We compared Cisco Secure Firewall and Azure Firewall based on our users' reviews across several parameters.
Cisco Secure Firewall is regarded highly for its strong security features, user-friendly interface, and seamless integration within Cisco's security ecosystem. Customers appreciate the value they receive for the price paid and the efficient deployment process. Azure Firewall is praised for its competitive pricing, centralized network security management, and high performance in managing traffic. Users find the setup process straightforward, although some face challenges with customization and integration with other services. Both products receive positive feedback on customer service and support.
Features: Cisco Secure Firewall stands out for its robust intrusion detection and prevention system, seamless integration with Cisco's security ecosystem, and powerful threat intelligence capabilities. On the other hand, Azure Firewall is commended for its centralized network security management, seamless integration with Azure services, and high performance in handling large traffic volumes.
Pricing and ROI: Cisco Secure Firewall's setup cost is praised for its straightforwardness, offering users value for money. In comparison, Azure Firewall's competitive pricing and reasonable setup cost are highlighted, with flexible licensing options catering to diverse organizational needs. Cisco Secure Firewall offers a higher ROI with its strong security features and user-friendly interface. Azure Firewall, although cost-effective, lags in advanced security measures and comprehensive features.
Room for Improvement: Cisco Secure Firewall offers enhanced user-friendliness, efficient traffic handling, improved visibility, better integration with security solutions, regular updates, enhanced reporting, and scalability. Azure Firewall needs improvement in setup difficulty, protocol support, rule customization, logging, and integration with Azure services.
Deployment and customer support: Users found Cisco Secure Firewall to have a quicker setup process, emphasizing efficient deployment. Azure Firewall was noted for a longer implementation phase, causing frustration among users and highlighting the delay in establishing the new tech solution. Cisco Secure Firewall boasts efficient and reliable customer service, with users praising the support team's helpfulness and responsiveness. Azure Firewall customers appreciate the team's efficiency and effectiveness in addressing issues.
The summary above is based on 123 interviews we conducted recently with Cisco Secure Firewall and Azure Firewall users. To access the review's full transcripts, download our report.
"Fortinet FortiGate is easy to use. Anyone can easily maintain it."
"Overall, the pricing of the solution is very good. The product offers good value."
"The reporting and monitoring are very good."
"The solution is extremely reliable."
"The most valuable feature of Fortinet FortiGate is security. They are known for efficiency and are on the top of Gartner Quadrant reviews. Fortinet FortiGate has an easy-to-use platform with a good graphical interface. The configuration is simple and the solution provides an overall good layer of security."
"It is a one box solution, which covers most of the edge device’s requirements."
"Some of the key features of the solution is that it has good reporting, you can receive many details from the connection, for example, clients and website information."
"In terms of security, we have not experienced any security flaws or loopholes, and it has proven to be quite stable."
"We secure the entry point to the virtual data center with the firewall."
"It is easy for me to protect certain ports or even the IP addresses, as well as do whitelisting, blacklisting, and the FQDN when we want virtual machines connected and to protect certain websites."
"The solution is very stable. When comparing it to other environments, it's actually quite impressive."
"The firewall policy control, URL content control, and antivirus are all the most valuable aspects. Threat prevention is as well quite good."
"Azure Firewall is a cloud-native solution that removes the pain of load balancers."
"One of the notable advantages of Azure Firewall is its user-friendly interface, which closely resembles or shares similarities with other Azure components."
"All its features are good. That's why we recommend it."
"In terms of the reporting, it's beautiful. It integrates with Azure monitoring and with Azure policies. That piece is a big help. You can set governing policies and you can use the application firewall, as well as the Azure Firewall, to enforce those policies."
"When it comes to the integration among Cisco tools, we find it easy. It's a very practical integration with other components as well."
"The IPS, as well as the malware features, are the two things that we use the most and they're very valuable."
"The technical team is always available when we have problems."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is reliable, which is why we opted for it during the pandemic for our remote users."
"The stability of the product is good."
"The product is easy to manage and simple. It works with the rest of our Cisco products. You can drop in new ones if you need more performance. The training and documentation provided are good."
"The integration of network and workload micro-segmentation helps a lot to provide unified segmentation policies across east-west and north-south traffic. One concrete example is with Cisco ACI for the data center. Not only are we doing what is called a service graph on the ACI to make sure that we can filter traffic east-west between two endpoints in the same network, but when we go north-south or east-west, we can then leverage what we have on the network with SGTs on Cisco ISE. Once you build your matrix, it is very easy to filter in and out on east-west or north-south traffic."
"The most valuable Cisco Secure Firewall features are options, features, and ease of deployment because it's an appliance."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"I would like to see improvements with the antivirus and IPS as they are not working properly all the time."
"The logging details need to be improved."
"Lacks sufficient security options."
"Web security solutions can be improved."
"I think that the infrastructure for the VPN could be improved. The way that it is bundled also made it difficult to use and sell as it is too expensive."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"There are a lot of bugs I have found in the solution and it is difficult to upgrade. These areas need improvement."
"For larger enterprises, they need to adjust the scalability."
"The tool needs to improve the onboarding and transition process for on-prem users."
"Azure has new versions including a premium firewall. But I would like to see them not put the premium features on Azure Firewall Premium alone because it is quite expensive."
"The interface could be improved, it's not very user friendly."
"It is a cloud service, but the lending speed for each region is not always the same. For example, in China, the speed is slow. They need to think about how to make sure that the service pace or speed is always the same in all regions. It would be a great improvement if they can provide the same pace worldwide."
"They can improve the pricing of Azure Firewall."
"Azure Firewall should have a free trial version for new users so that they can evaluate it before deploying it."
"It would be much easier if the on-premises, firewall rules, had some kind of export-import possibility in place, which is not the case right now."
"The ability to better integrate with other tools would be an improvement."
"The most valuable features of the product are the VPN and the NextGen firewall features such as application control, URL filtering, etc."
"Migration with other appliances is not easy. It has to be done manually, and this takes a long time."
"Maybe the dashboard could be a bit better."
"Its user interface is good, but it could be better. Currently, you have to know what to do before you can manage a device. If you don't know what to do, you can mess things up. There are some devices that are easier, such as FortiGate. The user interface of FortiGate is more intuitive. It is very easy to log in and configure things."
"The stability could be better because we have a lot of issues with the stability of Cisco Firepower."
"The SSL VPN is, and always has been, painful to configure and the Java plugin does not guarantee a uniform deployment."
"One of my main concerns, an area that could use improvement is in adjusting the need to buy a license to enable features."
Azure Firewall is ranked 21st in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series and Netgate pfSense, whereas Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Azure Firewall vs. Cisco Secure Firewall report.
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