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 8.0, while Cisco is ranked #8 with an average rating of 9.5. Akamai holds a 18.0% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco’s 11.0% mindshare. Additionally, 88% 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 Feb 8, 2026

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and Cisco Secure Workload compete in the network security category. Akamai has the advantage in ease of deployment and pricing, while Cisco's comprehensive features make it a top choice despite higher costs.

Features: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers micro-segmentation, intuitive security policy management, and strong visibility across environments. Cisco Secure Workload provides extensive workload protection, integrated security approaches, and deep network traffic visibility.

Room for Improvement: Akamai could enhance feature depth, integration capabilities, and user interface design. Cisco could streamline its complex deployment, lower its cost, and simplify user-trained models.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is appreciated for its simple deployment process and responsive customer support. Cisco Secure Workload offers extensive documentation and a broad customer service network, albeit with a more complex deployment.

Pricing and ROI: Akamai offers competitive pricing with high ROI, making it attractive for budget-conscious organizations. Cisco, priced higher, delivers solid ROI through its robust feature set, favored by those valuing feature richness over cost considerations.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: January 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload

January 2026

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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 February 2026, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is 2.7%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is 18.0%, down from 25.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 11.0%, down from 13.7% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security Market Share Distribution
Product	Market Share (%)
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation	18.0%
SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security	2.7%
Cisco Secure Workload	11.0%
Other	68.3%

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

Satyavijay Chavan

Information Security Engineer at DataVigilant Infotech

Enables us to prioritize and effectively address critical security issues

Evidence-based reporting helps us to prioritize and solve critical security issues. The new visualization feature demonstrates how an attacker can enter the system, highlighting the potential path that can be exploited and outlining all the steps the attacker could take. With that visibility, we can ensure the perimeter is strong and attackers cannot enter, thus reducing the risk. It has helped us prioritize issues. The visibility into how an attack could happen is valuable. For example, it highlights the system vulnerability and outlines where an attack could propagate. The visualization helps me to prioritize remediation, and if I don't know where to start, I can check to see the score that enables me to prioritize issues. I am using infrastructure-as-code scanning, and it's one of the useful features. In pre-production, it identifies embedded secrets and misconfigurations, including issues with Kubernetes or some privileged containers. This feature allows us to pass the audit and secure IaC code so that it isn't easily exploitable by attackers. We can more proactively work to identify and resolve vulnerabilities by using the dashboard and the alerting system that SentinelOne provides. It helps us with audits and compliance. We can show the compliance in percentage. We can confidently say that our company or infrastructure is very secure. It has improved our security posture by 30% to 35%. It has reduced our false positives by 30%. It has helped teams collaborate better. The security team manages SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, and when it flags vulnerabilities, they are forwarded to DevOps for remediation. Previously, we needed to identify and report the issues, but there would be lapses in communication. Now, there is a centralized dashboard that anyone can look at and see the open issues and work on them.

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Ken Bauer

Senior Security Analyst at a retailer with 5,001-10,000 employees

Segmentation of legacy systems has protected outdated endpoints and reduces network risk

The best features Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers make it simple to see all of the connections that are being made to each of the endpoints, and they can be controlled by process and port. The ability to control by process and port helps my team day-to-day because, since there are hundreds of thousands of connections to some of these endpoints, looking at the Reveal Map makes it simple to audit and create rules for what we want to allow. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has impacted my organization positively because we find it difficult to remove the legacy systems, so it was very important to segment them from the rest of the network to protect them and protect the rest of our network.

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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

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

"The most valuable feature is the easy-to-understand user interface, which allows even non-technical users to comprehend and resolve issues."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is better than other vendors because we get all the cloud-related, data center-related information."

"The solution's most valuable features are its ability to detect vulnerabilities inside AWS resources and its ability to rescan after a specific duration set by the administrator."

"It is advantageous in terms of time-saving and cost reduction."

"Cloud Native Security helps us discover vulnerabilities in a cloud environment like open ports that allow people to attack our environment. If someone unintentionally opens a port, we are exposed. Cloud Native Security alerts us so we can remediate the problem. We can also automate it so that Cloud Native Security will fix it."

"We like the platform and its response time. We also like that its console is user-friendly as well as modern and sleek."

"SentinelOne is far superior to our previous solution, Accops, due to its seamless updates, effortless maintenance, and user-friendly interface and dashboard."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pros

"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."

"This tool greatly helps in understanding the footprint of the attacks."

"Its deception features are great, providing a rich telemetry of lured origins, and are a great resource for any active defense strategy."

"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."

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers us large visibility in all our environments and helps us to understand network segmentation and traffic."

"Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see microsegmentation as distributed services."

"The most valuable feature is the visibility of processes and connections."

"I found the solution to be stable."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation pros

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

"The product provides multiple-device integration."

"By using Tetration insight, we are able to get the latency on our level accounts and we can determine whatever the issue is with the application latency itself."

"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."

"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures."

"Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

"The most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"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."

"They need more experienced support personnel."

"Cloud Native Security's reporting could be better. We are unable to see which images are impacted. Several thousand images have been deployed, so if we can see some application-specific information in the dashboard, we can directly send that report to the team that owns the application. We'd also like the option to download the report from the portal instead of waiting for the report to be sent to our email."

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

"The areas with room for improvement include the cost, which is higher compared to other security platforms. The dashboard can also be laggy."

"If I had to pick a complaint, it would be the way the hosts are listed in the tool. You have different columns separated by endpoint name, Cloud Account, and Cloud Instances ID. I wish there was something where we could change the endpoint name and not use just the IP address. We would like to have custom names or our own names for the instances. If I had a complaint, that would be it, but so far, it meets all the needs that we have."

"The Automation tab is an add-on that doesn’t work properly. They provide a list of scripts that don’t work and I have asked support to assist but they won’t help. When running on various endpoints the script doesn’t work and if it does, it’s only a couple. There are a lot of useful scripts that would be beneficial to run forensics, event logs, and process lists running on the endpoint."

"SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security's current documentation could be improved to better assist customers during the cluster onboarding process."

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security cons

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation can be improved because keeping it up to date is difficult since it is SaaS-based and updates are not on a regular schedule; I have to reach out to my contact to ask them to update to a newer version, and it would be helpful if updates were on a regular cadence so that I would not have to remember to ask them."

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

"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."

"Clients would like to see that the security policies of GuardiCore can continue to be comparable to all the major firewall players out there."

"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."

"It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud."

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

"Customers would want to see the cost improved."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation cons

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."

"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 interface is really helpful for technical people, but it is not user-friendly."

"It has an uninviting interface."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"SentinelOne offers excellent pricing and licensing options."

"Pricing is based on modules, which was ideal for us."

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

"It is cost-effective compared to other solutions in the market."

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

"The tool is cost-effective."

"As a partner, we receive a discount on the licenses."

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

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security pricing and cost advice

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

"The customer would complain about the cost."

"Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."

"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."

"GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."

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

"The pricing is too high."

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

"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."

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

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

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

14%

Computer Software Company

12%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Government

Financial Services Firm

18%

Computer Software Company

11%

Manufacturing Company

Insurance Company

Manufacturing Company

13%

Computer Software Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	48
Midsize Enterprise	22
Large Enterprise	54

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	7
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	10

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	5
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	8

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?

Regarding the pricing for SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security, I do not think it is something I can compare.

See all answers

What needs improvement with PingSafe?

Regarding the downsides of cloud security, I do not have much negative to discuss about cloud security, because it is...

See all answers

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

My experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing is that overall everything worked out really well. The pricing ...

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?

I believe Akamai Guardicore Segmentation could be improved with a feature to filter, and I believe implementing MFA w...

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

What is your primary use case for Cisco Secure Workload?

When we onboarded Cisco Secure Workload, the usual use case was to discover internal application dependencies and cre...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 10% of the time

Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 10% of the time

Microsoft Defender for Cloud vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 6% of the time

AWS GuardDuty vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security vs SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

Compared 5% of the time

More SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security Competitors

Illumio vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 37% of the time

VMware NSX vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 10% of the time

Trend Micro Deep Security vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 4% of the time

Zero Networks vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 4% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

Compared 2% of the time

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation Competitors

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 17% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 12% of the time

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 11% of the time

Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 7% of the time

Trend Micro Deep Security vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 5% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security

January 2026

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security report

Download SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security product report

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation

February 2026

Download Akamai Guardicore Segmentation product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

February 2026

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Also Known As

PingSafe

Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore

Cisco Tetration

Overview

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security offers a streamlined approach to cloud security with intuitive operation and strong integration capabilities for heightened threat detection and remediation efficiency.

Singularity Cloud Security stands out for its real-time detection and response, effectively minimizing detection and remediation timelines. Its automated remediation integrates smoothly with third-party tools enhancing operational efficiency. The comprehensive console ensures visibility and support for forensic investigations. Seamless platform integration and robust support for innovation are notable advantages. Areas for development include improved search functionality, affordability, better firewall capabilities for remote users, stable agents, comprehensive reporting, and efficient third-party integrations. Clarity in the interface, responsive support, and real-time alerting need enhancement, with a call for more automation and customization. Better scalability and cost-effective integration without compromising capabilities are desired.

What are SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security's standout features?

Ease of Use: Intuitive operation simplifies navigation across platforms.
Real-Time Detection: Quick identification and response to threats.
Automated Remediation: Streamlines recovery processes with integration capabilities.
Forensic Visibility: Aids in thorough threat analysis and prevention strategies.
Comprehensive Console: Offers full visibility and historical data tracking.
Platform Integration: Supports seamless operation across cloud and hybrid environments.

What benefits should users expect from SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security?

Enhanced Efficiency: Automation and third-party integration improve threat response.
Improved Detection: Reduces mean time to detect and respond to threats.
Operational Support: Comprehensive visibility and forensic tools aid operational decisions.
Cost Efficiency: Affordable integration with scaling capabilities without high overhead.

SentinelOne Singularity Cloud Security is deployed in industries needing robust cloud security posture management, endpoint protection, and threat hunting. Utilized frequently across AWS and Azure, it assists in monitoring, threat detection, and maintaining compliance in diverse environments while providing real-time alerts and recommendations for proactive threat management.

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

January 2026

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: January 2026.

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