Cisco Secure Firewall Reviews

Our customers for the most part use this solution in data centers. 

The feature my customers find the most valuable is the exportability. They also appreciate that the IPS features are easily migrated from Cisco SA to FTDs. 

We have seen some bugs come up with Cisco Secure Firewall in terms of high availability. The solution should be improved to avoid these bugs. 

We have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for almost a decade. 

Cisco's support is much better than other vendors' support. In my opinion, this is a big advantage for Cisco. The support Cisco offers is upper-level. 

Positive

We previously sold Fortinet devices. However, many of our clients switched over to Cisco because of the price as they are quite cheap. 

We are in the middle of a migration plan to Cisco right now in our company. I am not directly involved. We are working with a Cisco partner but I have been communicating our needs to them. However, I believe the migration process will be smooth for our company. It is crucial to have a solid migration plan in place because we are a core data center, so we have to be careful. 

We are deploying with the help of a partner. 

We do see a lot of ROI from Cisco Secure Firewall. We are in the process of migrating a lot of end-of-support devices with some new ones and the return on investment is there.

Price is a big selling point for Cisco Secure Firewall. They are quite affordable and many clients chose them precisely for this reason. 

This solution helped my clients save money and time. My clients save 50% on time thanks to automation and processing brought on by this solution. 

I have only good things to say about Cisco Talos. It has been quite helpful to our customers.

We are using it for our VPN. We have a remote VPN and then a VPLS connection. Overall, it is a pretty big design.

We were looking for an opportunity to integrate our Firepower with Cisco ASA.

We mainly have these appliances on the data center side and in our headquarters.

It did help my organization. The firewall pretty much covers most stuff. They have next-gen firewalls as well, which have more threat analysis and stuff like that. 

The firewall solution is really important, not just for our company, but for every organization. It keeps away threats trying to come into my organization.

With the pandemic, people began working from home. That was a pretty big move, having all our users working from a home. More capacity needed to be added to our remote VPN. ASA did this very well.

The most valuable features are the remote VPN and site-to-site VPN tunnels.

I use the solution to write policies and analyze the data coming in via the firewalls.

It can be improved when it comes to monitoring. Today, the logs from the firewalls could be improved a bit more without integrating with other devices.

I would like to see more identity awareness.

I have been using it for over six years.

The stability is pretty good. They are keeping up the good work and making updates to the current platform. 

The support is good. They have been there every time that we need them. I would rate them as nine out of 10.

Positive

We have used Check Point and Palo Alto. We are still using those but for more internal stuff. For external use, we are using the Cisco client.

The initial deployment was straightforward. We have worldwide data centers. For one data center, it took three days from design to implementation. 

It was a self-deployment. It took eight people to deploy.

It was pretty good and not expensive on the subscription side. Cisco is doing a good job on this.

We also evaluated Zscaler, which is more cloud-based. It was pretty new and has a lack of support on the system side.

They have been keeping up by adding more features to the next-gen and cooperating with other vendors.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10. It is pretty good compared to its competitors. Cisco is doing well. They have kept up their old traditional routing and fiber policies while bringing on new next-gen features.

Typically, we use them on the internet edge for protecting customer networks from the internet. It's a delimiter between the local area network and the wider internet. Other use cases include securing data centers or protecting certain areas within a network. It's not particularly internet-based, but it gives you that added layer of security between networks or between VLANs and your network, rather than using a Layer 3 switch.

Ultimately, it's about securing data. Data is like your crown jewels and you need to be able to secure it from different user groups. Obviously, you need to protect your data from the internet and that's why we generally deploy Cisco ASAs.

The usability, with the GUI front end, certainly helps and it means you don't have to be a command-line person. We have to get away from that now because if you put the typical IT admin in front of a CLI they might struggle. Having something graphical, where they can click in logs to see what's going through the firewall— what's been denied, what's being allowed—very quickly, helps to get to a diagnosis or know something has been blocked. And when it comes to making changes within the environment, that can be done very quickly as well. I've seen something be blocked within a couple of minutes, and any IT admin can make a change through the GUI.

One of the most valuable features is the GUI front end, which is very easy to use. But I'm also a command-line guy, and being able to access the device via command-line for advanced troubleshooting is quite important.

One area that could be improved is its logging functionality. Your logs are usually displayed on the screen, but if you want to go back one or two days, then you need another solution in place because those logs are overwritten within minutes. 

To have that kind of feature, it's more than likely there would need to be some kind of storage on the device, but those boxes were designed a number of years ago now. They weren't really designed to have that built-in. Having said that, if you do reflash into the FTD image, and you've got the Firepower Management Center to control those devices, then all that logging is kept within the Firepower Management Center.

I've been using Cisco ASA Firewalls since they came out. Before ASA, I used Cisco PIX Firewalls. I've been using them since about 1999 or 2000.

I'm involved in the presale events as well as the implementation and post-sale support. We do everything. That is probably different from a lot of organizations. We are quite a small company, so we have to be involved at all levels. I see it from all angles.

One of the reasons I've stuck with Cisco all these years is that you always get excellent support. If a network goes down due to major issues, I know I can raise a case with TAC and get through to subject matter experts very quickly.

Obviously, you need a SMARTnet contract. That means if a device has completely failed, you can get a box replaced according to the SLAs of that contract. That's very important for customers because if you have an internet edge failure and you just have a single device, you want to know that the replacement box is going to be onsite within four hours.

When a network goes down, you're going to know about it. You want to be safe in the knowledge that someone is going to be there for you and have your back. Cisco do have your back on those kinds of things.

Cisco support is a major selling point.

Positive

In terms of deployment, a lot of organizations are moving to the cloud. People are looking at the ASAv image for deploying into the public cloud on Azure or AWS. But there are still a lot of organizations that use ASAs as their internet edge.

The on-prem and the cloud-based deployments are very similar. When you're designing a solution, you need to look at the customer's business requirements and what business outcomes they actually want from a solution. From there, you develop architecture. Then it's a matter of selecting the right kinds of kits to go into the architecture to deliver those business outcomes. We talk to customers to understand what they want and what they're trying to achieve, and we'll then develop a solution to hopefully exceed their requirements. 

Once we've gotten that far, we're down to creating a low-level design and fitting the components that we're going to deploy into that design, including the ASA firewalls and the switches, et cetera. We then deploy it for the customer.

Your investments are protected because of the innovations over time and the fact that you're able to migrate to the latest and greatest technology, through Cisco. 

There are also a lot of Cisco ASA skills out there in the marketplace, so if you have ASAs deployed and you get a new employee, it's more than likely they have had experience with ASAs and that means you're not having to retrain people.

We do deploy other manufacturers' equipment as well, but if I were to deploy a solution with firewalling, my number-one choice would probably be Cisco ASA or the FTD image or Cisco Meraki MX.

The flexibility you have in a Cisco ASA solution is generally much greater than that of others in the marketplace. 

For any Cisco environment, we choose Cisco because it comes down to support. If the network is Cisco, then you have one throat to choke. If there is a network issue, there's no way that Cisco can say, "It's the HP switch you've got down in the access layer."

ASA morphed from being just a traditional firewall, when they introduced the Firepower Next-Generation Firewall side. There has also been progress because you can reflash your old ASAs and turn them into an FTD (Firepower Threat Defense) solution. So you've got everything from your traditional ASA to an ASA with Firepower.

Cisco ASA has been improved over time, from what it was originally to what it is now. Your investments are being protected by Cisco because it has moved from a traditional firewall through to being a next-gen firewall. I'm a fan of ASA.

I think ASAs are coming towards the end of their lifespan and will be replaced by the FTDs. It's only a matter of time. But there are still a lot of Cisco customers who use ASAs, so migrating that same level of knowledge those customers have of the ASA platform across to the FPR/FTD image, will be a challenge and will require investment.

This solution is running behind the infrastructure and behind the hypervisor itself. We have two firewalls and two nodes in the cluster environment.

This solution is suitable for both cloud and hybrid-cloud deployments. I have implemented a cloud project, and one hybrid as well. The hybrid was between a public and a local cloud.

The Cisco security rules are very strict and very strong.

I like the Cisco ASDM (Adaptive Security Device Manager), which is the configuration interface for the Cisco firewall.

When comparing this solution to other products, the Fortinet UTM bundle has some better features in their most receive product. For example, there are better configuration features, the Sandbox is better, and so is the web censoring. These are currently in the Cisco solution, but they are better in Fortinet. The Sandbox and the Web Censoring in this solution need to be improved.

This solution has to be more secure from the cloud. The current trend is moving towards private cloud and hybrid cloud, so it is very important to consider the cloud security aspects when the solution is installed. This includes things such as IoT and the existence of user connectivity on the cloud.

The stability of this solution is great. The Cisco name and hardware are enough. The product is used in tier four data centers, so it is very trusted and very dependable. If you compare Cisco to others, the high industry and high workload have gone to Cisco. Stability is very, very high.

This is a scalable solution.

In terms of the number of users, it depends on the customer. A small customer may have less than twenty users. A larger customer can be complicated by having different branches with different users and different security rules. This means that you can reach up to the hundreds. 

Technical support for this solution is good. Most of the technicians are technical people that have certifications such as CCNA, CCNP, CCIE, and CCISP. I think that they are well knowledged and well educated about the Cisco culture, industry, and products.

The Cisco distributors are everywhere, even if I'm speaking about the Middle East. I can find distributors everywhere in Dubai. Here in Dubai, the support is great, including for firmware updates, and even replacing the hardware when the firewalls crash.

The initial setup of this solution is straightforward.

The deployment does not take much time. It is just a matter of installing the firewall and configuring the basic system to get it up and running. That's it.

There are, of course, different models of deployment, like deploying customers, that have to be considered. However, for the most part, deployment time is not an issue at all.

The pricing for Cisco products is higher than others, but Cisco is a very good, strong, and stable technology. If we compare Huawei or FortiGate or others then the prices are lower, but the higher Cisco price is acceptable because of the stability, trust, and reliability.

This is my first recommendation for firewalls, and my second recommendation is Fortinet FortiGate.

This is the number one firewall product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

I have been using the Cisco ASA NGFW for about four months. Everything works fine right now. We have only been using this device for a very short period of time. 

• We have about 500 registered users and about 400-600 static users. 
• For 400 to 600 users with wireless devices, we use Cisco ASA NGFW to control device traffic. We're using the new web filters. 
• We use Cisco ASA NGFW as the bit application.

Thus far, we are using it as a web filter to filter the data against incoming traffic. We are an educational organization, so there is no gambling allowed. We don't want to allow students access to gambling sites or adult sites, etc. We use lots of web filters. That's the primary reason I installed the Cisco firewall. 

We are also happy with the Cisco ASA NGFW router firewall. It protects your small server infrastructure, but it's not complete. We purchased the Cisco ASA NGFW for the web filter. That's why we moved to the firewall.

Right now, Cisco ASA NGFW has given us a lot of improvement. We are planning to move to a new facility and will be a much larger organization. 

We have an opportunity to grow now. The Cisco ASA NGFW firewall can be upgraded to another version, so it's better for us long term. It is much better because we can control the traffic that students are accessing and downloading. There are still a lot of improvements that can be done. 

For organization security, Cisco ASA NGFW has robust cyber-security features. We are planning to increase the number of firewalls installed, especially for wireless connections.

We installed a Cisco path a month ago. There was a new update for the Cisco firewall and there were security issues.

We like Cisco filtering as a firewall, but in the current market, Cisco's passive firewall is not unique. We don't have any warranty problems with Cisco. 

I asked our carrier several times to provide the exact gap code for me, but there is no Cisco dealer in our region. There is also no software accessibility with Cisco ASA NGFW. You can't always access the product that way. I also tried pfSense.

There is no support here in Georgia. If something goes wrong, support is not always very helpful with the other firewalls or other products. 

Cisco products are more supported by lots of companies who are producing technical services for cloud platforms. The certification is very easy in Georgia now. There are lots of people using Cisco in Georgia because their accessibility is better than the other products on the market. I also talked to several guys about the Barracuda firewall.

The Barracuda firewall is very expensive. You need to pay three or four thousand dollars every three months, so it's very expensive for us. We are not a big company.

For our users, there are rules for the students and staff have another RF for authorization. There are small file servers also within the domain controller. 

There is no special restriction for the students. They can print. They can visit outside websites online, but there is no gambling allowed at other sites.The students can access whatever they want over email or HTTP. Only the gambling and the betting sites, they cannot install the software. There are restrictions. 

The students can use their own mobile phones or wireless devices, whatever they want. They are using the shared public key authorization. Our institution doesn't have any restrictions about accessing legal data. Except in Georgia, we have a very big problem with gambling websites. There are a lot of gambling websites, so we are trying to restrict all of the gambling sites at our company. We have a contract for the next year. 

We are growing. In the next two years, we will have an additional 600 users, so we will double the capacity. We will see even more in the next three years. 

It will be like very tough. In about five-year cycles, you need to update the firewall and add other new Cisco devices for the next generation of innovation.

In five years, we will be ready for a complete upgrade cycle for everything. The stability and scalability of the Cisco ASA NGFW are good for when we need to grow. 

For the next five years, everything is fine. After that, we will see because there will be a lot of changes.

Technical support with Cisco is very good. We feel the company is very reliable and very competent. I have very good feelings about the future for project operations.

We had the old version of the Kerio firewall, but because in our country, there is no official dealer for Kerio, we moved to the Cisco ASA NGFW. This is the main reason why we moved to the Cisco firewall.

We announced the tender and bought this product with the installation plus setup included in the price. I was not involved in the installation or in the setup. 

The company just asked a consultant to do it. The whole process, after we announced the tender, took about one to two weeks. The consultant company installed the software. They also helped us to optimize other parts of the network such as the routers and switches.

The setup of the Cisco ASA NGFW was complex, not only for us as a firewall. We have now submitted another tender for a device router with two-node switchless support. We updated almost everything on the Cisco ASA NGFW with the core and distribution level software upgrades.

We paid about $7,000 for the Cisco firewall, plus another small Cisco router and the lead switch. It was under the combined license. It's a final agreement.

The Cisco license was not yearly. It was a yearly license for the firewall. For the router and switch, it was a lifetime license.

The other option we considered was Kerio. I tried to contact their office in Russia, but it is in the UK. I wanted to communicate with them because we cannot buy things without a warranty.

We considered buying Kerio products with the warranty, but they said we needed to send the device to them to repair it. This meant it would take too much time to replace it. In Georgia, we need a local distributor, i.e. a local representative here who we can work with, so that's the problem.

In Georgia, there is no problem using the Cisco firewall, because it's accessible. You cannot use other products, because they are not accessible. That's the whole problem.

I would rate Cisco ASA NGFW an 8 out of 10.

We use them in our data centers and on the client side. We have a small installation of Firepower in our main data center, and we are also using Cisco ASA firewalls. So, we have the old ASA platform and new Firepowers. 

It saves time because it's easy to operate and it's easy to add new zones or firewall rules. It's also easy to troubleshoot. It's a neat platform.

When I was managing these firewalls, I found them easy to understand, easy to deploy, and easy to maintain as compared to some of the other firewalls I have been involved with earlier. The opinion of my coworkers is that it's easy and quick to establish new zones, expand, and maintain.

I'm not very familiar with the largest Firepower models, but competitors like Palo Alto seem to have a more capable engine to do, for instance, TLS/SSL decryption. As I understand, Firepower doesn't let you export the decrypted traffic so that, for instance, the security department can look at the traffic or inspect traffic. It's all in the box. I've heard rumors that this is something Cisco is working on, but it isn't yet available.

We have been using Cisco firewalls for about 10 years. 

Its stability is good. We have a failover standby solution that works fairly well. It can have some improvements, but we are happy with it.

We had an issue where we had to install another cluster for the firewall because we went out of the capabilities on one of them. You need to analyze in advance how much your usage will grow in the future and you have to decide based on that. It's about adding more firewalls. We can scale in this way, and it's good.

Whenever I've used their tech support, they have been successful. They quickly pinpointed the problem and provided swift remediation for all the problems. My experience has been good. I'd rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

We decided to go for Firepower because we needed to expand, and we have a large installation of Cisco devices in our environment. It's 70% Cisco. We have one location where they are using Extreme equipment, but in that location also, we have Cisco firewalls. Having one vendor leads to ease of management. It's also easy in terms of competence. We have good knowledge of Cisco, so it's easy to maintain and operate a Cisco platform.

For network security, we have a central hub for all the external traffic. That is a huge load of traffic. On those applications, we are using Palo Alto. We have a mixed combination of Cisco and Palo Alto in our central locations.

Using Cisco firewalls has helped to eliminate or consolidate some of the tools and applications. We have some installations of AlgoSec to see what's going on or how the performance is, but we have, more or less, decided that we don't need them now because there is so much information that we can pull from CSM or FMC.

It's easy to deploy and maintain.

We have a partner for Cisco products. We have a contract with a new partner now for the SDA fabric on ACI.

I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine out of ten. 

The Cisco Secure Firewall is placed between the separate VLANs. It's a common and effective method of protecting VLANs against internal risks such as Checkpoints and external parameters.

It certainly saves time. You can detect anything if you have nothing. This is why, in the end, it saves time.

Collaboration with other Cisco products such as ISE and others is the most valuable feature.

it is difficult to say what it needs in terms of what needs to be improved. I don't work with it on a daily basis.

I haven't heard anything negative about it.

While this applies to all vendors, pricing can be always lower. In my opinion, Cisco is the most expensive. 

The pricing can be reduced.

Our organization has been working with Cisco Secure Firewall for three to five years.

There are no complaints about performance or stability.

There are no issues with the scalability. It works fine.

It is simple to upgrade.

We only need one person to maintain the product.

My colleague has experience with technical support. I'm not sure if it was with Cisco's technical support directly or through Conscia in between.

This was the first solution we were using.

We are primarily Cisco housed, and I believe that practically everything is Cisco. 

It might be part of the contract for a small fee. I don't think there's any particular reason.

I am familiar with CheckPoint, as well as Microsoft ISA.

We have an implementation partner.

It's a hands-on job with a colleague of mine.

I don't know if it is particularly easy or not.

There was also some learning involved, such as knowing the traffic. This took some time. It took six months to deploy.

With the implementation partner, everything was written out. It was the best-case scenario for us.

We did not use the Cisco Firewall Migration tool.

Conscia assisted us with implementation.

They are one of the best in the Netherlands.

I am not aware of the pricing. 

It's an all-in-one contract.

I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten.

Our use cases include inbound access, outbound access, as well as VPN solutions, both site-to-site and for an incoming client. We wanted something that would do all those things at one time, as opposed to having separate boxes.

Our deployment is on-premises. We're looking at going into cloud-based with some of it. Meraki is the cloud-based version of the ASAs.

If we have a power failure at one building, traffic can be routed to our other building. We also have backup data stores. I live in the Northeast, so in the event of ice storms that cause power outages, it really enables us to keep functioning as a company rather than going dark for the amount of time it takes to get the power back.

The GUI makes configuring it much simpler than the command line.

They should work on making it a little more intuitive for users and not quite as complex. Still, it's a good product.

I've been using Cisco ASA Firewalls for 15 years.

It's very stable. We've had no hardware issues at all and only very infrequent software configuration issues.

It's very scalable. You can go to different models of the ASAs and they scale up to as big as you want to go.

The technical support is very good. Whenever we call up Cisco, we get a rapid response. They help us in troubleshooting issues we have and we implement the solutions and go on.

Positive

For me, there wasn't a previous solution here. I inherited the solution when I came in.

From a security standpoint, the return on investment is hard to quantify. You've stopped something that was going to cost you money, but how do you quantify that? How many times did it stop something from coming in that would have cost you a bunch of money? You don't know.

We've compared it to other solutions, like WatchGuard and other types of firewalls in that same realm. Cisco ASAs are fairly priced and very competitive with them.

Some of the solutions we looked at had different GUI interfaces that might be a little bit easier to get around in, but they might not have had as many features. Cisco had the feature edge.

Look at the features and consider what your migration path may be. Some other vendors offer firewalls with great bells and whistles, but when you look beneath the surface, they don't do exactly what they say. Do your due diligence and make sure you see everything.

In terms of resilience, in general, if we have any box failure, being able to fail over to another box or to fail over to another site helps measurably. Cyber security resilience is important for all organizations. The number of attacks going on just increases every day. There's a cost-benefit to building cyber security resilience. You have to get past that and build as much resiliency as you can. If you worry more about cost than you do about your product or your productivity, something else is going to fail.

Maintenance of the ASA is just the security updates that we watch for and updating the client software.