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.
"Our security improved from being able to put in rules and close off unwanted traffic."
"It can expand easily."
"I like Fortinet FortiGate's antispam filter, SPN, and clustering features."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"It's a user-friendly firewall. Most of the tasks are very simple. It's simple to configure and troubleshoot this firewall."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"The initial installation is very straightforward."
"The most valuable feature is the web filter."
"One of the notable advantages of Azure Firewall is its user-friendly interface, which closely resembles or shares similarities with other Azure components."
"The Layer four features are okay and meet my business needs."
"The initial setup is straightforward; Azure Firewall does not have a complex implementation process. It is very simple; you just need to enable the service within Azure. It does not require any maintenance because it is managed by Microsoft, that is, it is a fully managed service."
"Azure Firewall is a cloud-native solution that removes the pain of load balancers."
"The firewall policy control, URL content control, and antivirus are all the most valuable aspects. Threat prevention is as well quite good."
"The feature that I have found the most valuable is the control over the network permissions and the network."
"The solution is stable."
"The most valuable feature is threat intelligence. It is based on filtering and can identify multiple threats."
"The stability of Cisco ASA is excellent compared to other products on the market. Because of our customer experience as an integrator company, our clients never report any performance problems. We have a good performance reputation with Cisco ASA."
"The best solutions for our company are those we have yet to implement so it will be even better in the future for us than it already is."
"The benefits we see from the ASA are connected to teleworking as well as, of course, having the basic functionality of a firewall in place and the prevention of attacks."
"The VPN is our most widely used feature for Cisco Secure Firewall. Since we were forced into a hybrid working situation by COVID a few years back, VPN is the widely used feature because everybody is working remotely for our agency. So it came in very handy."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"To be honest, all of the features that are provided, all the other vendor will also have. One feature we did find valuable was the CLI, it is more accurate. Additionally, I was happy with the customization, dashboards, access lists and interface."
"A stable and solid solution for protection from external threats and for VPN connections."
"If configured, Firepower provides us with application visibility and control."
"The solution lacks sufficient filtering."
"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."
"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."
"In the future, I would like to see improvements made to cloud-based management."
"Difficult to add or define, and not that easy to configure and manage."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"It should come integrated or have its own type of network monitor tool in a module. There should just be one package, and you are good to go."
"Fortinet FortiGate could improve if it had a cloud-managed solution."
"They can improve the pricing of Azure Firewall."
"There is room for further integration of AI into the system."
"For larger enterprises, they need to adjust the scalability."
"Right now, with Azure Firewall, we cannot have a normal inbound traffic flow. For inbound, Microsoft suggests using application gateways, so the options are very limited. I cannot use this firewall as an intermediate firewall because of the limitations, and I cannot point routing to another firewall. So if I want to use back-to-back firewall architecture in my environment, I cannot use Azure Firewall for that type of configuration either."
"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."
"An Azure firewall is not a real firewall."
"It has fewer features than you can get from other firewalls, like anti-spam and anti-phishing. Those kinds of things are not included. It only includes IDS and IDB."
"There should be better monitoring and logging. Currently, it is put in Sentinel. It should be more seamless and from the interface."
"The phishing emails could be improved."
"Cisco Secure Firewall should be easier to handle. It uses ASDM, which is not easy to understand. It would be better if there was direct access via HTTPS."
"The initial setup could be simplified, as it can be complex for new users."
"I would like the ability to drill down into certain reports because currently, that cannot be done."
"The user interface for the Firepower management console is a little bit different from traditional Cisco management tools. If you look at products we already use, like Cisco Prime or other products that are cloud-based, they have a more modern user interface for managing the products. For Firepower, the user interface is not very user-friendly. It's a little bit confusing sometimes."
"<p>If there is old hardware, or appliances, it does not necessarily work with the new Cisco generation firewalls."
"Cisco ASA is starting to get old and Firepower is taking over. All the good things happening are with Firepower."
"Cisco missed the mark with all the configuration steps. They are a pain and, when doing them, it looks as if we're using a very old technology — yet the technology itself is not old, it's very good. But the front-end configuration is very tough."
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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