility. It's not chaotic, but it's not that user-friendly.

The GUI of Cisco Secure Firewall could improve, as there are better solutions in terms of how they look and how they can be navigated.

I find the solution reliable and stable, and I can say that there is no downtime. As I am used to Cisco products, they are stable and reliable.

I think that what we bought is overkill, but whatever. Basically, it can serve up to 1,000 clients on VPN, so for us it's basically unlimited. The largest number I have seen on the dashboard was 300 users connected on the VPN.

My experience with Cisco customer support has been nice all the time. Sometimes they can take their time, but if they are properly motivated, they can be fast.

If I had to rate their support from one to ten, with ten being best and one being worst, I would give it an eight.

Positive

I evaluated basically the new solution from Pulse Secure, which is now called Ivanti.

The reason we chose Cisco Secure Firewall was more or less politics because Ivanti didn't have the hardware, and they will not have the hardware in the foreseeable future. So we went with the only one who was able to provide it to us.

The deployment of Cisco Secure Firewall was kind of straightforward and was not problematic.

It took us two months, together with the migration, but the thing is that we needed to change the groups and rules and everything in the background. It was more or less up to us, not up to the platform. We needed to change things on our side.

It was internal, not the product's fault. The migration was lengthy.

Regarding the pricing and licensing of Cisco Secure Firewall, it's not up to me.

I know that it was purchased from our partner, from the local distributor.

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being best and one being worst, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall overall with my past experience as nice. Because I cannot say it was good, from the point of view when I was able to look through Cisco Secure Firewall, it was nice. The FTD, the Firepower Threat Detection, is really mature, but the former ASA was a pain in the ass.

The former ASA was a pain in the ass because when someone is used to the Cisco way, the ASA was a strange thing. My overall rating for this product is 8 out of 10.

My main use cases for Cisco Secure Firewall include revamping old networks, security, content filtering, amp protection, et cetera.

Cisco Secure Firewall is easy to configure, and you can do it all in one pane of glass. It is really simple to configure. The solution allows my junior admins to go into the dashboard and look at any issues or reconfigure any features that need to be tweaked without me physically having to be there.

I have been using the assurance feature in Cisco Secure Firewall recently, and I am starting to see that it is a lot more beneficial for me, with all the analytics and reporting that it provides. 

Cisco Secure Firewall allows us to pinpoint exactly where the packets are being delivered or dropped, and we are able to identify issues quicker than with other models or other vendors.

I assess Cisco Secure Firewall's ability to unify policies across my environment as having ease of building. We need to be able to scale and deploy without running a bunch of commands, especially when managing multiple locations acting as separate entities. It is important to my organization since our team is really small. As an engineer, it is just myself and a few juniors. I can verbally tell them to look at specific things or deploy certain features. It gives them the confidence to touch a firewall without being insecure.

The impact of the cloud-delivered firewall on my organization's security posture is very important. It allows us to place certain policies compared to the old infrastructure that is currently in there, with outdated hardware. It allows us to control the firmware and deploy the firmware. In evaluating Cisco Secure Firewall, I find that it helps us implement a zero-trust security model by allowing us to create one policy and deploy it across all of our networks versus multiple agents. Cisco Secure Firewall is very helpful and convenient for me.

I faced challenges moving away from the MS switches to the CS switches, as it is a little different. I am experiencing some small issues with IP reservations, however, I am working with the Meraki engineers to work around or configure it the next day. 

Regarding stability and reliability, I have experienced false negative alerts with the CS models, which indicate that my switch has gone down when in reality, it has not. That is a fix that is needed.

I would say I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for the past two months.

Regarding stability and reliability, I have experienced false negative alerts with the CS models, which indicate that my switch has gone down, but in reality, it has not. That is a fix that is needed.

Cisco Secure Firewall scales tremendously with the growing needs of my organization. I know in the future we are going to start deploying SD-WAN and other applications that will require all of our clinics to connect to our HQ, and deploying Meraki will make their IPsec tunnels very seamless.

I evaluate customer service and technical support based on productivity. If I can reduce ticketing by 10% to 20% by deploying these solutions, I consider or job done. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer service and technical support of Cisco a ten. There is always someone on call. They are very thorough; they know the product and work with you to resolve issues. That is important for me.

Positive

Prior to adopting Cisco Secure Firewall, I was using different solutions at various locations. As we transition and take on these clinics, we have anywhere from home networks, where someone's uncle installed something, to very outdated firewalls. When we come in and present Meraki and what it can do, it becomes a done deal.

My experience with the deployment of Cisco Secure Firewall has been awesome.

I come in when they have the old network and deploy it. I install a cabinet and new drops. I configure the Meraki gear onto their old network side by side. 

Especially during downtime, I can plug the firewall into that rack to get the external IP configured. Once my ISP comes in, I apply those IP addresses to the firewall.

I have seen a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall.

I handle pricing, setup costs, and licensing with our vendors. I contact our vendors, we go over the pricing and the licensing. I make sure they get all the proper codes. As I purchase and license these firewalls, it is all in one place and easy to read and do.

Before selecting Cisco Secure Firewall, I considered Fortinet, which was probably one of the bigger competitors, and SonicWall. We thrive in the Meraki policy. What stood out to me in the evaluation process, compared to other options, was the ease of deployment, the dashboard, being able to manage everything in one place, and Meraki support.

I did not purchase the product on AWS Marketplace.

My advice to other organizations considering Cisco Secure Firewall is to make sure they plan for their organization. Plan for your growth, a three-year growth, and then scale your solutions accordingly. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall overall a solid ten.

We are deploying Cisco Secure Firewall for customers in the cloud, on-premise, or all around, depending on the customer. We have small customers that are migrating to the cloud, so we have to deploy virtual firewalls as well as on-premise solutions for both large-scale and small-scale operations.

The best return on investment when using Cisco Secure Firewall is the visibility. From my point of view, the best return on investment is the visibility. With Firepower Management and the FMC, you are able to really see everything that's going on in your network.

From my point of view, the stability and reliability of the product is quite good. The firewall sensors and the management are quite stable. We are encountering some problems, but mostly when you implement the solution correctly, you don't have any problems besides hardware failure, which is really rare. 

Scalability for Cisco Secure Firewall is a good point. It's hard to say because mostly we are consulting and planning together with the customer. If they can see upfront or if they know when they have to scale big, then we can scale with them. I think the appliances are well scaled for the use of the customer.

I have a lot of experience with the customer service and technical support of Cisco. Recently, we managed to get one of the Cisco engineers to connect with us to solve some customer problems.

My experience with the customer service and technical support of Cisco is quite excellent. The engineers are top-notch and they know what they are doing. They are really experts in their field.

Regarding customer service, I'm not as familiar with that aspect. However, with the technical support, when you know the right people and when you really have problems which you can't solve on your own, they are behind you and they can help you mostly.

Negative

I have worked with other solutions in the past, different ones. The vibe which is in Cisco equipment caught me from the early days. When I started, the first security appliance I saw was Cisco PIX. I worked sometimes with Cisco ASA, and this was all before I came to Bechtle. Now I'm where I want to be.

Deploying Cisco Secure Firewall is getting easier, so I would describe the experience as straightforward. You are now able to preconfigure the appliances to send out, so you don't need engineers on site. In some cases, you can preconfigure and send it to the customer, and the customer is able to plug it in and it has access to WAN or to the internet. You are up and can run the system. I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall overall as an eight or a nine out of ten.

This is mostly the system I'm working with, so I do work with other solutions other than Cisco Secure Firewall, but we do have other teams working with other vendors. We are at a point where things are getting more and more complicated and you need more and more knowledge to do the implementation correctly. My goal is to do Cisco and to do it the best I can and do it properly.

I'm mostly on the implementation side, so pricing, the setup cost, and the licensing are not really my part in the business. I hear it's quite expensive, but the service you get is worth it. When you invest so much, you will get a lot of service. About licensing, I don't have experience with other vendors regarding licensing, so I would say the licensing is quite good. I'm not sure if there are any other downsides, so I consider it acceptable.

Our company's use case involves integration with Cisco Secure Firewall for our clients, typically for remote access VPN. The purpose of our remote access VPN integration is to connect with Duo. We also perform integration with Cisco ICE and integration directly with the firewall.

The most valuable feature of Cisco Secure Firewall for me relates to the remote access VPN, because companies need multi-factor authentication. The selling point of the product revolves around multi-factor authentication for VPNs. I have implemented this with Cisco firewall, Cisco ICE, and Palo Alto integration with Duo.

If I could improve the product in any way to make it better for my clients, that would be beneficial. For now, everything is fine from my perspective, although there may be room for improvement that I have not yet identified.

I have been using Duo for two years.

I find Cisco Secure Firewall to be stable and scalable. It is reliable. The solution has experienced downtime.

I have worked with Cisco support. My experience with Cisco support is fine. When I need to open a case, I have done so. I did not contact Duo support, but I did contact support for Cisco firewall and Cisco ICE. I did not work with an engineer for Duo.

They are responsive. In general, it takes them two to three hours to get back to me. When they need to search for something, it may take a day.

Negative

Deploying Duo is quite simple because Duo has very good documentation for all integrations. It typically takes a couple of days to deploy because we need to schedule meetings with our clients. When we gather all the information, we can integrate it, then test it and put it in production.

I have experience with the implementation.

The benefit of using this integration for our company is that clients want solutions from us. Our clients need to find a solution for multi-factor authentication, and we recommend them to use Cisco Secure Firewall with Duo. We integrate that with their firewalls or AAA servers. Cisco Secure Firewall integrates well. I am not involved with pricing and licensing concerns, as our company has a sales team who handles that. My company is a partner. I rate this product ten out of ten.

My main use cases for Cisco Secure Firewall are mainly user access to the internet and blocking firewall sites.

With the centralized management of Cisco Secure Firewall, it's good in unifying policies across my environment. The simplicity and supportability are important to my organization as it's much easier if everything's the same as much as possible.

I appreciate that the central management of Cisco Secure Firewall is from one location, which saves a lot of time. 

The IPS protection is good for us for security reasons. 

The central management feature of Cisco Secure Firewall saves one location instead of having to log on to multiple locations, which speeds up deployment of any changes or requirements for monitoring.

The upgrading process of Cisco Secure Firewall is a long process on a per-firewall basis, and it would be nice if that could be improved. One firewall can take two to two and a half hours to upgrade, so we end up having to watch it. It becomes a problem; in the old firewall days, it would be about a ten-minute job. I know it's more complicated with the newer firewalls. It's just a long-winded process even if they have sorted it out a little bit with automation.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for probably about eight years.

I have not had one Cisco Secure Firewall fail so far, which shows it is stable and reliable. Right now, I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with Cisco Secure Firewall.

Cisco Secure Firewall scales with the growing needs of my organization, as we have different models and sizes, and our central boxes are powerful enough to cover whatever we want whenever we want.

My evaluation of customer service and technical support for Cisco Secure Firewall is that I have generally hardly ever had to use them. We did two weeks ago, and it was a very quick response that identified exactly where the issue in our configuration was. 

Two weeks ago, I received a very quick response from customer service, which identified exactly where the issue on our configuration was, and it went very smoothly, so out of ten, I would give it a nine.

Positive

Prior to adopting Cisco Secure Firewall, I was also using previous Cisco firewalls, and before that, we had Fortinet and Juniper.

The factors that led me to consider the change to Cisco Secure Firewall were actually price, as Cisco's was a very competitive price, and we received a very good deal.

My experience with the deployment of Cisco Secure Firewall has been generally okay.

I have seen a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall since we run them for a long time. 

Our current Cisco Secure Firewall units have been in place for probably over three years now, and at the moment, we're not looking to replace them, indicating a good return on investment since they last and are supported quite a long time after they're released.

My experience with pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Cisco Secure Firewall shows it can be expensive, especially the bigger boxes, since they do a lot more and handle a lot more, with a big jump from the smaller firewalls to the big firewalls.

The other solutions I considered before selecting Cisco Secure Firewall include Fortinet, Juniper, and Palo Alto. We're generally a Cisco house and have been for quite a few times with the old Cisco firewalls, so it was a natural progression. 

We did not purchase the product on AWS Marketplace.

We actually don't do that much encrypted inspecting traffic at the moment with Cisco Secure Firewall, which is something we want to look at. We just want to make sure we don't max out the CPU with the many jobs it does. Cisco Secure Firewall will be a building block part of our zero-trust security model, however, there will be a few other parts needed, such as Cisco Secure Access. 

I have not really expanded the usage of Cisco Secure Firewall. My advice to other organizations considering Cisco Secure Firewall is that it does what it says on the tin; it works, it's reliable, and I have never had one fail, so I think it's good. 

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine.

We have two deployment models for the use case: one is a perimeter firewall and one is a data center firewall. If you have a perimeter, you will position Cisco Secure Firewall as a perimeter firewall; it fits more in data as a data center firewall because in a data center firewall, you are inspecting incoming traffic and you need a very good IPS, so Cisco Secure Firewall is very effective as a data center firewall.

The best feature in Cisco Secure Firewall is the stability; we have a stable product with no lagging or crashing, unlike others. Additionally, the IPS is the next-generation IPS from Cisco, which has many features and many signatures with updated signatures for my IPS.

I switched to Cisco Secure Firewall to get very good IPS signatures and next-generation IPS; that is a market leader from Cisco.

The stability is very good. I do not experience any downtime, crashes, or performance issues; that is the best feature from Cisco Secure Firewall.

Most of the time, Cisco provides features on some versions and the updated versions will move them; for example, we can do firewall policies based on users, which is from Active Directory. It should be from Cisco ISE, so it is a very bad drawback from Cisco Secure Firewall. Not all customers have Cisco ISE, and we need to integrate to make a policy on users, not just by IP, but with users also. We had integration before with LDAP and Active Directory, but on some versions, Cisco requires us to do it through Cisco ISE.

I have five years of experience with Cisco Secure Firewall overall.

The stability is very good. I do not experience any downtime, crashes, or performance issues; that is the best feature from Cisco Secure Firewall.

Cisco Secure Firewall is providing scalability. I rate the scalability as a number 10.

Positive

I rate the technical support a number 10.

Positive

Compared to Fortinet, we have a complex configuration, but we still have a stable product rather than Fortinet's product.

Cisco Secure Firewall requires maintenance. Maintaining it is slightly complex; it is not easy or very easy.

I am a customer. It was purchased through a partner. I was satisfied with my experience with the partner.

I have seen a return on investment of 50.

The pricing for Cisco Secure Firewall is very good, and we got many discounts from them.

Cisco Secure Firewall is deployed on-premises. We have a team of four users using the solution. I rate this review a 10.

One of the biggest use cases for Cisco Secure Firewall is Public Bank; they use it in Malaysia, but we implemented it in the Sri Lankan branches.

When a global company is using Cisco Secure Firewall, they would prefer to go with the same product with the same switching and firewall, making it an umbrella solution.

I think the UTM is the best feature of Cisco Secure Firewall.

The UTM features are indeed the best.

The reason why the UTM feature of Cisco Secure Firewall is the best is because the customer is more concerned with security; for a worldwide company, they need the most security, and I think it's very suitable for the most secure companies.

The centralized management console in Cisco Secure Firewall is effective and helpful.

Most of the partners are looking for AI-driven solutions now, so if Cisco improves more on the AI part than other products, it will be very good when they are trying to capture the market.

Cisco Secure Firewall has to enhance its AI part.

Customers using Cisco Secure Firewall are looking for UTM features, and some enhancements have to be done, such as when you block applications, more applications have to be able to be blocked and categorized.

I've been working with Cisco Secure Firewall for around 15 years as a partner.

Cisco Secure Firewall is stable, and there are no issues or challenges that my customers have faced with it.

Customers use Cisco Secure Firewall both on the cloud and on-premises, and it is a scalable solution and easy to scale.

My experience with Cisco support is good. I would rate the technical support of Cisco Secure Firewall eight out of ten.

Positive

The deployment of Cisco Secure Firewall takes one day.

Customers see a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall, and it is workable in terms of value for money.

Competitively, Checkpoint is the best, but considering pricing and everything else, Cisco Secure Firewall is also the best product.

Cisco Firewall is better in terms of cost and is cheaper; unlike other products, if the license expires, no features work, but Cisco isn't that way. Most of the time, they have perpetual licenses, so that's the best solution customers are looking for.

The threat intelligence functionalities in Cisco Secure Firewall are also good, but when considering Checkpoint and others, they have some enhanced features; there is some differentiation, but it's also good.

They need a global, one single vendor, which is why they see value for money with Cisco Secure Firewall.

I recommend Cisco Secure Firewall because it's a global vendor.

On a scale of 1-10, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall an 8.

My main use case for Cisco Secure Firewall is to protect corporate internet access from malicious people.

I can provide a specific example of how I use Cisco Secure Firewall to protect my corporate internet system from malicious activity: I block malicious sites and create rules to detect them.

I also use it to provide remote access for vendors and IT support people.

The best features Cisco Secure Firewall offers in my experience are its GUI, clear definition, and process to create rules.

The GUI is clear and I am able to follow the description of processes such as backup, creation of rules, and other management processes.

This has helped my team feel more confident that we are protected from malicious intruders, and I have noticed specific positive outcomes and changes since using Cisco Secure Firewall.

I believe Cisco Secure Firewall can be improved, particularly regarding the specifications such as the memory that is used on entry-level firewalls, because sometimes when doing an upgrade or changing configuration, issues arise.

On the performance side, I notice that the upgrade to a different version is slow, so hopefully improved CPU and RAM will help performance.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for three years.

Cisco Secure Firewall is stable in my experience.

The hardware is working and we have not encountered the firewall failing because of a firmware upgrade.

We have not needed the scalability feature of Cisco Secure Firewall as of now.

I have not needed to reach out to Cisco support for any issues.

I have not switched from another vendor or used another firewall vendor prior to Cisco.

Before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall, we did not evaluate other options.

I would advise others looking into using Cisco Secure Firewall that it is easy to use and manage, easy to create rules, and upgrade the firmware, and it is reliable; I have not encountered any failure on my Cisco firewall so far. I rate this product an 8 out of 10.

Our main use case for Cisco Secure Firewall is to have the different clients secured in their own VLAN and subnet, ensuring effective segregation of our network.

We do not have an internet connection with Cisco Secure Firewall; basically, it is all on-premise. We have different use cases and those need to stay separated, so they do not interfere with each other.

My main usage for Cisco Secure Firewall is that I work in a train company where we are basically managing the network for the different use cases of the train. Those need to get separated, so the phone does not interfere with the cameras, for example, and we only allow the designated ports to the other.

What I appreciate most about Cisco Secure Firewall is that it has been working since we bought it without any failure, highlighting its reliability and performance.

An example of how Cisco Secure Firewall benefits my organization is that it performs its function very effectively. We use it as a router, and it works really well, ensuring our operations run smoothly.

I think the old interface could be improved, as it is not that good. Cisco Firewall Management Center is much better, but I need to get more experience with that because we do not really have any experience with it. I did not work extensively with it as we are in the migrating phase.

I have been using a Cisco firewall, specifically the ASA, for ten years and now we are migrating to Cisco Secure Firewall, which represents our ongoing commitment to network security.

I assess the stability and reliability of Cisco Secure Firewall as performing really well. We have had one small issue, but it happened over ten years, and with the new one, we have had no issues.

I believe Cisco Secure Firewall can scale and grow with the needs of my organization because we bought the biggest model, so we do not really need to scale anywhere. We roughly calculated this and it should last the next nine to ten years, so if we buy a new one, it will probably have more performance, but the next ten years are secure.

I have used customer service for Cisco Secure Firewall. We have a partner between us and Cisco and only the extreme cases get to Cisco. Most of the time our partner, Logicalis, will solve the problem for us because they have experts, so only really problems with the software or these kinds of things get right to Cisco.

Before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall, we have a complete Cisco network, so we tried to keep the network together, completely Cisco. Therefore, there were no other solutions, as we did not use one before and we did not consider different options.

I would describe the experience of deploying Cisco Secure Firewall as very smooth. We used the migration software which just took the complete ASA configuration and put it in Cisco Secure Firewall in Cisco Firewall Management Center, and that was it; it worked.