Cisco ACI vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

Cisco ACI and Cisco Secure Workload are both solutions in the Cloud and Data Center Security category. Cisco ACI is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.7, while Cisco Secure Workload is ranked #7 with an average rating of 9.5. Cisco ACI holds a 5.7% mindshare in CDCS, compared to Cisco Secure Workload’s 14.0% mindshare. Additionally, 85% of Cisco ACI users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Cisco Secure Workload users who would recommend it.

Cisco ACI

Read 101 Cisco ACI reviews

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1,126 Comparison Views

85% willing to recommend

Cisco Secure Workload

Read 15 Cisco Secure Workload reviews

3,434 Views
2,325 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Cisco ACI

Cisco Secure Workload

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Jan 12, 2025

Cisco ACI and Cisco Secure Workload are products in the networking and security category. Cisco Secure Workload has the upper hand in features due to its enhanced capability, while Cisco ACI is perceived more favorably in pricing and support.

Features: Cisco ACI is notable for its application-centric infrastructure, automation, and policy-driven management. Cisco Secure Workload excels in micro-segmentation, workload protection, and strong security features.

Room for Improvement: Cisco ACI could improve in simplifying deployment, enhancing security integrations, and reducing initial setup complexity. Cisco Secure Workload could benefit from more intuitive configuration, broader support for non-Cisco platforms, and streamlined onboarding processes.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cisco Secure Workload offers straightforward deployment with an emphasis on security, requiring specific configuration expertise, and is supported positively during setup. Cisco ACI's deployment is more complex but aided by extensive Cisco support to handle challenges effectively.

Pricing and ROI: Cisco ACI involves significant initial setup costs but promises solid ROI through network efficiency gains. Cisco Secure Workload, despite similar setup expenses, justifies its cost with advanced security features, offering high ROI via enhanced security and threat mitigation.

To learn more, read our detailed Cisco ACI vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: March 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Cisco ACI vs. Cisco Secure Workload

March 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

Cisco ACI

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

4th

Average Rating

8.0

Reviews Sentiment

6.5

Number of Reviews

101

Ranking in other categories

Network Virtualization (1st), Software Defined Networking (SDN) (2nd)

Cisco Secure Workload

Ranking in Cloud and Data Center Security

7th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (14th), Microsegmentation Software (4th), Cisco Security Portfolio (9th)

Mindshare comparison

As of April 2025, in the Cloud and Data Center Security category, the mindshare of Cisco ACI is 5.7%, down from 7.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Cisco Secure Workload is 14.0%, up from 12.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Cloud and Data Center Security

Featured Reviews

Raj Metkar

Director, Head of Networks at MUFG, EMEA

Provides scalability, ease of migration for future DC moves, multi-tenancy and programmability

Cisco's MSO (Multi-Site Orchestrator) or NDO has room for improvement. Cisco monitors ACI through a product called NDI. I find it very frustrating that Cisco has multiple monitoring platforms. It has DNAC for monitoring Cisco NX-OS, campus switches, and any other routers and switches you would have in the environment. That same thing does not work for Cisco ACI monitoring. MEraki cloudbasd platform for Meraki which will get extended to Campus monitoring, to be honest Cisco never got Monitoring 100% right from days of CiscoWorks to Prime to current platforms. To monitor and manage Cisco ACI, you need to have another platform called NDI and Cisco Dashboard Insights. What frustrates me about Cisco is that it never has a central, single pane of glass platform for all its solutions. It has one thing for Cisco ACI and another thing for campus switches. I would really appreciate it if Cisco came up with something centralized to monitor everything. I haven't thought about anything since the Cisco NDO is quite advanced, and you can deploy your cloud networking through it. I don't know how many people use it. I might explore it as my cloud orchestration tool in the future. We do a lot of cloud automation using our scripts like TerraForm, but I would like to see people using NDO more. We could have more case studies on how many people use NDO for their cloud orchestration. That might be a much easier journey for people when they move from an on-premises data center into a cloud and move from one cloud to another cloud. That is where I personally see an orchestrator being effectively used for multiple deployments.

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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

"Because we can use automation processes with this platform, we have been able to free up our IT department's time."

"It is very stable. It works 100 percent of the time."

"The flexibility of adding new components with minimal impact on existing services running in the data center is a key benefit of this ACI-based solution."

"Cisco's technical support team is very good."

"The most valuable feature is the data center communication."

"It is a complete re-write of everything that you've ever thought of from a networking standpoint."

"The ability to integrate with other systems is the most valuable feature."

"We use Cisco ACI for perimeter security and threat detection."

More Cisco ACI pros

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

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

"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."

"It's stable."

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

"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."

"Scalability is its most valuable feature."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

Cons

"Before version 5, you could manage your firewall or load balancer from the AP. It was very basic and now they removed the whole features in the new version, so you cannot manage your load balance or firewall from your AP on L2, L4, and L7 services."

"It is more about resolving bugs early on in the code. Otherwise, as the product gets more mature and those bugs get discovered sometimes by the customer, then Cisco will resolve them."

"It is challenging for people who don't understand the programming language, making it difficult to migrate. With technology, there are two verticals. One is hardware driven and the other is software driven. Most people in our domain understand networking, but they don't understand programming. When we migrate, some programming is required."

"So far we've had very few issues, a couple of routing things that were glitches within ACI."

"Cisco needs to enhance their technical support and pay more attention to regional support."

"The error messages should be improved. Sometimes we want to remove an error message so we acknowledge an error and we would then like to remove it but there's no real way of doing that. If we need to do it, we need to open a tech case. That could use improvement."

"I would like this solution to be integrated with Pure Storage."

"In terms of improvement, I would like to see some sort of way to baseline the system in a network-centric fashion."

More Cisco ACI cons

"The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved."

"They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes."

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

"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 product must be integrated with the cloud."

"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."

"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."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The pricing and licensing are both high, particularly if you want a high level of functionality. It would be great if the price and licensing cost could be decreased."

"On a scale from one to ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive, I rate the solution's pricing an eight out of ten."

"The thing that I like the most from Cisco is the support and all the documentation that they have. We do have to pay for it though."

"The product is not cheap."

"If you compare the licensing and total cost of ACI, it's cheaper than NSX because of the licensing fees. If you are going for full NSX features it will be too expensive, especially the next-generation firewalling feature."

"We bought a package for hardware, software, and support. At that time, Cisco was simply selling that package to distributors, then we opted for it directly."

"It is quite expensive. It is not at all on the cheap or medium side."

"We have saved time on the provisioning and configuration."

More Cisco ACI pricing and cost advice

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

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

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

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

"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."

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

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

22%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

26%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?

There are some very major differences between both the Products and to name a few. -Cisco ACI have physical network gear (9K Switches) where the Code runs in ACI Policy Mode & the UCS server wh...

See all answers

What are the biggest differences between Cisco ACI and VMware NSX?

Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cisco ACI?

The flexibility of adding new components with minimal impact on existing services running in the data center is a key benefit of this ACI-based solution.

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 discovery. This raises questions about the resources required to discover and write po...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Cisco Secure Workload?

See all answers

Comparisons

VMware NSX vs Cisco ACI

Compared 21% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco ACI

Compared 17% of the time

HPE SDN vs Cisco ACI

Compared 9% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco ACI

Compared 8% of the time

Juniper Contrail Networking vs Cisco ACI

Compared 7% of the time

More Cisco ACI Competitors

Cisco Hypershield vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 19% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 19% of the time

Illumio vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 18% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 9% 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

Cisco ACI

March 2025

Download Cisco ACI product report

Buyer's Guide

Cisco Secure Workload

March 2025

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Also Known As

No data available

Cisco Tetration

Overview

Cisco ACI automates data center networking, centralizing management and configuration of diverse network environments. It's used for micro-segmentation, replacing legacy networks, and deploying software-defined networking.

Cisco ACI enables seamless integration with cloud platforms and multi-site connectivity. It ensures high availability and redundancy, supports network-centric applications, enhances security, and facilitates agile service implementations across different regions and data centers. The platform offers high throughput, ease of configuration, centralized management, and programmability. Users find value in its single management interface, policy-based routing, Service Graphs, and simplified deployment. Cisco ACI also excels in scalability, automation, low latency, and supports data center expansion efficiently.

What are the key features of Cisco ACI?

High Throughput: Ensures fast data transmission and network efficiency.
Ease of Configuration: Simplifies setup and changes to network configurations.
Centralized Management: Provides a single interface for managing the entire network.
Micro-Segmentation: Enhances security by isolating network segments.
Integration with VMware: Seamlessly integrates with VMware environments.
Scalability: Easily expands to accommodate growing organizational needs.
Automation Capabilities: Reduces manual tasks through advanced automation.
Policy-Based Routing: Optimizes network traffic based on set policies.

What benefits should users look for when evaluating Cisco ACI?

Seamless integration with cloud platforms and multi-site connectivity.
High availability and redundancy ensuring consistent service uptime.
Enhanced security with micro-segmentation and policy-based control.
Agility in service implementations across regions and data centers.
Efficiency in network management with centralized control.

Organizations in industries such as finance, healthcare, and technology implement Cisco ACI to modernize data centers, improve security, and streamline network operations. Its capabilities support expanding infrastructure, integrating with cloud services, and managing complex network architectures with minimal effort.

Cisco

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

Bowling Green State University, du, Qatar University

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

Buyer's Guide

Cisco ACI vs. Cisco Secure Workload

March 2025

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