We compared Cisco ACI and Akamai Guardicore Segmentation based on our users' reviews in five categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:
Comparison Results: When comparing Cisco ACI and Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, Cisco ACI offers a network-centric approach with strong integration capabilities and a focus on applications. It has a more complex setup process but becomes easier to configure and manage once deployed. However, it is expensive, has a non-user-friendly GUI, and faces security and segmentation issues. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, on the other hand, has a simple setup process, good flexibility, and strong customer support. However, there is limited information on pricing and licensing, and it may pose challenges for large organizations.
"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."
"Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems."
"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."
"From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful."
"The solution is very scalable, especially when connected to the cloud resources."
"The most valuable features of the solution are the maps and ring fencing that help monitor events."
"The tool is a complete package that offers many features like visibility. You can get a graph with real-time workflows and visibility into server-to-server communication. We get visibility into many things happening within our environment."
"Cisco ACI is scalable and easy to expand."
"The most valuable features are the automation with the different systems for the software development and the ability to provision switches in hours rather than days."
"It has made it much easier to deploy and make changes in the data center versus the previous infrastructure, which was NX-OS based."
"The stability is perfect. We have had no problems with Cisco ACI."
"ACI's most valuable feature is sizing - you can easily find the sizing of the data, which means the data speed, CPU, and virtualization can be determined."
"We had different networks and combined them with ACI so we could have the control of one controller-based network. Also, everything is combined now."
"It provides flexibility, so you can install it everywhere."
"In a very general way, the ease of access, ease of use, and ease of connecting the system is a valuable feature in itself. The solution doesn't really increase detection rates as that is not what it was created for. Threat prevention comes in from other devices that might be connected into the Cisco ACI that monitors external traffic. It maintains what end-of-life products would be doing and offers other opportunities to unify solutions."
"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."
"Needs more customization of honeypots and a vaster catalog of systems able to be mimicked."
"The dashboard needs improvement. It should be more flexible so that I can easily see what I want or need to see."
"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."
"In our version, when using the terminal server, we cannot exclude user tasks for each session."
"The product needs a few features like enhanced user policies and payload-level inspection to improve the offering."
"Sometimes, the speed needs improvement, especially when it comes to the generation of maps, where it can be a bit slow."
"They can maybe improve their customer service just because they are kind of a small organization, and customer service isn't as big as others such as VMware."
"ACI's blade servers could be more flexible, and its storage interface is a little too complex because they use some third-party storage solution."
"Technical support needs to be more helpful. It's rare that you get a knowledgeable person."
"The initial setup was fairly complex and it looks terrifying when you first log in. That's one thing about ACI. It takes a bit to wrap your mind around how it works. It's not overly complicated once you understand the concepts, but someone who has never worked with anything like ACI, will initially find it difficult to grasp the complexity of it."
"Where there is room for improvement from ACI is for Layer 2 and Layer 7 packages. Normally, when you're updating your ACI fabric or you're introducing new Layer 4 to Layer 7 devices, there are some constraints, there are some limitations... When you are doing device packages you will not have the functionality of ASM. It's like WAF, web application firewalls. So you need to configure it manually."
"For Multipod we need Layer 3 devices that support multicast. Customers ask: "Why can't ACI do that? Why do we need a dedicated Layer 3 device for this?" If they go for Multi-Site there is no need for that, ACI can do it. So Cisco needs to increase the Multipod features in ACI."
"The integration has room for improvement. There should be a drag-and-drop interface for configuring the integration where you connect some arrows to boxes, and the system takes care of the configuration. Right now, they have something similar, but it's limited. You have to take care of some things yourself. That is one area that the solution can work on. It's easy now, but it's much easier in other solutions."
"The product needs to be more visible on the Internet and have the ability to be integrated into more software developments."
"They should improve the GUI, make it simpler. They also need to improve its integration with other automation tools."
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Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is ranked 3rd in Cloud and Data Center Security with 17 reviews while Cisco ACI is ranked 2nd in Cloud and Data Center Security with 96 reviews. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is rated 8.2, while Cisco ACI is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation writes "Allowed us to build out a data center topology without worrying about placement of physical or virtual firewalls that can create bottlenecks". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco ACI writes "Stable, easy to extend, scalable, and has a host-based routing feature". Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is most compared with Illumio, VMware NSX, Cisco Secure Workload, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks and Zero Networks Microsegmentation, whereas Cisco ACI is most compared with VMware NSX, Cisco Secure Workload, Nuage Networks, Juniper Contrail Networking and HPE SDN. See our Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco ACI report.
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