Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) Reviews

Our primary use case is for regulatory purposes. We use Cisco Secure IPS for intrusion prevention to manage all features from a single dashboard.

The solution is valuable since it is a single vendor option, which makes it easier to manage all features from one dashboard. The threat detection and prevention feature is particularly important for us.

Customer support needs improvement. The regional manager and the Romanian representative are not adequate. They should change their approach and policy since they currently do not allocate enough resources for smaller projects, like those in Moldova. This is not acceptable for a vendor of Cisco's stature. We are considering a change in vendors due to this issue.

We have been using the solution for about one year.

I would rate the stability of the solution as seven to nine out of ten.

The scalability of Cisco Secure IPS is strong, supporting our organizational growth with a rating of nine out of ten.

Customer service is lacking, and I would rate it as three out of ten. There is significant room for improvement.

Negative

We also use Zscaler. Unlike Cisco, Zscaler is more flexible in terms of vendor and regional management.

The initial setup was somewhat difficult. It took about a week to deploy.

On a scale from one to ten, Cisco Secure IPS pricing is relatively economical with a rating of four out of ten.

We have evaluated Zscaler as another solution.

I would not recommend Cisco Secure IPS to other users in Moldova because of the regional managerial approach and inadequate resources. They need to change their policy and position in the market. 

I would rate the overall solution as seven out of ten.

My company is a system integrator and we deploy Cisco NGIPS in various contexts, typically in the banking environment and in other high-level security scenarios, depending on our customer requirements. 

We normally work with the most current models of Cisco products such as the Catalyst 9000 Series switches and 1000 Series routers.

The top features of Cisco NGIPS, which have been working very well, include stateful inspection and the access list-based security configuration. But from my perspective, the best part of Cisco NGIPS is the licensing process, which is very easy and straightforward. It's essentially copy-paste licensing.

The other aspect that I like is the technical support, who are highly capable. They were very good to us during the times that we used them and they tend to reply immediately to queries, even though you might not get the right engineer to help you right away. Tickets are usually assigned to junior staff at first but they do have escalation procedures, so if the support member can't solve the issue then they will immediately escalate it to higher management.

The feedback from some of our customers is that they weren't interested in Cisco because it was too complicated to deploy, especially in cloud-related areas.

Something else that our customers have commented on is that, in the current release of Cisco NGIPS that we are using, there have been some issues when they have tried to synchronize Cisco's hardware products with Cisco's management software.

If I recall correctly, the problems came from Cisco's Firepower Management software after we had proposed to our customers to use virtual machines as a cost-saving measure. After setting up the VMs, the software would start crashing, and it greatly disturbed the customers. It is possible that this was related to power issues because most of the time it would crash on power-on or power-off, but at other times it would crash due to incoming firewall traffic. I hope that in future releases, these problems will be solved.

In general, the ASA level features are working very well in Cisco products, but when it comes to the Next-Generation product, it has been somewhat unstable. To remedy this situation, Cisco needs to make the software more stable, easier to manage, and easier to update (possibly with an auto-updating mechanism). The small intricacies of the software product make the system more complicated than it needs to be for our engineers and our customers. 

I have used Cisco NGIPS for four years.

Cisco's stability issues have caused several of our customers to complain directly to the vendor, and if these issues persist into the future I will not be able to continue recommending Cisco NGIPS to our customers. In terms of cost, security, compatibility, and flexibility, there are a lot of products doing better than Cisco, so why would customers keep buying Cisco if they can get better products with more stability? Cisco has to think of their global market first and foremost and fix their issues based on their findings. In our country, Cisco has a good name because they got here first, but a lot of customers have shifted, in terms of security, to other products such as Fortinet and Palo Alto, which have their own Next-Generation firewalls.

Cisco NGIPS is not that easy to scale, in my opinion. However, it can be upgraded, depending on the design. When you propose a design to customers, you have to check their expansion capability in terms of various factors such as how much time and how much employees would have to be involved.

When it comes to the VM products, some of them might not be scalable unless you upgrade your product to the latest version, in which case you have to upgrade the versions one by one. For example, your current version might 5.1 and you are aiming to upgrade to version 10.1. In this case, you would have to upgrade each intermediate version until you reach 10.1.

Cisco's tech support is very good and it was a pleasant experience whenever we used them. They tend to reply immediately, although when it comes to the technical capability of the support you might not get an appropriately skilled engineer to help you right away. However, they do have escalation procedures such that the junior staff will escalate any unsolved issues to higher management.

The ease of installation depends on the engineer. If they aren't trained in Cisco NGIPS or they aren't skilled enough, it's not easy to implement. You have to implement with a highly skilled engineer because it's not simple to deploy Cisco products.

We had one project where we implemented Cisco NGIPS along with a few other products and it took perhaps a week to fully deploy. 

The annual licensing tends to be expensive, but in terms of implementing the licenses, it's a very uncomplicated process and as easy as copy-paste in its straightforwardness.

Regarding the affordability of the licensing, if you buy licenses on a yearly or quarterly basis, you might not find much return on investment, but at the same time you will have a better product with regular upgrades and less network interruptions, so this has to be weighed against the costs.

I have decided not to update our use of Cisco NGIPS unless they can solve their issues related to software stability, and thus I cannot fully recommend Cisco NGIPS to other customers at this time.

I would rate Cisco NGIPS a seven out of ten.

We have deployed Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) for intrusion detection and prevention in our financial sector. It protects our public-facing systems, especially in the DMZ zone, ensuring high security for servers involved in public transactions.

Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) performs exceptionally in Trojan detection, especially at the network level. We used a Next Generation Firewall on that aspect, which is amazing. Cisco products are also very good at integration with third-party tools.

It's better to strengthen the AI feature of the IPS. Considering different attack vectors, using AI to understand the behavior or features of network-level intrusions and protecting against zero-day attacks would be beneficial.

I have been working with Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) for about two to three years.

I find Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) stable.

The solution is good at scaling.

Before Cisco, we did not work with any other solutions for the IDPS.

I was not involved in the initial deployment or setup.

The pricing for Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) is quite high. They should consider revising the pricing strategies since there are other vendors in the market offering competitive pricing.

I would recommend Cisco Secure IPS (NGIPS) to others, although the pricing is high.

I'd rate the solution eight out of ten.

We use the solution for cybersecurity purposes. The tool helps us to identify anomalies that come from internal or external networks. 

The attack patterns and payloads go undetected in Cisco. We would like to see a new solution with more effective detection of attack patterns. There should be more data analyzing patterns as well which provides useful information. 

I have been using the product for two years. 

I would rate the solution's stability an eight out of ten. 

The tool's scalability is not an issue. We have a lot of people using the product even in our subsidiaries. We have a couple of thousand users for the solution.

We have residence engineers for support. We mainly use level two support. Cisco's support in the local region is up to the level. However, we have issue with country-level support.  

I use Darktrace simultaneously. 

The product's setup was smooth and easy. The implementation was not a big deal and took two weeks to complete.

A Cisco consultant helped us with the tool's implementation. They were competent, helpful, and confident. 

We get cut in price since we use other Cisco products. We have the whole bundle of Cisco solutions. 

I would rate the product a six out of ten. The solution is easy to maintain. We are looking for a solution that is powered by AI which gives enhanced protection and detection. 

It is our main firewall. We use it for reporting and for firewall purposes to block unwanted inputs and outputs.

Its ease of use and its ability to block and allow ports in and out of our organization are the most valuable features.

It works very well. It gives us all the information that we need.

We don't like its licensing model. It has separate licensing for all the features. For instance, to get URL filtering, you need to buy another license. Every feature set seems to require another license. Unless you purchase them all upfront, you find some surprises and realize that you can't do that because you need another license. 

Its logging isn't quite as good as it used to be in our previous solution. We used to have Cisco ASA, and we could view the logs a lot easier than NGIPS (also known as Firepower). We saw real-time logging, but we don't see that as much in Firepower.

I have been using this solution for two years.

It has been very stable. I don't think it has gone down at all in two years.

It is very scalable. In terms of the number of users, we have 26,000 students and 3,500 staff members. Everybody in our organization goes through it and takes advantage of it on our system. We have about five people who are managing it, and they are from the network group, infrastructure group, and storage group.

We did have some engagement with the technical support people regarding the integration with Nexus Switches, and they were very good. They helped us out quite a bit.

We were using Cisco ASAs. They were going out of service. They were going out of sale and support. So, we decided to move to Firepower. We wanted to go to the Next-Gen IPS type of stuff, and ASAs didn't have that kind of feature set.

It was quite complex. It required some workarounds with other network components in our system. It could have been a lot less complicated. Nexus Switches that we had were a little bit older, and they didn't integrate as well with Firepower as they could have. So, we ended up having to buy some new switches. 

The deployment pretty much took about three weeks. It involved moving all of our stuff from our old firewall onto the new one. Rules were a little different, so we had to work on it for a while. Fortunately, we could run them in parallel, so it worked out okay.

We did it in-house.

It has definitely given us our return on the investment.

It is expensive. It has separate licensing for all the features, and every feature set seems to require another license.

Licensing is on a yearly basis. There are no additional costs besides the standard licensing fee.

I would advise others to make sure that the rest of their equipment is completely compatible with the newest Firepowers.

I would rate Cisco NGIPS an eight out of ten. It gives us all the information that we need. We've got to dig for it sometimes, but it is a good product.

We have NGIPS deployed at the edge and use it to filter the point of presence to the Internet or other offices.

NGIPS lets you map web requests to a specific user to determine who is downloading files and what they are accessing. You can use it to identify users downloading malware or track time wasters using Facebook or something like that. It gives you visibility into what your users are doing on the Internet. 

The price is a little high. It's hard to find solutions that are easy on the budget and strike a balance between affordability and features.

I have used NGIPS since 2015.

NGIPS is quite stable. 

NGIPS is scalable. It has well-defined stacks for how much traffic it can handle. You can fully inspect traffic or use SSL decryption.

I rate Cisco support 10 out of 10. We get everything we need from them. 

Positive

I rate NGIPS nine out of 10 for ease of setup. The process was smooth and straightforward. After deployment, it requires some maintenance like updates and creating or changing the policies. We have more than a hundred policy categories now. 

We had help from professional services.

I rate Cisco NGIPS nine out of 10. We always find stuff that could be done better or that we want more of. For example, we've had some issues creating specific rules, and it's challenging to create exceptions or tweak the rules as your business evolves. It's tricky to order the rules to follow the business policies you want. You have to balance security with getting work done. You need to watch how many rules you make because you can get overwhelmed.

We use it at the end and the center as the core and apply a lot of policies to the firewall.

Using Cisco Firepower has helped us.

We like the Cisco product, the concept, and the tech intelligence. We are much more comfortable with Cisco products. It's a reputable organization, and we trust the products.

The next Cisco NGIPS release should include more features for production ideas and more intelligence for IDS and IPS features.

We have been using this solution for two years. 

We initially had some difficulty loading pages due to certain rules regarding performance and stability. On some websites, we had to click more than once. These issues were quite easy to fix.

Regarding scalability, the solution is not that good.

They're nice people. We don't have any issues with them. They are quick to respond, but sometimes it takes time to solve the issues.

Positive

We previously used Check Point and Cyberoam. We switched because the license expired.

We initially had some difficulties, but now we have no problems.

A Cisco vendor in Nepal helped us configure the product properly. We didn't have a strategy. The vendors supported us from the very beginning. After working with them, we had no problem using the product.

It took almost a month and a half to install the system.

I would rate our ROI as eight out of 10, with 10 being the highest ROI.

Cisco NGIPS licensing is yearly. 

I would rate the pricing four out of 10, one being very expensive and 10 very cheap. 

I would give Cisco NGIPS an overall rating of eight out of 10, 10 being the best.

We have a department of almost 50 people in our company using Cisco NGIPS. 

We have 10 people to maintain the product.

We want to cover all the systems and networks of our organization. 

I use Cisco NGIPS as a firewall.

The most valuable features of Cisco NGIPS are protection and reporting.

We have a separate management controller for Cisco NGIPS. If they have not done it already they should integrate Cisco NGIPS with the Cloud Portal.

The solution has some bugs that sometimes take time to resolve.

I have been using Cisco NGIPS for approximately two years.

The stability of Cisco NGIPS has been good since we have been using it.

The scalability of Cisco NGIPS is good.

Cisco has better technical support than other competitors, such as Check Point IPS or Palo Alto. Cisco has very good support, they are always ready to help their customer if there are any production issues.

Cisco NGIPS should add a technical person to the chat support. They correctly do not have a specialist. The knowledge base of the chat agent should be better.

I have used Check Point IPS solutions.

The implementation of Cisco NGIPS is straightforward.

You have to do your own implementation of the Cisco NGIPS hardware, but for the configuration, Cisco support can be involved from day one. That's what I have experienced. There was some exception but I have involved the Cisco support team from day one when I started configuring my firewall.

We have seen a return on investment by using Cisco NGIPS.

There is a license required to use Cisco NGIPS and it can be a one or three-year license.

I would advise others to use the support from Cisco, they are helpful.

I rate Cisco NGIPS an eight out of ten.