Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

We started with the old ASA 5510 and migrated to Firepower, first using ASA as the basic operating system. Lately, we've been using FTD because it simplifies operations a lot. We are a very small networking team, and being able to push one policy to many firewalls eases our workload.

We are a global company, and we don't always have IT staff in all corners of the world. Therefore, having one place to do everything is very nice.

Cisco Secure Firewall has made it easier so that more than one person can handle things. We are able to have a bigger team that can handle simple tasks and have a smaller team focus on the deep-dive needs.

We have the same basic policies everywhere now, which makes it more flexible for us to manage.

I like the central management and IPS features. Having everything in one place is very valuable.

Cisco Secure Firewall is very good at detecting threats. We see a lot getting blocked by the IPS in our DMZ, that is, our internet-facing web service.

It helped free up IT staff time. Before, we would have to manually configure every single firewall. Every time we configure something on a firewall, it takes five to ten minutes, and we have more than 50 firewalls around the globe. We do changes every week, and the automated policy and upgrades saved us a lot of time.

In terms of the organization, we have been able to save time by getting things out faster. However, the only downside is that the policy push takes quite a while. Thus, a quick fix still takes at least 15 minutes, and troubleshooting can take time as well.

Some of our problems are related to software updates in remote sites where the internet connection is not stable. Sometimes, the image push just gets disrupted and fails.

The most annoying thing is having to replace the hardware so often. It's very difficult for us to do.

The integration between different tools could be improved. For example, with SecureX, I am yet to find out how to forward security events to different tools such as Microsoft Sentinel, which is what we use for log detection.

We've been using Cisco Secure Firewalls for a very long time.

We had to get in touch with technical support a few times, and our experience was good. I would give them a rating of nine out of ten. 

Positive

The initial deployment is easy, and I have not had any issues.

The solution is deployed on-premises. We have an on-premises FMC that connects everything.

The cost of the firewalls versus the ROI is okay.

We are quite Cisco-centric because of the performance we get for the price range. We have a lot of smaller sites, and we are not a very big organization. The price fits us perfectly.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall at nine on a scale from one to ten.

It is primarily our VPN solution. Initially, it was used in our firewalling. Then, we transitioned it into just our standalone VPN service for the company.

It is on-prem. We have it in two different data centers: our main data center and our backup data center.

With what is going on in the world, e.g., hybrid work and work from home, and everything that happened, VPN was everything to us. Without it, we wouldn't have been able to operate.

Typically, before COVID hit, we were a very much work-in-the-office type of environment with five to 10 people on our VPN solution. We quickly ramped up to 500 people when COVID happened, which is the majority of our full-time users. Onboarding our entire company onto this solution was pretty cool.

It is very good at what it does. It is a very dependable, long-standing product that you can trust. You know exactly how it works. It has been in the market for a lot longer than I have. So, it is great at its core functionality.

We are still running the original ASAs. The software that you are running for the ASDM software and Java application has never been a lot of fun to operate. It would have been nice to see that change update be redesigned with modern systems, which don't play nicely with Java sometimes. Cybersecurity doesn't seem to love how that operates. For us, a fresher application, taking advantage of the hardware, would have been a better approach.

I have been with the company for seven years, and we have had it the entire time. Cisco Advanced Services came in in 2013, which was two years before I joined. They did a deployment and installed it then.

There is your regular day-to-day maintenance, e.g., the patches and updates. Because it sits at the edge, it is exposed to the world. With threats always being of concern, you often have to patch and update. However, it is nothing more than regular maintenance

We have never had to ramp up more than a small- to medium-business use case. For that, it has been great. Limitation-wise, we would run into challenges if we ever hit 2,000 to 2,500 users. We would then have to move onto hardware. Its scalability is only limited by the size of the appliance. So, if you ever have to exceed that, then you just have to buy a new box.

ASA has always been great because it has been such a longstanding product. There is a lot of knowledge in-house with Cisco. I always know if we call to get help, it is great. I do wonder in the future, as the product gets close to the end of its life, if those people will move onto other things and it gets lost a bit. However, it has always been easy enough to find that help.

For the ASA specifically, probably nine.

Positive

We were just looking for a different feature set. We found that ASA was rock-solid as a VPN piece. We wanted to separate the VPN from our firewall policy management, so we just moved it over to VPN as a solution.

We had a partnership with Cisco. They came in and redid the entire environment. Before that, there was no Cisco environment whatsoever. So, they came in with the Nexus switching and Catalyst Wireless solution, then the VPN came with that as well as the ASA.

I have never found it hard to deploy. We didn't have a BCP solution set up as our secondary when COVID hit, which was something that we had to scramble to put together. However, it was something like a couple of days' work. It wasn't really a big deal or really complicated. It was a fairly straightforward system to separate and manage.

It brings us the ability to work from anywhere and has allowed us to work remotely without having to incur a lot of other costs. If we didn't have this type of solution, since we have so many on-prem services that are required, we would have likely lost money and been unable to deliver. We have a video services team who helped build the content for our sporting events. When you are watching a Leaf game and those swipes come by as well as the clips and things, those are all generated in-house. Without the ability to access our on-premise resources, we would have been dead in the water. So, the return on that is pretty impressive.

We integrate it with our ISE solution, TACACS+, etc. We have a Windows NPS server for MFA through Azure. We don't have any challenges with it. It has always worked well. I can't think of a time when we have ever had problems with either of those things. It has worked just fine.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

I'm a solution architect specializing in IT infrastructure designs. I create solutions for clients using Cisco and other products. I've developed solutions with various Cisco Firewall models. I may use an entry-level solution for smaller businesses, like the Cisco 555 Series or 5500. If it's a large enterprise, I may use the 4000 Series, or an ISR router integrated with a firewall for a branch office, and maybe an ISR router, which is integrated with the firewall.

I work with businesses of all sizes, but I see Cisco more often in medium-sized companies or large enterprises. Small businesses often pick Sophos or FortiGate because of the pricing. Large enterprises use Cisco and other products like Palo Alto or Check Point, especially for managing cloud architectures like GCP and AWS. 

If the customer only needs a plain firewall, Cisco ASA is sufficient. It can compete with FortiGate or Sophos. When I talk about a next-gen firewall, the basics include malware protection, instruction prevention, URL filtering, etc. Firepower is integrated to address these next-gen requirements. 

I may use the tabs for dynamic policy implementation in cloud environments depending on the clients' needs, but not typically VMware. I might get a false positive with the VMware operator and platform layer. If I stop some surveys, my production will stop. In such cases, I cannot just go by dynamic classification blindly. It would be better for the application layer, not the platform layer.

I don't have any metrics about how ASA has improved operations for my clients, but I can look at their market share relative to Check Point and other competitors. Cisco has a decent footprint today, and it reduced my customers' CapEx. I don't have the numbers. I'm just speaking relatively. Cisco can reduce operational expenditures by around 40 percent. I'm just giving a vague estimate, but I don't have any specific metrics.

Cisco offers two architectures. I can choose the Meraki track if I want an OpEx model or the traditional track, which is a CapEx model. Due to Cisco's tech acquisitions, I have various feature options within the same product. The DNA of Cisco combines the traditional Cisco architecture with the next-generation firewall.

Segmentation can be helpful for some clients. Let's use a financial organization as an example. We have traffic moving through the branch to the core banking. This is where we can employ segmentation. We can do security policy restrictions for branch employees to prevent them from accessing certain financial reporting systems. We can limit them to the branch level. 

I can enforce certain policies to prevent all branch traffic from reaching one layer of a particular segment by minimizing the overall traffic on the network. I can always control the traffic when I segment it. This set of capabilities is beneficial when a lot of financial algorithms are done.

ASA integrates with Firepower, IPS functionality, malware filtering, etc. This functionality wasn't there in the past. With its cloud architecture, Cisco can filter traffic at the engine layer. Evasive encryptions can be entered into the application, like BitTorrent or Skype. This wasn't possible to control through a traditional firewall. 

Deep Packet Inspection looks at the header information and inspects the contents of a particular packet. We can also look at traffic management. It can control end-user applications, and we can check device performance when we do this type of regression on our resources. This is what we look at with a DPI. It can help us reduce the overall OpEx and CapEx.

Traditionally, we needed multiple software and hardware tools. With these features, we can snoop into our network and understand each packet at a header level. That's called the service control engine.

Within Cisco's Service Control Engine Architecture, there's something called the Preferred Architecture, which has a supervisor engine. It's more of a network management tool. Cisco makes it more convenient to manage our resources. It has a nice UI, or we can go into the command-line level. 

Cisco's micro-segmentation features are helpful for access control layers and virtual LAN policy enforcement. That's how we segregate it. Micro-segmentation is focused on the application layer. When we design a policy that is more automated or granular, and we have a specific business requirement, we get into micro-segmentation. Otherwise, the majority of the implementation will be generic network segmentation.

Dynamic classification is also essential given the current security risks and the attacks. We cannot wait for it to tell us if it's a false positive or a real threat. In those cases, dynamic classification is essential, especially at a MAC level.
When using WiFi, we may have a suspicious guest, and we cannot wait for someone to stop it manually. The firewall needs to at least block the traffic and send an alert.

In cases like these, integration with Cisco ISE is handy. If the firewall alone doesn't help, you must redesign your architecture to include various associated products as you increase your requirements. For example, you may have to get into multiple servers, so you'll need an ISE for identity management. 

As you start scaling up your requirements, you go beyond a firewall. You start from an L1 layer and go to the L7 sitting at the organization's gateway. When you talk about dynamic policy implementation, that's where you start to get serious about your operations and can change things suddenly when an attack is happening.

With ISE integration, you get another dynamic classification if an endpoint connects immediately. ISE has a lot of authorization rules, so it applies a filter. The dynamic policy capabilities enable tighter integration at the application workload level. Snort 3 IPS enables you to run more rules without sacrificing performance, and IPS puts you one step ahead of any threats to the organization.

There are some limitations with SSL. Regarding the security assessment for the ISO 27000 standard, there are certain features that Cisco needs to scale up. Not all products support it, so we need to be slightly careful, especially on the site track. 

We face challenges with Cisco when implementing some security vulnerability assessments, including the algorithms and implementing SSL 3.0. I may change the entire product line because traditional product lines don't support that.

Integration isn't typically a problem because the network is compatible, but Cisco could upgrade the threat database. They could integrate the threat database of the on-premise firewall with the cloud. Check Point has cloud integration with a market database of all the vulnerabilities. Cisco could add this to its roadmap to make the product more effective.

I have been working with firewalls for about 20 to 25 years, but I've been using Cisco for around 12 to 15 years.

Cisco ASA Firewall is reliable, especially in the Indian context. For example, I had a couple of banks with around 5,000 branches and ATMs. It was easy to deploy remotely or send it to each branch. 

Cisco ASA Firewall is scalable to a certain extent.

Cisco support is okay, but not great. I rate Cisco support five out of ten. The response time is too long. We need an instant response to security issues. They follow some legacy processes.

In some cases, I think they're good, but they have hundreds of questions and steps to go through before the ticket is escalated. The local partner adds a lot of value in that case.

Neutral

The standard setup is straightforward and takes around four hours. You can also do more customization and adjustments to deploy it in a particular environment.
I design a custom implementation strategy for each customer. It depends on whether I'm migrating an existing environment or doing a fresh deployment. I try to understand the customer's security footprint and all the issues I need to address before installation. 

I think Cisco's price is in the right space now. They have discounts for customers at various levels. I think they're in the right spot. However, Cisco can be expensive when you factor in these additional features. 

If you add SecureX, Cisco's cost will definitely jump. We started with the standard ASA, then we added segmentation and micro-segmentation, and now we're talking about automation and unified architecture. SecureX is an integrated security portfolio. It gives a vertical and 360-degree algorithm with an open, integrated platform that can scale.

In most next-generation products, the UA itself will manage a lot of things, but it's easier to find people with expertise. If you put 10 firewall experts in the room, six will be talking about Cisco, but you can hardly find one or two people talking about Check Point or Palo Alto. Others would be more talking about Sophos, FortiGate, etc.

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall seven out of ten. If you're implementing a Cisco firewall, you must be crystal clear about your business requirements and how a Cisco ASA firewall will address your problem. You need to understand whether this product line contains all the features you need. 

Can it pass a security audit? Does it integrate with your network device? How scalable is it? Will this solution you're implementing today be adequate in the next three years? These are the questions that you should ask.

I use the solution in my company for some internal testing purposes, so I don't use it in a real environment. I use it in my dummy lab environment.

The product's user interface is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.

From an improvement perspective, the product's price needs to be lowered.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for three years. I am a customer of Cisco.

I have faced no issues with the stability of the product. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The product offers good scalability.

I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with Sophos.

The product's initial setup phase is a little difficult.

The product's deployment phase is a good and easy process.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The product is expensive.

I can't describe a particular scenario where the product has improved security, but I can say that the devices from Cisco are much more trustworthy and reliable compared to other devices in the market.

The most effective feature of the product for threat prevention stems from the granularity of the control that the devices from Cisco provide to its users.

The product offers great integration capabilities.

For our company's daily operations, the user interface provided by Sophos is much better and interactive compared to the one offered by Cisco.

You can choose Sophos if you want a low-budget or budget-friendly product. You can choose Cisco if you want a high-end and highly scalable tool with great integration capabilities, especially if budget is not an issue.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

I'm in network security, so I care more about security than the network architecture. I mostly just pull all the data out and throw it into Splunk. I use threat intelligence and some of the integrations like Talos. My company uses the product for east-west traffic, data center, and Edge.

The product is easy to manage and simple. It works with the rest of our Cisco products. You can drop in new ones if you need more performance. The training and documentation provided are good.

There's a little bit of a disconnect between Firepower’s management and the rest of the products, like DNA and Prime. The solution should have fewer admin portals for network, security, and firewalls.

I have been using the solution for a year and a half. My company has been using it for at least five years.

I haven’t had a product die. The products failover really fast, and we can cluster them. The product is definitely many nines of reliability.

I have contacted support in my previous jobs for things beyond firewalls, like servers, switches, and call centers. It's always been pretty good. They know their stuff. Sometimes we have to have a few calls to get really deep down into the issue. Eventually, we’ll get an engineer who's a senior and knows how to fix it. They do a pretty good job finding a resource that can be helpful.

In my previous jobs, I used Palo Alto and Fortinet. My current organization chose Cisco Secure Firewall because we use Cisco for the rest of our network, and it just made sense.

We have definitely seen a return on investment. It works pretty well. It is important to have everything work together. Our time is probably more valuable than our money. We're not going to go out and grab ten other network engineers to set up another complicated platform when we can just save the hassle.

The solution has improved our organization. I think my company was using Check Point back in the day. My company has 12 Cisco products. We used Palo Alto in my old organization. It’s what I'm most familiar with.

The application visibility and control with Secure Firewall are not bad. The product’s alerting is pretty good. There were a couple of things that surprised me about the solution. It works really well because we use it with Secure Client and Secure Endpoint. Sometimes the solutions can cross-enrich each other, which we wouldn’t get with a dedicated, standalone firewall.

The solution has helped free up our IT staff for other projects. We don't even have a dedicated firewall person. I sometimes do some stuff. Mostly the dedicated network admins run it, and they have time to do the rest of their job. Our whole network infrastructure team's only five to six people, and they can manage multiple sites across all different firewalls. It's not unreasonable to demand at all.

The product has helped us consolidate tools and applications. If we were using another solution, we would have had their firewall, management plane, and other appliances to back that up. Having a product in the Cisco universe definitely does help. It's all right there when we're using Secure Client and Umbrella. I want more of what Cisco Identity Services Engine and DNA do. I don't like switching tabs in my browser.

We use a relatively basic subset of Cisco Talos for general threat intel. It's definitely helpful. It's mostly about just getting the Talos definitions into the firewall so it can do all the heavy lifting so we don't have to. Now that Cisco has the XDR product, it will probably make it even more useful because then we can combine the network side, the security operations, and the threat intelligence into one thing to work harder for us.

Cisco Secure Firewall has definitely helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience. I like the IDS a lot. The definitions work really well. Making custom ones is pretty trivial. We don't have to do complicated packet captures or anything of that kind.

My advice would be to lean really hard on your sales engineer to explain the stack to you. There's definitely a learning curve to it. Cisco does things in a very particular way that's maybe a little bit different than other firewall vendors. Generally, it's pretty helpful talking to post-sales about what you need because you're probably not going to be able to figure it out. It's definitely a pretty top-shelf tool. If an organization already uses Cisco, they probably want to invest in the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Our primary use cases lie mainly with high availability and the security features available doing Layer 3 routing that we would need on our internal network.

It has simplified the internal network, so we don't have to worry about one device failing and losing connectivity. High availability is always there.

Our top three features are the high-availability features, the VPN and the IPSec.

It has fantastic visibility. It's a 10 out of 10. 

Cisco Secure Firewall is fantastic at securing our infrastructure from end to end so we can detect and remediate threats. We have already caught things that have tried to get in. 

Cisco Secure Firewall has improved resilience by a huge margin. It has been a great help.

Cisco Secure Firewall has freed staff because we don't have IT staff worrying about a lot of the threats. We trust the device that we are going to catch the threat. We are going to get a notification and be able to act upon that. Cisco Secure Firewall has saved at least 25 hours a week

The newer versions have made it so that we do not have to worry about other appliances with feature sets that are already built into the Cisco firewall.

The solution has had a huge effect, especially from physical density when it comes to securing our infrastructure. A lot of people don't think about power availability and cooling aspects. You have a limit to how much power you can push, and every little bit helps. 

We chose Cisco because of its understanding, customer service, warranties, and the quality of the product

We would like to see dual power supplies for some Cisco Firewall products. Having to get an ATS in the Data Center application because there's an A+B power feed on such a vital device with high availability may be something that I want to put in there.

We have been using Cisco Firewall for the last 20 years.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is scalable because Cisco keeps up with new technology, the security application, bandwidth, optics, and the kind of speed that one can use.

Customer support has been very responsive, whether it is a hardware failure or calling for any kind of technical support.

Positive

We have seen a return on investment in the total cost of ownership.

The pricing is fair compared to competitors. Cisco is the Cadillac in its field. You get what you pay for. 

Cisco is amazing at upgrading, so even if we did have to upgrade a device, it is plug-and-play because of that availability option.

Cisco is doing a great job with all the improvements that are coming; they are allowing for GUI setups where many people aren't so used to CLI. Many of the younger grads coming into our field are more used to APIs and automation, so having that GUI feel is a lot better than CLI.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We mainly use it for policy-based VPNs to IPSec one of the businesses. We also use it as a firewall solution for remote VPN users. We have vendors who have access to our VPN solution, and they get a dedicated network.

We can automate the VPN. The build process and how we've standardized it makes it very easy for us to focus on other tasks. We know that an end user can push a button, and the VPN will get built. They only bring us in for troubleshooting or higher-level issues with the other vendor. Because of that program, the ability to use Cisco ASA every time, in the same way, makes our job easy.

Once we started standardizing and using the same solution, we've been able to correlate that so we know what we are doing. We can train even less experienced and newer guys to do the tasks that in turn frees up the higher-level engineers. It has cut out the VPN work for higher-level engineers. They may have been spending ten hours a week previously, and now they may spend ten hours in the quarter.

It has improved our cybersecurity resilience. It has allowed us to see some differences with partners using weaker ciphers, which allows us to validate what we're using and reevaluate it. We put exceptions in cases where we have to. The security risk team is as well aware of those, and they can essentially go back on a buy-in or see if the vendor has upgraded to plug in a security hole. It has given us that visibility to see where we are weak with our vendors.

Being able to use it as a policy-based VPN is valuable. It's very easy to understand. 

It's very easy to troubleshoot. It may be because I'm comfortable with it or because I've used it for so long, but it's easy to use for me. I don't have any problems with how to set it up or use it.

For what we use it for, it ends up being the perfect product for us, but it would help if they could expand it into some of the other areas and other use cases working with speeding up and the reliability of the pushes from the policy manager.

We've been using Cisco ASA at least for the last six years. That's how long I've been in this organization, but my organization has been using it longer. 

We don't open bugs for it. It just works for what we've used it for. The last time we opened up an ASA bug would have probably been three years ago. From a reliability standpoint of what we're using it for, it's fantastic.

We've had no problems with scaling our business. We went from using probably 200 active VPNs an hour to over 600 VPNs without blinking an eye at that.

I enjoy Cisco's tech support. Just like any tech support out there, you could get a great or fantastic engineer, or you may get somebody who has just learned, so you just have to work with it. However, working with Cisco TAC, you find less of that than you do with other companies. 

Just to give them a shout-out, whenever we hit the Australian TAC, they're absolutely fantastic. Sometimes I feel that we should wait our hours when we open a ticket just so that we get one of them. They know their stuff. They absolutely do, so whoever they're hiring there, they got to keep that up and spread that out. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

I've worked with Check Point's firewall, and I've worked with Palo Alto's firewall. Things like packet capturing and packet tracing that I can manipulate to pretend I'm doing traffic through the firewall are a lot easier to do with ASAs than with other products.

We have other firewalls in our environment. We still use Palo Alto. We do have a little bit of a mix with Palo Alto in our environment, but in terms of VPN specifically, the way that Palo Alto does route-based VPN by default doesn't flow well with most people out there. It works great with cloud providers. Cisco can do route-based VPNs too. We have a route-based VPN solution with Cisco as well. We just use an ISR for that instead of a firewall.

I've been part of the deployment. Specifically, how NATTING and the firewalls work, that part is not difficult at all, but there are some challenges when you take any product and manipulate the order of operations, but that's not a Cisco challenge. You're pairing different information. There are some tools that usually try to help with those conversions, but most of the time, I find it just easier to develop what you need and just build it from scratch.

We implemented it on our own.

We've seen an ROI in terms of our high-level engineers having to work less on the product. I've been able to provide it to the NOC because of the use of the solution. They see value in that.

Pricing is more for my leadership, but I give them the quotes, and if they approve, they're happy. They've never wavered, so I wouldn't say it's out of the realm where they're considering another product. It must be in the direct price range for our leadership to not blink an eye when we give it to them.

To those evaluating this solution, I'd say that it's a solid product. It works. It does what we need. It gives us peace of mind to sleep at night. I'd definitely put it up there with some of the other firewalls to consider.

I'd rate Cisco ASA a nine out of ten.

I use the solution mostly to separate internal networks.

Being able to create and apply new policies to the firewall has been helpful. It is an object-oriented way of doing things that helps a lot because we can build and apply new policies. We can also test it and revert to the old one if it doesn't work.

The monitoring dashboard is valuable to us for troubleshooting. It lets us see if the packets get from the source to the destination correctly.

With the new FTD, there is a little bit of a learning curve. The learning curve could probably be simplified a little bit. I've come around that learning curve, and I'm able to get around it.

I have been using the solution for 15 years.

Cisco is known for its general stability.

The solution’s scalability is excellent. I don't know if the scalability has a downside or even a limit.

The support is really good. I have a good team that supports us, and I'm able to always reach out to them. It's nice to have somebody on the cell phone and just be able to reach out to them.

Positive

Years ago, I used different firewalls like Juniper, but mostly, it's been fixed to ASA and FTD. We switched to Cisco because our customers were using Cisco.

The initial setup had a little bit of a learning curve, especially because I came from ASA. I needed some help from Cisco. However, I knew what I was doing once it was set up, especially with FMC and Firepower.

We used Cisco’s support to deploy the product.

In general, we have seen an ROI on the product. Using it, applying policies, setting it up, and leaving it alone is helpful. It helps save resources.

I don't use the product for application visibility and control. I tend to worry more about blocking or allowing certain things versus looking deep into the servers and applications and how they work.

The product is great for securing our infrastructure from end to end. I'd like to be able to test out some of the other products, like dashboards and IPS/IDS, that work with it. For the most part, I set up a firewall, and I set up the rules. If things don't work, I monitor it through the monitoring dashboard and try to figure it out.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped free up a lot of time for our IT staff. Apart from monitoring, unless somebody needs a firewall rule change or anything like that, there's no need to mess with it. Once we set it up, it just runs.

The solution has helped our organization to improve its cybersecurity resilience. Being a firewall, by definition of the term, the product has improved our organization’s security.

People should always evaluate other products. If you’re looking for a solid firewall, Cisco makes the choice so much simpler, especially now with FMC. We are able to apply policies easily and control different firewalls at the same time.

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