Cisco Secure Workload vs RedSeal comparison

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Cisco Secure Workload

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Workload and RedSeal based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

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Cloud and Data Center Security

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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 Secure Workload

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.7

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Cloud and Data Center Security (10th), Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) (23rd), Microsegmentation Software (5th), Cisco Security Portfolio (9th)

RedSeal

Average Rating

8.2

Reviews Sentiment

7.5

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Risk-Based Vulnerability Management (21st), Continuous Threat Exposure Management (CTEM) (19th)

Mindshare comparison

While both are Security Software solutions, they serve different purposes. Cisco Secure Workload is designed for Cloud and Data Center Security and holds a mindshare of 8.5%, down 12.8% compared to last year.
RedSeal, on the other hand, focuses on Risk-Based Vulnerability Management, holds 1.6% mindshare, up 0.5% since last year.

Cloud and Data Center Security Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
Cisco Secure Workload	8.5%
Illumio Segmentation	13.4%
Akamai Guardicore Segmentation	11.4%
Other	66.7%

Cloud and Data Center Security

Risk-Based Vulnerability Management Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
RedSeal	1.6%
Qualys Exposure Management	9.7%
Tenable Security Center	6.6%
Other	82.1%

Risk-Based Vulnerability Management

Featured Reviews

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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reviewer1339494

Associate Consultant at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees

Enhancing network visibility with competitive pricing but needs better OT and 5G integration

The primary use cases for RedSeal are lifecycle management, vulnerabilities, and change management. Customers might look up or use these solutions for these areas RedSeal helps in optimizing the cost for the customer based on different use cases. If the solution caters to a particular use case,…

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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 most valuable feature of this solution is security."

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

"This product does everything that you need it to do and more and does a lot to provide visibility in a network environment, save time and money, and make the organization IT operate in a much more streamlined fashion."

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

"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."

"A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution."

More Cisco Secure Workload pros

"RedSeal helps you prioritize and allocate your scarce human and capital resources where they have the biggest impact to protect your most-valuable digital assets."

"The Vulnerability and Risk Management feature is valuable to us for keeping the security posture up-to-date and conducting regular continuous audits."

"This is the only solution in the world that gives you a digital resilience score."

"RedSeal integrates the network and gives us a visual or graphical overview of our network. If an organization is geographically dispersed, for instance, with one office in Canada and one office in the Philippines, the whole network, including all devices, is integrated into RedSeal, and you can see from where the traffic is going in and out."

"The most valuable feature I enjoy that is provided by this security analytics platform is the ability to measure resilience."

"If you want to understand your network environment as it relates to configuration issues, host/node vulnerabilities and firewall configurations, then I highly recommend that RedSeal be considered."

"The most valuable feature of the product to me is being able to ask what-if questions about traffic flows, which is a great ability to have for security and incident response."

"RedSeal has different modules, such as the Analyzer module, which can be leveraged."

More RedSeal pros

Cons

"The scalability of this solution needs to be improved."

"The product must be integrated with the cloud."

"I would have expected Cisco to incorporate more automatic discovery and enforcement features within the existing Cisco Secure Workload product."

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

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

"Cisco Tetration needs more flags and system alerts that we should get with network capture."

"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."

"I'd like to see better documentation for advanced features. The documentation is fairly basic. I would also like to see better integration with other applications."

More Cisco Secure Workload cons

"Although we are talking about a very robust platform, I would like to see the Windows compatible VM version come back."

"Sometimes, it required us to refresh the configuration. When we integrated any of the configurations into the device, sometimes, it could not detect the exact picture of that device. So, we had to reset the device to see that if it was giving true-positive results or false-positive results. In some cases, we were not able to get true-positive results. There was some kind of bug in that version. Its interface is not user-friendly and needs to be improved. It takes time to understand the interface and various options. Skybox has quite a user-friendly interface. They could provide a feature for compliance audit policy if it is already not there. A compliance audit policy ensures that all configurations are based on the best practices standards, such as CIS benchmarks standard or other similar standards. It provides visibility about whether your device configuration is based on best practices or not. Usually, such a feature is provided by other solutions such as Meteor or Tenable Nessus."

"The dashboard should be improved to make correlating data easier to do."

"The network mapping/visualization could be improved significantly."

"There is room for improvement in integrating the OT security part and the private 5G security part in RedSeal."

"Its interface is not user-friendly and needs to be improved."

"Integration with other security tools. Have the ability to create custom reports: Currently, within RedSeal you only have the option to run the canned reports."

"There is room for improvement regarding customization and automation of reports."

More RedSeal cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"The pricing is based on the number of endpoints and devices, and we have seen it range from mid-five figures to low six figures."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Manufacturing Company

13%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Outsourcing Company

Government

Outsourcing Company

11%

Construction Company

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Small Business	1
Midsize Enterprise	1
Large Enterprise	7

Questions from the Community

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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for RedSeal?

The pricing of RedSeal is competitive.

See all answers

What needs improvement with RedSeal?

There is room for improvement in integrating the OT security part and the private 5G security part in RedSeal.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for RedSeal?

The primary use cases for RedSeal are lifecycle management, vulnerabilities, and change management. Customers might look up or use these solutions for these areas.

See all answers

Comparisons

Illumio Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 12% of the time

Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 11% of the time

VMware NSX vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 7% of the time

BMC Helix Cloud Security vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 6% of the time

Check Point Email Security (formerly Harmony Email & Collaboration) vs Cisco Secure Workload

Compared 6% of the time

More Cisco Secure Workload Competitors

Tufin Orchestration Suite vs RedSeal

Compared 8% of the time

FireMon Security Manager vs RedSeal

Compared 6% of the time

Qualys Exposure Management vs RedSeal

Compared 6% of the time

AttackIQ vs RedSeal

Compared 6% of the time

More RedSeal Competitors

Product Reports

Cisco Secure Workload

Download Cisco Secure Workload product report

Download RedSeal product report

Also Known As

Cisco Tetration

No data available

Overview

Cisco Secure Workload offers advanced auditing, micro-segmentation, and network visibility, automating policy presentation for improved security. It enhances application dependency mapping and provides comprehensive telemetry with strategic policy enforcement.

Cisco Secure Workload specializes in automating micro-segmentation, data center management, and traffic analysis. Its capabilities facilitate application dependency mapping and enhance internal micro-segmentation, providing invaluable network visibility. Users find its automation in policy presentation and strategic enforcement beneficial, along with granular control and scalability, despite needing improvements in scalability and integration capabilities. Enhanced notification features, troubleshooting options, and an efficient interface are desired for seamless deployment, along with stronger multi-tenancy, redundancy, and monitoring functions. Broader platform support and integrated cloud connectivity are desired for unified management across tools.

What are the most important features?

Auditing: Provides in-depth network analysis and security auditing capabilities.
Micro-Segmentation: Enhances network security by automating segmentation at a granular level.
Application Dependency Mapping: Visualizes connections and interactions between applications.
Network Visibility: Delivers comprehensive insight into network activities and dynamics.
Policy Discovery: Streamlines policy creation through automation and reduces manual intervention.
Comprehensive Telemetry: Offers complete coverage and insights for better security assessment.

What benefits and ROI should be evaluated?

Enhanced Security Measures: Offers robust features for network security improvement.
Automated Processes: Reduces manual efforts through automation, increasing efficiency.
Scalability: Adapts to growing network demands with flexible scalability options.
Granular Control: Allows detailed control over network policies and enforcement.

Entities in finance, gas, and oil sectors utilize Cisco Secure Workload for networking site management and compliance maintenance. It integrates into extensive Cisco infrastructure, aiding routers, switches, and endpoints, thus supporting auditors in network synchronization and auditing needs.

Cisco

RedSeal offers advanced network mapping and risk management capabilities that enhance digital resilience by providing visual and analytical tools to assess network vulnerabilities and compliance.

RedSeal integrates network mapping with vulnerability data, enabling organizations to visualize end-to-end network access and manage configurations effectively. It provides comprehensive scoring of digital resilience while facilitating "what if" traffic analyses. Organizations benefit from features like accelerated incident response and unified infrastructure views, which help identify security postures and compliance gaps. Improved report customization and a shift from Java dependency to HTML5 are areas for enhancement.

What are RedSeal's Key Features?

Network Mapping: Provides visualization of entire network pathways for better access control.
Vulnerability Management: Integrates vulnerability data with network maps for enhanced awareness.
Risk Assessment: Offers tools for evaluating digital resilience risk scores.
Compliance Verification: Helps ensure adherence to network policies and standards.
Traffic Analysis: Supports "what if" scenarios to predict network behavior.

What Benefits and ROI Can Users Expect?

Enhanced Security Posture: Improved visibility into network vulnerabilities and risk assessment.
Operational Efficiency: Streamlined configuration management and data correlation.
Accelerated Incident Response: Rapid insights into security incidents for quicker resolution.
Informed Decision Making: Provides executives with substantial insights for digital transformation.

In industries like finance, healthcare, and telecommunications, RedSeal aids organizations in securing their infrastructure by identifying risk scores and ensuring compliance. It supports digital transformation by analyzing network gaps, segregating prohibited access points, and aiding lifecycle management for robust technological performance and security integration.

Sample Customers

ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)

United States Postal Service, Pacific Gas and Electric Co., Interval International

Cloud and Data Center Security