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Akamai Enterprise Application Access vs Cisco Secure Access comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Jun 3, 2026

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

iboss
Sponsored
Ranking in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
6th
Ranking in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)
7th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (6th), Internet Security (3rd), Web Content Filtering (1st), ZTNA as a Service (6th)
Akamai Enterprise Applicati...
Ranking in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
15th
Ranking in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)
18th
Average Rating
9.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.5
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
Access Management (19th), ZTNA as a Service (20th)
Cisco Secure Access
Ranking in Cloud Access Security Brokers (CASB)
3rd
Ranking in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)
3rd
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
6.4
Number of Reviews
72
Ranking in other categories
Secure Web Gateways (SWG) (4th), Firewalls (9th), ZTNA (6th), Domain Name System (DNS) Security (2nd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) category, the mindshare of iboss is 3.3%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai Enterprise Application Access is 1.9%, up from 1.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Access is 3.9%, up from 2.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Cisco Secure Access3.9%
iboss3.3%
Akamai Enterprise Application Access1.9%
Other90.9%
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE)
 

Featured Reviews

Ashok Ananthula - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Consultant Proxy Engineering at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Cloud gateway has strengthened remote web security and now needs better Mac and ISP support
The problem our organization had is that iboss failed for the Mac devices. It is not able to give a successful agent for the Mac agents. That is where in 2025, we had to migrate to the Palo Alto-based platform. If your use case is for just Windows laptops,you can consider this platform as an option One issue is the data center resiliency part. In India especially, they are not tied up with the Tier 1 ISPs like Tata or Airtel; they were having Tier 2 ISPs and encountered many issues reaching few major sites that my organization depends on, and they were having problems that they could not fix quickly. They also lack a mechanism to route that traffic within their data center; rather, they ask customers to make a pac file change to route it to Singapore explicitly. It would be better if they route from their backend , i mean even if I send it to India DC, they should be able to route it internally to make that work; however, they fail to do that and ask the customer to route it in the pac file. Another suggestion is that in China, they do not have the proper setup; they used to have numerous problems with slowness and lack of premium circuits in China as well. That leads to multiple sites working slowly with latency-related issues. So the main issue is the ISP-related problems that need to be solved.
DE
Platform Manager at Globe Telecom
Centralized authentication streamlines global access with single sign-on and auto-scaling for seamless user experience
We use Akamai Enterprise Application Access for centralized authentication for our global customers. It provides a solution for consolidated authentication on our platform. We use the service to manage access for our global consumers, not for remote access for our employees My favorite part of…
reviewer2788500 - PeerSpot reviewer
Network Operations Engineer at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Secure access has unified zero trust and web protection while AI assistance automates tasks
From a feature perspective, I have not experienced any issues, drawbacks, or shortcomings. However, the cost of Cisco's products and licensing is high. My clients usually prefer cheaper options if possible. Mid-size or smaller businesses typically cannot afford Cisco Secure Access. Additionally, there is a steep learning curve, as it is very intensive. Someone with significant knowledge can work on it, but a new professional would have to spend considerable time to get accustomed to it. It is hard to find engineers who can work on it. Overall, we get what we pay for, as it is a pretty good feature and service. The pricing of Cisco's products and licensing is higher than competitors. If they could be more reasonable, that would help. The support offered for two years also has higher costs. Overall, the client's IT budget gets affected. It was challenging to learn because, as mentioned, it has a significant learning curve and requires considerable training to become proficient.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"Deploying iboss leads to good return on investment, estimated around 70% to 80%."
"I would rate the technical support of iboss a solid 10 without a shadow of a doubt."
"I would say iboss is a very good product; its scalability is very good, and it's seamless for the user."
"Granular setup, which was able to set different levels of filters using the OUs in the AD."
"The solution has massively improved our security posture, giving us full visibility into what our staff does online."
"From a use-case scenario, what I like the most is the plug-in. I like the fact that we can do the filtering of these devices offsite independent of the network they are connected to, and we do not have to have traffic coming back inside our network."
"Its initial setup was straightforward."
"iboss is definitely very good in terms of service."
"Application Access's most valuable feature is the accessibility of enterprise tech protection."
"We've had a good ROI from Application Access."
"The solution is very convenient and stable because you don't have to worry about attacks to public IPs or public networks."
"My favorite part of the Akamai Enterprise Application Access service is its SSO and auto-scaling capabilities."
"The capability of Akamai Enterprise Application Access is what you're looking for, it's giving you the service that you're looking for. It's simple and doesn't use an agent. It uses LCSD responders, and they have a lot of services around the globe. That's the reason that we were very interested in using it because it has a lot of coverage. This is because it's under the GDS umbrella."
"The cost and the capability are great."
"They've protected us from threats like phishing and ransomware."
"I can provide more advanced security features for my customers because Cisco Secure Access is built in the cloud, I don't have to worry about managing the security enforcement or the behind-the-scenes operational aspect, and it has resiliency in multiple data centers so I get increased availability with multiple redundant tunnels across different data centers."
"From my perspective, it was the right decision to move to that platform, as I expect the product to be ideal for having secure access to your network system, especially as we will see a transition from mostly on-premise to mostly cloud."
"Cisco Secure Client is really efficient for all the users and mostly for the enterprise, so I would say Cisco Secure Client would be the primary one."
"The move from Umbrella to Cisco Secure Access has been great, as Cisco Secure Access has more features available and provides a nice and easy migration from Umbrella to Cisco Secure Access."
"It works well. It hasn't broken. While I don't know enough about all the features yet, it hasn't caused us any problems."
"I assess the stability and reliability of Cisco Secure Access as top-notch, and I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues because we built the solution and performed the tests step-by-step."
"Customers spend much less time troubleshooting VPNs because ZTNA works more stably, and therefore it has become a pretty good point of sales for us as a reseller to increase our revenue at the customer level, because it's an extra layer of security that you can add to an already existing networking solution."
 

Cons

"The problem our organization had is that iboss failed for the Mac devices; it is not able to give a successful agent for the Mac agents, and that is where in 2025 we had to migrate to the Palo Alto-based platform."
"Iboss is growing so fast that it is often hard for them to keep up with the challenges."
"Our biggest problem with their service was it did not recognize the device and filtering did not always work correctly."
"The endpoint-type solution is an area that needs some improvement."
"I have heard they are doing DDoS filtering, but I am not certain if they are implementing it correctly."
"The area I would like to see improvement in is the ability with in the reporter to navigate directly to the content the user is traversing. It is kind of there, but it's not perfect. Quite frequently, I receive links that lead me to pages with error messages."
"The solution could be stronger on the integration side and offer more cloud applications like G Suite or Oracle."
"I appreciate that iboss's single pane of glass console gives centralized visibility into web traffic, user activity, security policies, and alerts from one dashboard, allowing us to quickly investigate incidents and monitor policy violations without switching between multiple tools, improving operational efficiency; however, the dashboard customization and reporting could be more flexible."
"The pricing could be lower for Akamai Enterprise Application Access."
"We need another approach to bring the solution to the cloud. In addition to Access Management, we would like to see if we can jump into Directories. I think ADs are going to go away and everything is going to be cloud-based and minimize the use of ADs because of the cost and some other dependencies to the cloud. Every time you buy AD it is more hardware, and everything's changing to software. The network's changing, the applications are changing, and for IT it is hard to keep up with it."
"The technical enablement sessions are quite limited, and Akamai could help by providing more of them."
"If you provide enterprise services we have to stop telling the customers it's going to be per users or the transactions. That's not good for the customers, it's good for the vendors."
"The solution has two agents so should combine its enterprise application and security access into one agent."
"The initial deployment and policy design process can be complex, particularly for organizations with a large number of applications, diverse user groups, and existing security integrations."
"The license model can be simplified; it is a bit tricky to understand exactly which licenses you need."
"This is my first time in healthcare after being in commercial space for a long time. It's always a challenge because we can't just turn stuff off as we could in the commercial space, since it may interfere with patient care. It takes longer to understand what's going on, so anything that could help give us a faster understanding of what's happening, why it's there, and if it's a risk to us would be helpful."
"If the FTD devices themselves, the Firepower Threat Detection system, those are the firewalls themselves, the individual appliances, weren't so tightly coupled to FMC, I'd probably appreciate them as a product more."
"The only bad experiences we have had were really sort of when the platform launched and I think even Cisco was still learning how to support it."
"It is confusing. When you look at the prices, you have different licensing and years of licensing that you have to purchase. Additionally, it's unclear what service you get from those licenses regarding end-user support. We have a representative who has to walk me through it every time."
"We did run into an issue with URL filtering where it would not filter a site properly. It took months to resolve by Cisco, but that is the only hiccup I would say there has been."
"In general, what can be improved about this solution is to not change the name of everything every year, as Cisco marketing are experts at making changes to everything, and I don't understand what this is; that was the AnyConnect VPN, and now it's Cisco Secure Access, and what's tomorrow?"
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is probably in line with other solutions, but I do not deal with the financial side."
"We have not priced the solution recently, but they were competitive with other vendors in the past."
"The overall pricing for iboss is very competitive and transparent."
"It is not expensive, and it is also not cheap. iboss is priced right in the sweet spot for the number of features it offers."
"We had the cost of purchasing a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs. However, the following year, the cost of just licensing was similar to what was paid the previous year for a new appliance along with the implementation and licensing costs."
"It is expensive compared to one of its competitors."
"Licensing is based on user count."
"The price is great it is all-inclusive, they use an enterprise cost model. That's what we like compared to other users. This is one of the main attractions of Akamai Enterprise Application Access. It's already an enterprise cost model established with us for services."
"The license can be shared based on the number of active users."
"The pricing, setup costs, and licensing for Cisco Secure Access have been very competitive compared to other platforms. I believe that if Cisco continues to improve costs or offers something similar to a Cisco credit, it would attract more customers."
"For what you get, it's a fair price in comparison to other products."
"It is confusing. When you look at the prices, you have different licensing and years of licensing that you have to purchase. Additionally, it's unclear what service you get from those licenses regarding end-user support. We have a representative who has to walk me through it every time."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Computer Software Company
8%
Construction Company
7%
Manufacturing Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Construction Company
8%
Healthcare Company
8%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Outsourcing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business11
Midsize Enterprise8
Large Enterprise10
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business29
Midsize Enterprise13
Large Enterprise36
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with iboss?
I think iboss could be improved by making reporting and dashboard customization more flexible, and simplifying troubl...
What is your primary use case for iboss?
I use iboss as a cloud-based secure web gateway to provide secure internet access, web filtering, and protect remote ...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for iboss?
My experience with iboss's pricing structure, setup cost, and licensing model has been positive, straightforward, and...
What needs improvement with Akamai Enterprise Application Access?
The pricing is a bit expensive for our market. Although it is cheaper compared to alternatives, Akamai Enterprise App...
What is your primary use case for Akamai Enterprise Application Access?
We use Akamai Enterprise Application Access ( /products/akamai-enterprise-application-access-reviews ) for centralize...
What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Access?
Before adopting Cisco Secure Access, we primarily relied on traditional VPN-based remote access solutions combined wi...
What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Access?
Cisco Secure Access serves as our primary solution for providing secure remote access to corporate applications and r...
What advice do you have for others considering Cisco Secure Access?
My biggest piece of advice is to approach Cisco Secure Access as a strategic, zero trust initiative rather than simpl...
 

Also Known As

iBoss Cloud Platform
Soha
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

More than 4,000 global enterprises trust the iboss Cloud Platform to support their modern workforces, including a large number of Fortune 50 companies.
Bugcrowd, InPowered, Spirent Communications
1. IBM 2. Microsoft 3. Amazon 4. Google 5. Apple 6. Cisco Systems 7. Oracle 8. Intel 9. HP Inc. 10. Dell Technologies 11. Verizon Communications 12. AT&T 13. Comcast 14. T-Mobile 15. Sprint 16. Vodafone 17. Orange 18. BT Group 19. Deutsche Telekom 20. Telefonica 21. Nokia 22. Ericsson 23. Samsung Electronics 24. Sony 25. Panasonic 26. LG Electronics 27. Siemens 28. General Electric 29. Ford Motor Company 30. General Motors 31. Toyota Motor Corporation 32. Volkswagen Group
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Enterprise Application Access vs. Cisco Secure Access and other solutions. Updated: August 2026.
908,877 professionals have used our research since 2012.