Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

I'm working as a Solution Architect for an energy provider in Austria. We have approximately 1,500 people working in Austria and also in some neighboring countries.

We are using Cisco Secure Firewall. We started with Cisco ASA long ago, and now, we have Cisco Firepower or Cisco Secure Firewall. We are using the product as a perimeter firewall and for remote access VPN and site-to-site VPN tunnels with other partner companies. So, the primary use case of Cisco Secure Firewall is to secure our perimeter, but it's also for the remote access VPN for employees in the home office or if they are outside the company.

The benefit of using Cisco Secure Firewall is that there is a lot of integration with other Cisco products like Cisco ISE or even with third-party systems. It's important to have these integrations with other systems. On one hand, you get more visibility, and on the other hand, you can also use the information that you have from the firewall in other systems, such as a SIEM or other similar things. You overall get better visibility and better security.

In terms of securing our infrastructure from end to end so that we can detect and remediate threats. When it comes to detection, it's pretty good because you have the background of Cisco Talos. I can't say if it's the truth, but they probably are one of the top players in threat hunting, so it's pretty good at detecting known things that are outside.

The most valuable features of the product are the VPN and the NextGen firewall features such as application control, URL filtering, etc. These features are especially valuable because nowadays, it's not enough to just filter for source and destination IPs. You need more insights or visibility to see which applications are passing your perimeter, which applications you want to allow, and which ones you want to block. Without this visibility and these features, it's a little bit hard to secure your network.

There is room for improvement in the stability or software quality of the product. There were a few things in the past where we had a little bit of a problem with the product, so there is room for improvement. In the past, we had problems with new releases. 

Also, from the beginning, some functionalities or features have not worked properly. There are bugs. Every product has such problems, but sometimes, there are more problems than other products, so it's definitely something that can be improved, but Cisco seems to be working on it.

There is room for improvement in the stability of the product.

I know that there are several models for every type of scale that you need. For small branches up to the data center or even for the cloud, there are models, but so far, we only have one cluster. Among all these different types, we found the perfect matching size for our company.

The Cisco support with Cisco TAC is pretty good. With the TAC Connect Bot that you have with WebEx, you can easily open a case or escalate the case through the WebEx app. That's pretty cool. Also, the engineers that are working for Cisco TAC are really good. Among all the vendors that we have in place, it's the best support that we have experienced. I'd rate them a 10 out of 10 because compared to the other vendors that we have in place, it's definitely the best support.

Positive

We have a multi-vendor strategy for the firewall so that if there is some security issue in the software or something like that, you are not directly impacted, and there is another vendor in between. If I compare Cisco Secure Firewall with the other vendor that we have in place, the pro for Cisco Secure Firewall is that detection is better with the database of Talos. The con that comes to my mind is the deployment time when you deploy a change. With the other vendor, the change is more or less deployed immediately, whereas, with Cisco Secure Firewall, you have to wait for a few minutes until the change is deployed. This is one of the biggest cons on this side because if there's a misconfiguration, you are not able to correct the issue as fast as with the other vendor.

We migrated from Cisco ASA to Cisco Firepower, and it was straightforward because there were some migration tools to export the old ASA rule set and import it into Cisco Secure Firewall. With these tools and the documentation that you find on Cisco's site, it was pretty straightforward, and we had nearly no problems with the migration to Cisco Secure Firewall.

In terms of the deployment model, we have one high-availability cluster, and, of course, FMC to manage this cluster. These are physical clusters, and we have them on-prem in our data center.

For deployment, we worked with our partner who helped us a little bit with the migration. Our partner's engineer had good knowledge and supported us when we had questions. When we didn't know how to do something, they helped us with that.

The licensing models that are available for Cisco Secure Firewall are okay. You have nearly every option that you need. You can pick filtering, advanced malware protection, or all the available features. It's sufficient.

In terms of pricing, there are, for sure, some cheaper vendors, but overall, it's nearly the same. It has a fair price.

To those evaluating Cisco Secure Firewall, I'd advise thinking about what are your use cases and what's your goal to achieve with this product. It's also a good idea to talk to other customers or a partner and ask them what's their experience and what they think about it, and if it's suitable for this use case or not. And, of course, it's also a good idea to do a proof of concept or something like that.

At the moment, I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a six out of ten. The reason for that is that we are having some problems with the stability and functionality of the product, but there are also features, such as VPN, that are working from day one without a problem. So, there are good parts, and there are parts that are not working as well as we would like them to, but we and Cisco TAC will solve this in the future, and then the rating will go up.

We use WSA proxy and Cisco Firepowers with the FMC suite and Cisco Umbrella. We mainly use WSAP for on-premises data centers to get traffic outbound to the internet. Cisco Umbrella is for our endpoints, and Cisco firewalls are to protect our perimeter but also internal choke points to secure segments on our LAN.

Currently, we don't have any integrations between the three of them. They all run in isolation. 

Our external partner does the day-to-day management. We are not using it on a day-to-day basis. We position the products from within my team, but the detection mechanism is different per platform. We mainly trust the policy, and our security department is checking logs for anomalies in the patterns.

In terms of cost savings, we've been using this mechanism for years on end, so we haven't been able to see a real cost reduction between using our own personnel versus our external partner for management. It has been like that for 10 years or so.

In terms of time savings, it doesn't put too much burden on day-to-day activities to go over the details. The policies are rather straightforward, and anything not configured is not allowed. In that sense, it's easy.

Protecting our landscape in general and being able to see logging when things aren't going as set out in policies are valuable features. Our security department is keen on seeing the logging. 

If WSAP remains to be an active product, it might be an idea to integrate the configuration policy logic between Umbrella and WSAP. There should be one platform to manage both.

The integration between the on-prem proxy world and the cloud proxy would benefit us. One single policy setting would make sense.

That's great. Sometimes, you need to be clear on the severity levels, but once determined, we have a good experience with tech support.

Positive

That was long ago, but we had Blue Coat proxies before. We switched because of our strategy to go for Cisco as an ecosystem.

We chose Cisco products because we have a Cisco-first strategy. We typically check first with the Cisco product portfolio and then make up our minds. Historically speaking, it serves our interests best.

I am not involved firsthand in its deployment. We have an oversight role within our company, so we ask our external supplier to do the implementation, and when needed, to have it validated via Cisco, but I've no real hands-on experience.

I would expect that we have seen an ROI because our sourcing department would make sure we get the best price for the solution.

Licensing is quite difficult to get your head around. My biggest challenge is to understand the details, the inner relations. Luckily, to some extent, we have enterprise agreements, but licensing for me is a real black box.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

As a manufacturing company, we have to use many different concepts of firewalls. That's one reason we had to use a trusted firewall for security and trust reasons.

We use a top-down architectural level mostly. For this reason, Cisco Secure Firewall is the top product for us.

I would say that this solution has saved our organization's time because we are certified engineers and experts. It helps us to connect quite well with our customers on a professional level.

The features I have found most valuable are the ASA firewalls. I like to have features like most integrated systems in ACI.

I think that the solution can be improved with the integration of application-centric infrastructure. It could be used to have better solutions in one box.

I have been using this solution for around seven or eight years.

I've used different concepts of solutions before Cisco. Cisco is much better than Juniper, Brocade, or Foundry, as it is much easier to use and get directions from. It is also easier to integrate Cisco if you compare it with other customer concepts, such as Juniper, Brocade, or Aruba.

I am not involved in all Cisco firewall deployments. We also have an architectural team. We deploy based on a top-down level architecture and implementation structure.

When it comes to pricing, quality is important to us. When looking at products, we prefer quality over speed. Cisco is on that quality side mostly.

We are currently using the Cisco Firepower firewall, which is dependent on the situations in the data center and regional data center concepts. 

The way that this solution helps secure our infrastructure end-to-end is by enabling us to easily integrate all end-to-ends for monitoring.

Whether this solution saves us time depends on the situation. We use highly secure networks on the national security level and that's why it helps to use different products as Cisco is one of the best.

Overall, I would rate this solution a nine, on a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best.

We use Cisco ASA and Firepower.

ASA is used for AnyConnect connections, that is, for users to connect to the office. It is very reliable and works fine.

We use Firepower in some sites as firewalls to control inbound/outbound access. We use it as a software protection layer. However, because most users are now working from home, few users need it in the office. As a result, in some places, we have switched to SD-WAN.

The network products help save time if they are well configured at the beginning. They help increase security and protect the company's data.

Firepower's user experience should be a little bit better.

I've been using Cisco Firepower for six months.

There are some hiccups here and there, but compared to the technical support from other vendors, I have had the best experience with Cisco's technical support. I would rate them at nine out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was somewhat easy because we had previous experience with implementation. We copied that strategy or tried to align it to that implementation, but there were some challenges.

We have a hybrid cloud deployment. We have our own data centers and a lot of branches. In the data centers, most Cisco technologies start with ACI. With firewalls for big branches, we find that it's easier to break out to the internet globally rather than to use data centers.

Cisco's prices are more or less comparable to those of other products.

Compared to other vendors' firewalls, Cisco's firewalls are a bit behind. Overall, however, I would rate Cisco Firewall at eight on a scale from one to ten.

The main use cases are firewalling, routing, site-to-site VPN, and remote access. We have some older 5585-X ASAs in place. We do have Firepower 2000 Series and 4000 Series. 

For most setups, we do have high availability in place. We've at least two devices in active-active or active-standby. If it's a highly secure setup, we sometimes have two firewalls.

Cisco has a huge variety of products and features. It's a benefit to have the knowledge of all those things and also put it in the firewalling products. The knowledge that comes from other products or solutions that Cisco is selling is finding a place in security as well, and that's one of the key benefits.

There are time savings when you have a good solution in place for stopping or preventing security risks. In general, it isn't saving me time on a daily basis, but there is peace of mind knowing that you are being protected.

Basic firewalling is obviously the most valuable. In addition to that, secure access and remote access are also very useful for us. When COVID came, a lot of people had to stay at home, and that was the basic use case for having remote access.

One con of Cisco Secure Firewalls is that Java is used a lot for the older generation of these firewalls. Java is used for the ASA and the ASDM tool for administration. It's an outdated way of administering, and it's also a security risk to use this kind of solution. This is a pro of Firepower or the newer generation of firewalls because they are using HTML for administration.

In general, they can make it easier to manage the solutions. They can make it easier in terms of administration and provide a single tool for different firewalling solutions. They have different tools to manage different firewalls, such as Firepower or ASA. Sometimes, both are on the same thing. You have ASA with Firepower modules, so you manage some of the things via HTML, and then you manage some of the things via another management tool. It's not seamless. It should be bundled together in one solution.

I have been using this solution for six to seven years.

They have been very stable. I did not have any cases where a network was down due to firewalling. Fortunately, I did not have any hacker attacks, but that's being lucky. It's not something I would point out to firewalling or configuration. It's just that sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you're not.

It's very scalable. Cisco is for mid to large businesses. For small businesses, there are solutions that are cheaper, but that's not the main focus. 

A large environment comprises several thousand users. We have small to large size environments, but we mostly have mid to large.

Cisco's tech support is good in general. It varies and depends on with whom you're speaking and how the knowledge on the other side is. That's basically the same for our company. I'd rate them an eight out of ten. A ten would be perfect, and no one is perfect. You can reach maybe a nine, but no one can reach a ten.

Positive

For more security, we sometimes have two firewalls. We have other vendors in place, such as FortiGate or Palo Alto. We have Cisco at the front or at the end, and another vendor on the other side so that there is more security, and if there is a security breach in one solution, we still have the other one. These firewalls differ mostly in administration and how you configure things but not so much in terms of features. They may differ in small things, but in the end, they are all doing the same things.

I deploy and manage them afterward. I'm not only in the designing and implementing; I'm also in the operational business. Its deployment is not more complicated than other solutions. It's fine. When it comes to documentation, in general, Cisco is very good.

We mostly try to do it ourselves. Our approach is to have knowledge or any certification of the topic we are trying to take.

I'm not a salesperson. I'm more from the technical perspective, and I don't know if there are any savings at the end, but I believe that all that was bought in the past was used the way we wanted it to use. So, the money was well spent.

Licensing is not only for Secure Firewalls, and it's too complicated.

To someone evaluating or considering Cisco Secure Firewall, I'd advise having a good greenfield approach regarding what component to use. If there is no greenfield, you should evaluate what solutions you need and what type of use case you have and then decide based on that.

I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten. Cisco is a big player in networking and security, and that's basically the pro on their side.

Our primary use case for Cisco Secure Firewall is protection in our OT network. We have our OT network behind the commercial network and we do dual firewalls. The Cisco Secure Firewall is on the commercial network side and a different vendor and management group are on the OT network side.

Cisco Secure Firewall has not necessarily improved our organization as much as it has protected it against the impact of cyber threats. Our organization runs manufacturing plants that have hazardous material and we don't want that manufacturing process to be impacted by break-in exposure and cyber threats.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a good solution. In some ways, it is a reactive solution and we have it sitting in a whitelist mode rather than a blacklist mode. It seems to work fairly well for us.

It would be better if we could manage all of our firewalls as a set rather than individually. I would like to see a single pane of glass type of option. We also use another vendor's firewalls and they have a centralized management infrastructure that we have implemented. This infrastructure is a bit easier to manage.

We have used Cisco Secure Firewall for probably 10 years.

Cisco Secure Firewall has been a very stable solution for us. In general, if you keep it up to date and do sensible management on it, it will be a very stable solution.

Cisco Secure Firewall has met our scalability requirements as far as traffic and management goes.

We have an excellent account team and they go to bat for us inside of Cisco. We have access to TAC and Smart Net and that all seems to be working out very well. Cisco has a good team in place.

We did not previously use a different solution for this particular use case. 

I was not involved in the initial deployment of the solution. 

In this specific use case, the biggest return on investment is that we do not have incidents. This ultimately – in some of our factories – ends up being a health and human-safety use case.

We have all smart licensing and that works well. 

We ultimately chose Cisco Secure Firewall because it came with a strong recommendation from one of our strong partners.

My advice to those evaluating the solution right now is this: understand what you're trying to protect and what you're trying to protect it from. Also, understand how the solution is managed.

Cisco Secure Firewall has not necessarily freed up our staff's time as much as it has secured the infrastructure and the OT network behind it. Cisco Secure Firewall was not built as a time-saver. It is not a cost solution. It is a solution meant to isolate and control access to and from a specific set of infrastructure.

Cisco Secure Firewall has not helped us consolidate tools and applications. It allows us to get access. What we're seeing more and more of is business systems like SAP looking to get access to OT systems and this is how our systems get that way.

Cisco Secure Firewall requires the sort of maintenance that any software product would: updates, asset management, etc. Worldwide, we probably have 30 to 40 people managing the solution on the OT side on the various sites and then probably 10 to 15 people on our account team with our outside partner.

We are using Firepower for outbound/inbound traffic control and management as well as for our internal security. We are using it for LAN security and VMware network security. It is a hardware device, and it is deployed on-prem.

Our target is to make our network 100% secure from the outside and inside traffic. For that, we are using the latest versions, updates, patches, and licenses. We have security policies to enable ports only based on the requirements. Any unnecessary ports are disabled, which is as per the recommendation from Cisco. For day-to-day activity monitoring and day-to-day traffic vulnerabilities, we have monitoring tools and devices. If there is any vulnerability, we can catch it. We are constantly monitoring and checking our outside and inside traffic. These are the things that we are doing to meet our target of 100% security.

We have a number of security tools. We have the perimeter firewalls and core firewalls. For monitoring, we have many tools such as Tenable, Splunk, etc. We have Cisco Prime for monitoring internal traffic. For malware protection and IPS, we have endpoint security and firewalls. The outside to inside traffic is filtered by the perimeter firewall. After that, it goes to the core firewall, where it gets filtered. It is checked at port-level, website-level, and host-level security.

We have the endpoint security updated on all devices, and this security is managed by our antivirus server. For vulnerabilities, we have a Tenable server that is monitoring all devices. In case of any vulnerability or attacks, we get updated. We are also using Splunk as SIEM. From there, we can check the logs. If any device is attacked, we get to know the hostname or IP address. We can then check our monitoring tool and our database list. We can see how this attack happened. We have configured our network into security zones. We have zone-based security.

It integrates with other Cisco products. We use Cisco ASA and Cisco FTD, and we also use Cisco FMC for monitoring and creating policies. For internal network monitoring purposes, we use Cisco Prime. We also use Cisco ISE. For troubleshooting and monitoring, we can do a deep inspection in Cisco FMC. We can reach the host and website. We can also do web filtering and check at what time an activity happened or browsing was done. We can get information about the host, subnet, timing, source, and destination. We can easily identify these things about a threat and do reporting. We can also troubleshoot site-to-site VPN and client VPN. So, we can easily manage and troubleshoot these things.

Cisco FMC is the management tool that we use to manage our firewalls. It makes it easy to deploy the policies, identify issues, and troubleshoot them. We create policies in Cisco FMC and then deploy them to the firewall. If anything is wrong with the primary FMC, the control is switched to a secondary FMC. It is also disconnected from the firewall, and we can manage the firewall individually for the time being. There is no effect on the firewall and network traffic.

Cisco FMC saves our time in terms of management and troubleshooting. Instead of individually deploying a policy on each firewall, we can easily push a policy to as many firewalls as we want by using Cisco FMC. We just create a policy and then select the firewalls to which we want to push it. Similarly, if we want to upgrade our firewalls, instead of individually logging in to each firewall and taking a backup, we can use Cisco FMC to take a backup of all firewalls. After that, we can do the upgrade. If Cisco FMC or the firewall goes down, we can just upload the backup, and everything in the configuration will just come back. 

We can also see the health status of our network by using Cisco FMC. On one screen, we can see the whole firewall activity. We can see policies, backups, and reports. If our management asks for information about how many rules are there, how many ports are open, how many matching policies are there, and which public IP is there, we can log in to Cisco FMC to see the complete configuration. We can also generate reports.

With Cisco FMC, we can create reports on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. We can also get information about the high utilization of our internet bandwidth by email. In Cisco FMC, we can configure the option to alert us through email or SMS. It is very easy.

It has a good security level. It is a next-generation firewall. It can protect from different types of attacks. We have enabled IPS and IDS. To make out network fully secure, we have zone-based security and subnets.

It is user-friendly with a lot of features. It has a CLI, which is helpful for troubleshooting. It also has a GUI. It is easy to work with this firewall if you have worked with any Cisco firewall.

With Cisco FMC, we can see the network's health and status. We can create a dashboard to view the network configuration, security policies, and network interfaces that are running or are up or down. We can also see network utilization and bandwidth utilization. We can see if there are any attacks from the outside network to the inside network. We can arrange the icons in the dashboard. For troubleshooting, we can also log in to the FMC CLI, and based on the source and destination, we can ping the firewall and the source. 

I have been using this solution for three to four years.

It is stable, but it also depends on whether it is properly configured or maintained. If you don't apply the proper patches recommended by Cisco, you could face a lot of issues. If the firewall is up to date in terms of patches, it works smoothly and is stable.

There are no issues in terms of the number of users. This is the main firewall for the organization. All users are behind this firewall. So, all departments and teams, such as HR, finance, application team, hardware teams, are behind this firewall. All users have to cross the firewall while accessing applications and websites. They cannot bypass the firewall. 

Their support is good. If we have an issue, we first try to resolve it at our level. If we are not able to resolve an issue, we call customer care or raise a ticket. They investigate and give us the solution. If there is a hardware issue or the device is defective, we will get that part as soon as possible. They replace that immediately. If it is not a hardware issue, they check the logs that we have submitted. Based on the investigation, they give a new patch in case of a bug. They arrange for a technical engineer to come online to guide us and provide instructions remotely. They provide immediate support. I would rate their support a nine out of 10.

We have HA/standby devices. We have almost 70 to 80 access switches, and we have 30 to 40 routers, hubs, and other monitoring tools and devices. We keep one or two devices as a standby. We have a standby for each Cisco tool. We have a standby for the core and distribution switches and firewalls. We have a standby firewall. When there is any hardware issue or other issue, the secondary firewall is used, and the workload moves to the secondary firewall. Meanwhile, we work with Cisco's support to resolve the issue.

For the past four to five years, we have only had Cisco firewalls. However, for some of the branches, we are using Palo Alto firewalls. It depends on a client's requirements, applications, security, etc.

I didn't do the implementation. We have, however, upgraded to a higher version. From the Cisco side, we get the updates or patches using which we upgrade a device and do the configuration. We register the product model and serial number, and after that, we can download a patch. We also can get help from Cisco. It is easy to migrate or upgrade for us.

We have vendor support. They are a partner of Cisco. When we buy the hardware devices, the vendor has the responsibility to do the implementation and configurations. We do coordinate with them in terms of providing the space and network details such as IP addresses, network type, subnets, etc. We also provide logical diagrams. We monitor the configuration, and after the configuration is done, we check how the network is working and performing.

We have an IT department that includes an applications group, a hardware group, and a security group. There are also Network Level 1, Level 2, and Level 3 teams. The Level 1 team only takes care of the network side. The Level 2 and Level 3 teams do almost similar work, but the Level 3 team is a bit at a higher level in IT security. The Level 2 and Level 3 teams take care of firewalls-level and security-level configuration, policy upgrade, etc. They manage all network devices. Overall, we have around 20 members in our department.

For the maintenance of Firepower, two guys are there. A Level 2 engineer takes care of policy creation and deployment for new networks. A Level 3 engineer takes care of a new firewall, upgrades, and network design and architecture.

When we purchased the firewall, we had to take the security license for IPS, malware protection, and VPN. If we are using high availability, we have to take a license for that. We also have to pay for hardware support and technical support. Its licensing is on a yearly basis.

It is a good product. It is easy to manage, but you need to have good experience and good knowledge, and you need to configure it properly.

Cisco FMC only supports Cisco products. If you have a large network with Cisco firewalls and other vendors' firewalls, such as Palo Alto, you can only manage Cisco products through Cisco FMC. Other vendors have their own management tools.

Most of the organizations nowadays are using the Cisco Firepower and Cisco ASA because of the high level of security. Cisco is known for its security. Cisco provides a lot of high-security firewalls such as Cisco ASA, Cisco FTD, Cisco Firepower. Cisco ASA 8500 came out first, and after that, new models such as Cisco FTD came. 

I would rate Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall a nine out of 10. It is excellent in terms of features, ability, and security. Whoever gets to work on Cisco Firepower, as well as Cisco ASA, will get good experience and understanding of security and will be able to work on other firewalls.

We have multiple use cases for Cisco Firepower. We have two types of use cases:

• Protect the perimeter of the enterprise.
• Inter-VRF zoning and routing. 

The goal is to have some Firewall protection with a Layer 7 features, like URL filtering, IPS, malware at the perimeter level as well as inspecting the traffic going through that firewall, because all traffic is encrypted. We want visibility, ensuring that we can protect ourselves as much as we can.

In production, I am currently using Cisco Firepower version 6.7 with the latest patch, and we are starting to roll out version 7.0.

I have multiple customers who are running Cisco Firepower on-prem. Increasingly, customers are going through the cloud, using Cisco Firepower on AWS and Azure.

We are implementing Cisco Firepower at the Inter-VRF level so we can have some segmentation. For example, between ACI and all the Inter-VRF being done through Firepower, we are able to inspect local east-west traffic. It is great to use Cisco Firepower for segmentation, because on the Firepower, we now have a feature called VRF. So, you can also expand the VRF that you have locally on your network back to the firewall and do some more tweaking and segmentation. Whereas, everything was coming into a single bucket previously and you had to play around with some features to make sure that the leaking of the prefixes was not advertised. Now, we are really working towards segmentation in terms of routing in Firepower.

The integration of network and workload micro-segmentation helps a lot to provide unified segmentation policies across east-west and north-south traffic. One concrete example is with Cisco ACI for the data center. Not only are we doing what is called a service graph on the ACI to make sure that we can filter traffic east-west between two endpoints in the same network, but when we go north-south or east-west, we can then leverage what we have on the network with SGTs on Cisco ISE. Once you build your matrix, it is very easy to filter in and out on east-west or north-south traffic.

Since SecureX was released, this has been a big advantage for Cisco Firepower. You can give a tool to a customer to do some analysis, where before they were doing it manually. So, this is a very big advantage. 

The IPS is one of the top features that I love.

The dashboard of the Firepower Management Center (FMC) has improved. The UI has been updated to look like a 2021 UI, instead of what it was before. It is easy to use and navigate. In the beginning, the push of the config was very slow. Now, we are able to push away some conflicts very quickly. We are also getting new features with each release. For example, when you are applying something and have a bad configuration, then you can quickly roll back to when it was not there. So, there have been a lot of improvements in terms of UI and configuration.

We saw a lot of improvements on Cisco Firepower when Snort 3 came along. Before, with Snort 2, we were able to do some stuff, but the bandwidth was impacted. With Snort 3, we now have much better performance.

I would like to see improvement when you create policies on Snort 3 IPS on Cisco Firepower. On Snort 2, it was more like a UI page where you had some multiple choices where you could tweak your config. On Snort 3, the idea is more to build some rules on the text file or JSON file, then push it. So, I would like to see a lot of improvements here.

I have been using Cisco Firepower for multiple years, around four to five years.

In terms of Firepower's stability, we had some issues with Snort 2 CPUs when using older versions in the past. However, since using version 6.4 until now, I haven't seen any big issues. We have had some issues, just like any other vendor, but not in terms of stability. We have had a few bugs, but stability is something that is rock-solid in terms of Firepower.

Cisco Firepower scalability is something that can be done easily if you respect the best practices and don't have any specific use cases. If I take the example of one of my customers moving to the cloud, there is one FMC and he is popping new Firepower devices on the cloud, just attaching them to the existing policy and knots. This is done in a few minutes. It is very easy to do.

When you open a ticket with Cisco tech support for Cisco FMC, you can be quite confident. Right away, the engineer onboarding is someone skilled and can help you out very quickly and easily. This is something that is true 90% of the time. For sure, you always have 10% of the time where you are fighting to get the right guy. But, most of the time, the guy who does the onboarding can right away help you out.

The initial setup and implementation of Cisco Firepower is very easy. I am working with a lot more vendors of firewalls, and Cisco Firepower is one of the best today. It is one of the easiest to set up.

The minimum deployment time depends on really what you want to do. If you just want to initiate a quick setup with some IPS and have already deployed FMC, then it takes less than one hour. It is very easy. 

What takes more time is deploying the OVA of Cisco Firepower Management Center and doing all the cabling stuff. All the rest, it is very easy. 

If you are working without a Firepower Management Center and using Firepower Device Manager with Cisco on the cloud, then it is even easier. It is like the Meraki setup, where you just plug and play everything and everything will be connected to the cloud. It is very easy.

If you configure Cisco Firepower, it has to be based on Cisco's recommendations. You can view all the traffic and have full visibility in terms of applications, support, URL categorization, and inspect malware or whatever file is being exchanged. We also love to interconnect Cisco Firepower with some Cisco ISE appliances so we can do some kind of threat containment. If something is seen as a virus coming in from a user, we can directly tell Cisco ISE to block that user right away.

I am working for a Cisco Professional Services Partner. We have only one guy deploying the devices. We don't require a big team to deploy it. In terms of configuration, it takes more people based on each person's skills because you have multiple areas: firewalls, IPS, knots, and routing. So, it depends on which skills will be required the most.

For maintenance on an average small to medium customer, it takes one to two people. When it is a big customer with multiple sites, you should have a small team of four to five people. This is because it is mostly not about creating the rules, but more about checking and analyzing the logs coming through Cisco Firepower Manager Center.

Whether Cisco Firepower reduces costs depends on the architecture that you are on. I had some of my customers answer, "Totally, yes," but for some of them that is not really true.

When we are fighting against other competitors for customers, whether it is a small or big business, we feel very comfortable with the price that Firepower has today.

I have worked with Palo Alto, Fortinet, and Sophos. I work a lot more with Palo Alto and Cisco Firepower. I find them to be very easy in terms of management operations. Fortinet is also a vendor where we see the ease of use, but in terms of troubleshooting, it is more complex than Firepower and Palo Alto. Sophos is the hardest one for me to use.

I love the IPS more on the Cisco Firepower, where you can do more tweaking compared to the other solutions. Where I love Palo Alto and Fortinet more compared to Firepower is that you still have CLI access to some configs instead of going through the UI and pushing some configs. When you are in big trouble, sometimes the command line is easier to push a lot more configs than doing some clicks and pushing them through the UI.

Compared to the other vendors, Firepower requires more deep dive skills on the IPS stuff to make it work and ensure that you are protected. If you go with the basic one in the package, you will be protected, but not so much. So, you need to have more deep dive knowledge on the IPS to be sure that you can tweak it and you can protect yourself.

Another Cisco Firepower advantage would be the Talos database. That is a big advantage compared to other solutions.

In terms of threat defense, we have a feature of TLS 1.3 that is free where we can see applications without doing any SSL inspection, which can increase the performance of the firewall without doing some deep dive inspection. At the same time, we keep some visibility of what application is going through. Therefore, we have a win-win situation if one wants to protect against some specific applications.

Do not just look at the data sheet that vendors are publishing. Sometimes, they make sense. But, in reality, these documents are made based on specific use cases. Just do a proof of concept and test every single feature. You will find out that Cisco Firepower is much better and more tweakable than other solutions.

When you start using Cisco Firepower Management Center, you need a few days to get used to it. Once you know all the menus, it is kind of easy to find your way out and analyze traffic, not only in terms of the firewall but also in terms of IPS or SSL decryption. Different users are split away who can help you to troubleshoot what you want to troubleshoot, not having everything in one view.

Today, the only use cases that we have for dynamic policies are leveraging the API on Cisco FMC to push some config or change the config. There isn't a feature built automatically on the FMC to build a new policy, so we are leveraging APIs.

I would rate Cisco Firepower between eight and nine. The only reason that I am not giving a full nine is because of the Snort 3 operations, where there is a need for improvement.