Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

Akamai and Cisco are both solutions in the Cloud and Data Center Security category. Akamai is ranked #1 with an average rating of 7.7, while Cisco is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.5. Akamai holds a 24.7% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco’s 14.0% mindshare. Additionally, 87% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Apr 20, 2025

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and Cisco Secure Workload compete in the network security segmentation space, with Cisco Secure Workload offering comprehensive features giving it an edge in this domain despite its higher cost.

Features: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers a user-friendly dashboard, dynamic threat intelligence, and versatile segmentation capabilities. Cisco Secure Workload provides robust integration features, extensive policy automation, and efficient anomaly detection systems.

Room for Improvement: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation could further enhance integration capabilities, expand policy automation features, and improve anomaly detection accuracy. Cisco Secure Workload can work on simplifying the deployment process, reducing the complexity of initial configurations, and streamlining its user interface for better usability.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is known for its straightforward deployment and responsive customer support. Cisco Secure Workload, although more complex to deploy, offers comprehensive onboarding support and a detailed knowledge base, providing extensive support for organizations during implementation.

Pricing and ROI: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is a cost-effective option attractive to businesses looking to minimize initial investment while obtaining significant ROI. Cisco Secure Workload justifies its higher setup costs with advanced capabilities that enhance long-term ROI, making it suitable for businesses prioritizing extended value through feature depth.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload

April 2025

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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

SentinelOne Singularity Clo...

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 1.6%, up from 0.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is 24.7%, up from 21.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 14.0%, up from 12.5% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

Andrew W

VP - Information Technology at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Tells us about vulnerabilities as well as their impact and helps to focus on real issues

Looking at all the different pieces, it has got everything we need. Some of the pieces we do not even use. For example, we do not have Kubernetes Security. We are not running any K8 clusters, so it is good for us. Overall, we find the solution to be fantastic. There can be additional education components. This may not be truly fair to them because of what the product is going for, but it would be great to see additional education for compliance. It is not a criticism of the tool per se, but anything to help non-development resources understand some of the complexities of the cloud is always appreciated. Any additional educational resources are always helpful for security teams, especially those without a development background.

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KlavsThaarup

Senior Security Consultant at Orange Cyberdefense

Offers micro segmentation capabilities and easy to setup

It's micro-segmentation The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature. There are always areas for improvement. It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud. So that could be improved. In future releases, I would like to see more integration with other…

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Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Discover internal application dependencies and create a dependency map

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration allows Cisco Secure Workload to learn about our networks and network tags, providing valuable insights into vulnerabilities related to the operating system and various applications installed on our servers. Recently, Cisco announced a new product called HyperShield, an AI-based autonomous micro-segmentation solution. While Cisco has not stated that HyperShield will replace Cisco Secure Workload, it represents a natural evolution for the company. HyperShield features dynamic policy discovery and enforcement; however, once policies are enforced, they do not change until a discovery occurs, requiring a re-enforcement process. This new platform operates autonomously, minimizing the need for user or security engineer intervention. I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product. Instead of enhancing the current product, they have introduced a new solution. Cisco plans to honor existing Tetration licenses, allowing users to transition to HyperShield without additional costs, reflecting the investment enterprises have already made. From Cisco’s perspective, this represents a natural progression in their product line. While the product name changes, it seems more of a rebranding effort. The enhancements are greater autonomy, improved discovery, and automatic enforcement, which are now being introduced in HyperShield. Cisco Secure Workload offers automatic policy enforcement but cannot adjust policies dynamically as the application needs to change. Having used the platform for the past five years, the recent announcement has been reassuring. Cisco has confirmed that our investment in the platform will not go to waste. They will honor our existing licenses, providing a natural migration path to the new solution without any disruption

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"I did a lot of research before signing up and doing the demo. They have a good reputation as far as catching threats early on."

"Overall, I would rate it a ten on ten for cloud security."

"We noted immediate benefits from using the solution."

"When creating cloud infrastructure, Cloud Native Security evaluates the cloud security parameters and how they will impact the organization's risk. It lets us know whether our security parameter conforms to international industry standards. It alerts us about anything that increases our risk, so we can address those vulnerabilities and prevent attacks."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security has improved our security posture."

"The real-time detection and response capabilities overall are great."

"It saves time, makes your environment more secure, and improves compliance. SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security helps with audits, ensuring that you are following best practices for cloud security. You don't need to be an expert to use it and improve your security."

"The agentless vulnerability scanning is great."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."

"The tool's most valuable feature is its visibility."

"The real bonus is the fact that we can secure applications, all the way down to the individual services, on each host. It's actually more granular security than we can get out of a traditional firewall."

"Guardicore makes its own rule set automatically, so we can work fast when creating a rule set."

"That is primarily because I've seen increased rules. It's kind of caught us a little off guard. With GuardiCore, I have had to deal with their technical support and engineering team in Israel. They are amazing. They are very quick to adapt."

"Application Ring-Fencing and Deception Server, which is basically like a honeypot, are pretty useful features."

"The interface and dashboard are amazing."

"We like the centralized management of the firewalls. Until we installed Guardicore Centra, we managed all our firewalls individually, so making changes was complicated, difficult, and time-consuming."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pros

"Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco."

"The only use case I can see that makes sense is micro-segmentation. I think there are other use cases for it. The main purpose of the product is to do micro-segmentation by collecting IP. That could be done by installing an agent, and then you have all the communication coming in and out. You could also use some flow sensors installed in the network that receive a copy of the traffic and then report that back to the system."

"It's stable."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network."

"Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time."

"The most valuable feature of this solution is security."

"The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network."

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"The documentation could be better."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security can be improved by developing a comprehensive set of features that allow for automated workflows."

"There is scope for more application security posture management features. Additionally, the runtime protection needs attention."

"It does not bring much threat intel from the outside world. All it does is scan. If it can also correlate things, it will be better."

"I want SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security to integrate additional third-party resources. For example, SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is compatible with Azure and AWS, but Azure AD isn't integrated with AWS. If SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security had that ability, it would enrich the data because how users interact with our AWS environment is crucial. All the identity-related features require improvement."

"The resolution suggestions could be better, and the compliance features could be more customizable for Indian regulations. Overall, the compliance aspects are good. It gives us a comprehensive list, and its feedback is enough to bring us into compliance with regulations, but it doesn't give us the specific objects."

"While SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers real-time response, there is room for improvement in alert accuracy."

"One of the issues with the product stems from the fact that it clubs different resources under one ticket."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"They can maybe improve their customer service just because they are kind of a small organization, and customer service isn't as big as others such as VMware."

"Incident tagging could be improved. Other vendors offer semi-automatic tagging, which Guardicore doesn't yet have."

"Customers would want to see the cost improved."

"The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one... to then manage the policies and changes to those policies, going forward, through some type of automation process is not turning out to be really easy."

"I would rate the stability a six out of ten, where one is low and ten is high stability."

"Supports become difficult when it's for a big organization. For a small organization, medium organization, it still makes sense, however, for a big organization, it makes life difficult."

"Guardicore Centra should incorporate automation so that we don't require to write custom scripts and APIs. The tool also has limitations on rules where it allows only sixty thousand rules. Our clients have also commented that there are too many manual clicks and effort to do changes. I think that the incorporation of automation can help our clients make changes with confidence and without the possibility of human error."

"In our version, when using the terminal server, we cannot exclude user tasks for each session."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation cons

"There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product."

"It has an uninviting interface."

"It is highly scalable, but there is a limitation that it is only available on Cisco devices."

"There is some overlap between Cisco Tetration and AppDynamics and I need to have a single pane of glass, rather than have to jump between different tools."

"Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it."

"The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring."

"It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge."

"There's room for improvement when it comes to Cisco Secure Workload. A couple of internal areas could be refined a little bit. They are trying to solve it, depending on where you suppose the agent is. Suppose you have the agent on both the server and the client, which could be the front-end server or web server connecting to the. In that case, if those two are communicating on RPC, the server can look into its configuration. It could go down and find the configuration file on the FTP server and then set the policies to it. But there are a lot of different FTP servers out there. It's also a complex case for the tool to support all FTP servers."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Its pricing is constant. It has been constant over the previous year, so I am happy with it. However, price distribution can be better explained. That is the only area I am worried about. Otherwise, the pricing is very reasonable."

"We found it to be fine for us. Its price was competitive. It was something we were happy with. We are not a Fortune 500 company, so I do not know how pricing scales at the top end, but for our cloud environment, it works very well."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is on the costlier side."

"It's a fair price for what you get. We are happy with the price as it stands."

"PingSafe is fairly priced."

"The licensing is easy to understand and implement, with some flexibility to accommodate dynamic environments."

"SentinelOne offers excellent pricing and licensing options."

"PingSafe is less expensive than other options."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

"Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."

"The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."

"Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."

"This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."

"The customer would complain about the cost."

"The pricing is too high."

"The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pricing and cost advice

"The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."

"It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."

"The cost for the hardware is around 300k."

"Regarding price, Cisco Secure Workload can be expensive if you don't have a budget. If you're not doing micro-segmentation, every extra security measure or enforcement you're putting on top of your existing environment will be an extra cost. It's not a cheap solution at all. But from my point of view, if you need to do micro-segmentation, this is one of the best tools I've seen for it. I can't compare that to Microsoft's solution because I haven't looked into it. I've looked into VMware and Cisco. Those are the only two that I know of. I didn't know that Microsoft could do micro-segmentation at all. Maybe they can, but I haven't heard anything about it."

"The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."

"The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."

"Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

15%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

15%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Computer Software Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about PingSafe?

The dashboard gives me an overview of all the things happening in the product, making it one of the tool's best featu...

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for PingSafe?

The pricing tends to be high.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

The price is on the higher side. The dashboard can be more detailed.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Guardicore Centra?

I would rate the pricing a six out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. I know other micro-segmentation t...

See all answers

What do you like most about Guardicore Infection Monkey?

Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy ...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Guardicore Infection Monkey?

When we have more than one interface, we can only have one policy for both interfaces. Normally, you have assets with...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco Secure Workload?

The product provides multiple-device integration.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Cisco Secure Workload?

CloudStrike offers antivirus capabilities and firewall features for servers and VDI but lacks automatic policy discov...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

We actively seek improvements in integrating the Infoblox DDI platform with Cisco Secure Workload. This integration a...

See all answers

Comparisons

Wiz vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 22% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 18% of the time

AWS GuardDuty vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 7% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 7% of the time

Orca Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 4% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

Illumio vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 43% of the time

VMware NSX vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 11% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 4% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 3% of the time

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation Competitors

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 20% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 17% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 10% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 10% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 7% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

April 2025

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

May 2025

Download Akamai Guardicore Segmentation product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

May 2025

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore

Cisco Tetration

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security protects cloud workloads, offering advanced threat detection and automated response. It integrates seamlessly with cloud environments and secures containerized applications and virtual machines against vulnerabilities.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is renowned for its efficiency in mitigating threats in real-time. The platform integrates effortlessly with existing cloud environments, ensuring robust cloud security management with minimal manual intervention. Securing containerized applications and virtual machines, it excels in threat intelligence and endpoint protection. However, improvements are needed in performance during high workload periods, and more integrations with third-party tools and better documentation would be beneficial. Users often find the installation process complex, support response times slow, and the dashboard's navigation unintuitive.

What are the key features of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Real-time Threat Detection: Identifies and mitigates threats as they occur.
Automated Response: Automatically responds to threats to minimize impact.
Ease of Deployment: Simple setup process with scalable options.
Machine Learning Insights: AI-driven insights enhance threat prevention.
Seamless Integration: Integrates with cloud environments for unified security management.

What are the primary benefits or ROI to expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Threat Mitigation: Improved security against real-time threats.
Reduced Manual Intervention: Automated processes save time and resources.
Scalability: Easily adapts to growing security requirements.
Centralized Management: Manage security across platforms from a single console.
Advanced Threat Intelligence: Provides in-depth analysis and protection.

In specific industries, SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is implemented to safeguard critical data and infrastructure. Organizations in finance, healthcare, and technology depend on its real-time threat detection and automated response to protect sensitive information. Its ability to secure containerized applications and virtual machines is particularly valuable in dynamic environments where rapid scaling is necessary.

SentinelOne

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is a software-based microsegmentation solution that provides the simplest, fastest, and most intuitive way to enforce Zero Trust principles. It enables you to prevent malicious lateral movement in your network through precise segmentation policies, visuals of activity within your IT environment, and network security alerts. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation works across your data centers, multicloud environments, and endpoints. It is faster to deploy than infrastructure segmentation approaches and provides you with unparalleled visibility and control of your network.

Akamai

Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

Reviews from Real Users

“The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

Cisco

Sample Customers

Information Not Available

Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload

April 2025

Free Report: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload

Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload and other solutions. Updated: April 2025.

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