We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and Zscaler Internet Access 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."It works very well. It has a lot of different functionalities. Its cost is also fine for our customers."
"The pricing is excellent. It's much less expensive than Cisco."
"Its administrative panel is very intuitive and simple. It is simpler than the other solutions that we had. As an administrator, we are always looking for the easiest solution to manage network policies. We are able to filter everything on our network and also use the VPN feature, which is important these days when people are working remotely during COVID."
"The most valuable feature is the VDOM, which allows the customer to have multiple firewalls in a single campus."
"It is easy to use and performs very well."
"The tool is a nice product and easy to handle. The software's user interface is also good. You can easily implement remote access in the solution."
"The most valuable feature is the SSL VPN, as it allows us to connect and it separates this product from other firewalls."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"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."
"ASA integrates with FirePOWER, IPS functionality, malware filtering, etc. This functionality wasn't there in the past. With its cloud architecture, Cisco can filter traffic at the engine layer. Evasive encryptions can be entered into the application, like BitTorrent or Skype. This wasn't possible to control through a traditional firewall."
"Simple to deploy, stable."
"The most important features are the intrusion prevention engine and the application visibility and control. The Snort feature in Firepower is also valuable."
"Management Console and user profiling to define activities."
"Implementing Cisco Secure Firewall has saved us time because we rely on most of the out-of-the-box signatures. It has reduced the time and effort spent in configuration within the security network."
"Firewall help with cybersecurity resilience. I really like this Cisco product. It's user-friendly. I don't like some other vendors. I've tried those in the past. Cisco is pretty easy. A caveman could do it."
"Unfortunately in Cisco, only the hardware was good."
"We use ZIA for outbound internet connectivity. The internet traffic of on-prem users will be directed to the ZIA cloud for security checks and web filtering."
"The data loss prevention feature is the most valuable. It stops our users from inadvertently leaking our customers' data to the Internet or anywhere else it shouldn't go."
"The scanning feature is impressive, because they do not introduce a big latency to the traffic."
"The most valuable feature is bandwidth control."
"All internet access flows through the Zscaler proxy, regardless of whether people are in office or remote. I have greater control site access and I minimize the number of compromises that we experience to almost none."
"The solution is stable and reliable."
"The most valuable feature is the ability to drop packets."
"The protection is most valuable."
"They have to just improve its performance when we enable all UTM features. When you enable all the features, the performance of FortiGate, as well as of Sophos and SonicWall, goes down."
"Some of the features in the graphical user interface do not work, which requires that we used the command-line-interface."
"The debugging and troubleshooting has room for improvement."
"We have an issue with hotel guest vouchers."
"Fortinet doesn't provide multiple virtual firewalls which would facilitate end users and customers."
"They should offer special pricing to premium partners and customers."
"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."
"There can be more security in hybrid implementations. When a customer has a hybrid environment where some parts are in the cloud, we need a consistent security solution for such scenarios."
"We would like to see improvement in recovery. If there is an issue that forces us to do recovery, we have to restart or reboot. In addition, sometimes we have downtime during the maintenance windows. If Cisco could enhance this, so that upgrades would not necessarily require downtime, that would be helpful."
"The graphical interface should be improved to make the configuration easier, to do things with a single click."
"It would be good if Cisco made sure that the solution supports all routing protocols. Sometimes it doesn't."
"Cisco should redo their website so it's actually usable in a faster way."
"The only con that I have really seen with it is the reporting structure. FirePOWER is good. It has been a great help because, before that, it was not good at all."
"Antivirus features must be integrated for end user security."
"Integration aspects and traffic shaping need improvement."
"Cisco ASA should be easier to use. It is a bit tough to navigate and see what is going on."
"I would like to see more training and video documentation."
"In every cloud service in the world, you have multiple upstream internet providers to create diversity so that if one of your providers fails, your network just continues. In South Africa, there is only one upstream provider, and that's not right. That that's a problem."
"The interface for administration could be better. They should upgrade the management portal."
"There are some performance issues when we add on additional controls."
"We'd like to have more plugins and integration."
"The reporting functionality could be a bit easier to use. There is a reporting function, but it's quite hard to do any good reporting, from a user-management perspective. For example, if a department manager wants to know how his department is using the web, there is a way to get the data, but it's quite cumbersome to get it and show it well. And that's true for comparing between departments."
"Zscaler should provide adjacent services, which would be complementary to their current offering that could to be more pragmatic for a customer. For example, if you take Akamai, you get multiple sets of services, all depending on the customer and the strategy and the complexity and the problems. In some areas, they are more varied in terms of coverage."
"One thing that they could improve is the ability to import rules from other platforms."
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while Zscaler Internet Access is ranked 2nd in Secure Web Gateways (SWG) with 46 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while Zscaler Internet Access is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Zscaler Internet Access writes "Provides integrated CASB and file sandboxing but could be less expensive ". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas Zscaler Internet Access is most compared with Cisco Umbrella, Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps, Netskope , Prisma Access by Palo Alto Networks and Appgate SDP. See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. Zscaler Internet Access report.
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