Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

I have been using this product for over ten years. Most of the features fulfill my requirements. It protects our network.

The most valuable feature is the section payover. But, I think that kind of function may also come from similar products. In addition, they have the integrated IDS/IPS source powered modules. This is a new screen for us, and it is also very useful.

More than five years.

The stability of the product is good.

The scalability of the solution is OK for me. It basically fulfills my requirement.

I would rate the technical support a rating of seven out of ten.

I always consider the stability and scalability of a product when choosing a vendor.

The cost is a bit high compared to other solutions in the market.

We have looked at Juniper, Palo Alto and other brands.

We like that Cisco has a lot of experience on the market trends.

It is primarily used as a firewall. I think that all firewalls basically work the same, but some have different configurations of the switches. Cisco ASA is very strong. 

I think that there should be better security of other firewall appliances. Migration is another main issue. If you migrate from the ASA to the new Fire Power Threat Defense appliance, it is not an easy migration. You have to do some of the migration manually, and if you are relacing those firewalls it will take a long time. It should be a smoother migration process. Some of the new engineers are still not familiar with it, and I think that Cisco should rehire some of the engineers coming from Sourcefire to do so.

There is not much to say about the stability of the product. Migration is the painful aspect of the solution.

During the mitigation process, I used tech support. But, I still have not had a completely clean migration process.

I do not like to have too many vendors it becomes difficult to diagnose and deal with. If all the switches also ran the same, I would be OK. But, this does not usually happen. Often there are many configurations of switches and we end up switching on the switches.

Cisco has recently become very expensive. Other solutions on the market are cheaper than this solution.

We have also evaluated Fortinet and Sophos UTM as possible solutions.

Our primary use case is to use it as a firewall.

I find that the product is a very good, and secure firewall. The benefits of this product is that it is a strong firewall solution. 

It is a secure product. But, it is not very easy to configure. You need to be knowledgeable to be able to manage it. 

In addition, due to changes in management, we found Cisco slightly behind some of the competitors in the market. Furthermore, the internet protection system seems to be lacking, in comparison to some of the competitors. This is why we are currently looking at other possible solutions.

It is a stable solution.

The scalability is a bit limiting, to be honest. In terms of when you look to changing landscape in terms of threats, I think to me, my personal it's a bit limiting.

I have not used the technical support for Cisco ASA.

It was a bit complex to setup this solution. When we used the command line, it was not easy to implement. We needed Cisco technical knowledge to be able to manage the implementation.

The cost is a bit higher than other competitive solutions on the market.

Yes, it's a good provider when it comes to firewall solution, but maybe limiting when you are looking at the wall UTM management. It's delayed behind some of the competitors.

We primarily use this product for networking. We are a Cisco shop, as far as networking goes.

I think the room for improvement of this solution is that there is a need for more of an application awareness capability. I just don't think it has the application awareness. It obviously looks at ports and what not, but it is not necessarily able to identify applications by their action, and what they're doing.

We have not encountered issues with stability of the solution.

The scalability is fine. We have no problems with the solution. We have two of them in a standby configuration.

If I were to rank the tech support, I would give it an eight or a nine. They have not been able to resolve all of my problems. I had to find my solutions on the web myself. I found other users with similar issues to what I had experienced. Then, I resolved the issues by myself.

I would consider this solution on the "high end" of the pricing spectrum.

I have considered Check Point and Juniper in the past.

Generally, it has highly productive platforms and it has good capabilities.

It just works like an internal firewall. It's an ordinary role of this platform, nothing special.

At this point, we find that this product has high productivity and high availability and there is no need for improvement. 

If there is old hardware, or old appliances, it does not necessarily work with the new Cisco generation firewalls.

It is a highly stable product. We rarely receive any serious outdates, so it works quite well. 

Yes, we use the technical support maybe twice a year. We received a very fast response time.

It was very straightforward. It was not complex at all.

When evaluating a possible solution, I always consider:

• Availability
• Productivity

It was used for a remote office deployment connect back via VPN to the corporate office and services.

Cisco ASA works out-of-the-box. With the setup wizard, it was easy to get it deployed quickly, even by novice IT users.

The ability to have a protected home network on the unit and a separate secured office network linked back to corporate.

More intuitive support for SIP services are needed. This took a long time to configure properly for the user.

E-commerce environment, Enterprise data center.

It has improved the security posture and visibility of our traffic. It has been proven very reliable on the hardware finishing and network portion. Since Cisco have been very experience in networking.                                                                                                                                                                                   

• Snort IPS with recommendation template
• Extendable hardware module
• Straightforward licensing
• Cisco product integration

• I would like to see more improvements made to the dashboard and UI, as well as to the reporting, the reporting is quite limited and not user friendly. 
• I would like them to consider offering more predefined security templates.
• Technical support product knowledge, licensing portal, activation process will need to be improved. 
• The configuration is not straightforward, Cisco will need to improve this so the user can easily pick up the product.
• Bugs are more than other firewall competitors, some bugs are quite serious. 

One to three years.

Yes, we found some firmware bugs and Cisco took some time to fix them. We needed to escalate the issue to the account manager to expedite the escalation process.

No.

A five out of 10.

Cisco ASA.

Complex in configuration and understanding. It would be very challenging for a non-Cisco trained engineer.

We implemented ourselves with some assistance from the vendor. Some vendor are not expertise in this deployment, possible because of the complexity of the product.

Base hardware cost are average. Additional hardware modules are priced higher than the base module. They also offer very clear licensing and pricing.

Check Point, FortiGate, Palo Alto, SonicWall, Huawei, and Sophos.

Cisco is still a very good hardware manufacture, but they need to catch up on the software portion. We used the Cisco product because we know they tried very hard to get back into the market and we were willing to give them a chance since we are still using a lot of Cisco product. For those who are non-Cisco trained, it would be very hard to pick up.

The primary use is that it manages all of our incoming and outgoing VOIP transmissions as well as data transmissions between our branches and our third-party bank processor. It has performed well.

The ASAs are very stable firewalls, and they've been very good at protecting our assets here at the bank. They have done exactly what they were purchased for. They have done a great job.

I've always looked at Cisco products as being the industry standard. They're wonderful at being able to lockdown and manage that. 

The only con that I have really seen with it is the reporting structure. FirePOWER is good. It has been a great help because, before that, it was not good at all. 

Three to five years.

The scalability is very good. We use the 5600 models and the lower 5000s. We were able to upgrade as needed. We added a ton of VPN tunnels to them and they handled all that traffic quite well.

Support has been very good, very professional, got right to the point. My third-party administrator got stuck on setting up some tunnels. We called ASA support and they walked him right through how to do it. That was good.

The third-party did all of the setup. I told him what I wanted and he set everything up and got the tunnels for us as well.

The cost of keeping the licensing up on the ASA is very expensive. It has a lot of positives, but the cost of going with it is really starting to be a major negative right now.

Talk to your peers in the industry, find out what they use and why, and then look at exactly what you're using it for. We changed a great deal of our infrastructure, adding a lot of extra tunnels, so that made a complicated product even harder to manage. Look at what you're comfortable in managing with their interface.

We start looking at upgrade cost, our constant licensing cost. I look at other products that rank very high in industry ratings. Now I'm looking at similar products that are a little bit easier to manage. That is another fault of the ASA. They're very complicated to manage, but that’s because they have so many features. It's a very feature-rich product.

When selecting a vendor the most important factors are

• Security - obviously that is number one because we are a financial institution
• stability of the vendor
• how the product is ranked in the market.

In terms of security, right now is a really tough time for us because, even as a smaller community bank, we’re targeted. We have huge targets on us right now from hackers. I have to have a product that is stable, that will hold up, from a reputable company. I'm looking at companies that are top-tier.

I would rate the ASA equipment itself a nine out of 10. The software and manageability would rate a seven and the reason for that is the complexity of it. It is extremely complicated, even for our Cisco-certified person who manages it for us.