We performed a comparison between Cisco IOS Security and Sophos UTM based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewalls solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI."The wireless control is helpful."
"FortiGate has a very strong unified threat management system."
"What's most important is the ease of use."
"The solution is very user-friendly."
"This solution has helped our organization by having strong functions and a reliable firewall."
"It's very easy to configure."
"The secure web gateway module and the application control module are valuable. HA operations are very easy."
"Whenever we raise a complaint with FortiGate, their response and resolution times are minimal."
"Cisco IOS Security is a mature product with extensive capabilities, serving as the base for the defense layer. It offers good network visibility, which helps in rapid response through the Rapid Threat Containment feature. Its deployment and configuration are straightforward."
"We are able to filter a lot of traffic especially when a lot of the traffic is in layer 7."
"There is a positive impact on security, particularly the intrusion feature, which helps keep the solution concealed and secure."
"Cisco IOS Security increases the overall security of our network, performs authentication, and provides level 15 access and privileges."
"The product has valuable features for business intelligence."
"The solution is stable."
"The technical support is good."
"Cisco has always been a premium product. There's a lot of other entry-level solutions. This is more robust."
"What I like about the solution is the ease of use."
"The product is extremely intuitive."
"Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement."
"The solution is scalable."
"The three most important features for us are web protection, web server protection, and network protection."
"The solution's sandboxing, application center, and database engine are good."
"The initial configuration is straightforward thanks to the web GUI. In 30 minutes, you can have a running firewall with UTM protection enabled."
"We find all of the features valuable because together they fit the needs of our customers."
"There were quite a few problems with the stability of the system."
"I don't like that anything more than very basic reporting is not included."
"The logging details need to be improved."
"Fortinet FortiGate needs to improve the protection, it did not prevent us from being attacked. Additionally, Fortinet FortiGate could provide more features for WAF devices. I should not have to purchase two solutions, it would be a benefit to combine these features into one solution."
"Scalability is one of the disadvantages. When it comes to scalability, you have to actually change the box. If you want to upgrade it, you need to actually change the existing box and probably you take the system off to other sites."
"There are problems with the custom reporting of the unique traffic. The data is there, but it is too difficult for us to extract."
"It would be nice if backups could more easily migrate between different models."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve by having more storage in the hardware for log data."
"The solution is complex and can be more user-friendly."
"We faced significant challenges related to licensing issues, particularly when licenses expire."
"The solution is not user friendly and it is hard to manage the GUI interface."
"Cisco IOS Security should improve its functionalities."
"It would be ideal if the solution had more capacity."
"We have a very bad experience on the support. They take too much time requesting logs, and they are not coming directly online to resolve the issues."
"The company needs to make its solution more affordable to make it more accessible to larger markets. Otherwise, it's seen as an enterprise-level solution that small or medium-sized organizations can't afford and therefore they won't even look at it."
"I think they should bring back remote VPN for users."
"There is still room for improvement in wireless protection. I don't mean their WiFi device is bad, but there are still things to improve on, such as WiFi roaming."
"Reporting: We have had to work manually in many of our reports."
"The initial setup may be difficult for those not familiar with the product."
"I would like this solution to support ICAP. Also, they no longer support on-premises management, and are forcing clients to use centralized management via the cloud, which I don't agree with."
"The logs are not clear, which means that you need an additional piece of software in order to read them clearly."
"The interface configuration could be improved."
"We had some problems with the configuration. They had provided a CloudFormation template, and we had to go several rounds to make it work."
"The initial setup was straightforward. The full deployment takes approximately two days which could be simplified to reduce the time. The major part of the process is the configuration and the policy setup."
Cisco IOS Security is ranked 22nd in Firewalls with 47 reviews while Sophos UTM is ranked 1st in Unified Threat Management (UTM) with 110 reviews. Cisco IOS Security is rated 8.0, while Sophos UTM is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Cisco IOS Security writes "User-friendly and excels in documentation, making it easier to resolve issues". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Sophos UTM writes "It's a highly stable platform with very few hardware issues". Cisco IOS Security is most compared with Cisco Secure Firewall, Meraki MX, Fortinet FortiOS, Netgate pfSense and OPNsense, whereas Sophos UTM is most compared with Netgate pfSense, Sophos XG, OPNsense, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls and Cisco Secure Firewall. See our Cisco IOS Security vs. Sophos UTM report.
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