We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall and ShieldX 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 multi-tenancy feature is most valuable. It integrates very well with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer."
"The inspection and web security features are most valuable."
"It can expand easily."
"We use a lot of function on the IPS and it works well for us."
"FortiGate firewalls are easy to manage through a user-friendly web interface. They also have advanced features like DDoS and DLP. However, I wouldn't recommend enabling all of these features on one device because it can cause performance issues."
"Its performance in fulfilling our requirements has been satisfactory."
"The web tutor and automatic rules by schedule are good features."
"It does a lot for you for intrusion protection and as an antivirus. The threat management bundle is worth the money. You don't need another company to monitor your web traffic for you. You can do everything yourself on the firewall. You restrict your own black list for people on the firewall. You don't need to pay some other company for another product to do that for you. The firewall can do that for you. So, it's an easy-to-use product for people to be independent. They don't need to rely on other vendors to do what the firewall can do. They can do everything."
"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."
"With Cisco, there are a lot of features such as the network map. Cisco builds the whole network map of the machines you have behind your firewall and gives you insight into the vulnerabilities and attributes that the host has. Checkpoint and Fortinet don't have that functionality directly on the firewall."
"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."
"It is scalable and stable."
"We feel that we can trust the security, and our assets and business are well protected. We need to have trust in it, but we also see that it works. We have a security company that has tested that it works."
"It's protecting the organization against the impact of cyber threats and cybersecurity. We run manufacturing plants that have hazardous material, and we don't want that manufacturing process to be impacted by break-in exposure, cyber threats, or any other similar thing."
"ASA 5505 and ASA 5506 are very powerful tools to use in a business environment, and provide a lot of security."
"The most important feature is its categorization because on the site and social media you are unified in the way they are there."
"It has helped us tighten our security posture. Now, staff can only access things that they should be accessing."
"We were able to see what devices are talking to each other, giving us more visibility."
"The most valuable feature is the automatic scaling. With its microservices, it scales both up and down, depending on traffic and throughput."
"ShieldX has been designed from the very beginning to work well in cloud environments. It understands autoscaling, automation, and auto-configuration. These are the things which are important in today's operating environment."
"The Adaptive Intention Engine is fantastic. It allows us to develop security policies using the language of our internal customers. It's machine-learning applied to security workflows. That allows us to much more easily construct the policies that will protect those workflows."
"...It takes the exact same policies that you would apply to your on-premise environment and enables you to simply apply them to the cloud. It becomes one policy for both on-prem and for the cloud."
"The UI was also one of the huge selling points. My web development manager was blown away with the detail and the granularity that you can get out of the UI. It is a very strong and informative UI, with the amount of data it provides."
"MTBF: Hardware failure is more common when compared to SonicWall or Cisco ASA."
"One area for improvement is the performance on bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"In terms of what could be improved, the SD-WAN is quite difficult, because if you install the new box, 15 is okay, but if you change from an old configuration, if there is already configuration and a policy when you change to SD-WAN, you must change the whole policy that you see in the interface."
"Fortinet FortiGate can improve by integrating the web application firewall and the DDoS protection part of the solution. Having a WAF feature, web application firewall, and proxy together would be a good benefit."
"Bandwidth usage in reporting could be improved for Fortinet FortiGate."
"This product needs to have an analysis feature, rather than having the analysis done through the integration of a different product."
"They can do more tests before they release new versions because I would like to be more assured. We had some experiences where they release something new and great, but some of the old features are disabled or they don't work well, which impacts the product satisfaction. The manufacturer should be able to prove that everything works or not only that it might work. This is applicable to most of the other services, software, and hardware companies. They all should work on this. We cannot trust every new release, such as a beta release, on the first day. We wait for some comments on the forums and from other companies that we know. We always wait a few weeks before we use the updated version. They should also extend the VPN client application, especially for Linux versions. Currently, it has an application for Linux devices, but it doesn't work the way we want to connect to the VPN. They use only the old connection, not the new one. They have VPN client applications for Windows and Mac, but they can add more useful features to better manage the devices and monitor the current health of each device. Such features would be helpful for our company."
"This product could be improved with Active directory integration and better handling in IPsec and GRE Tunnels."
"There are always vulnerabilities that come up and there was one in early 2018 but this was patched with software updates."
"It is confusing to have two management interfaces, e.g., ASDM and Firepower Management Center."
"In my experience, a number of engineers get tunnel vision with devices. This is exacerbated by vendors fostering a silo mentality in disciplines."
"The overall licensing structure could improve to make the solution better."
"It would be great to have all the data correlated to have an overview and one point of administration."
"There was an error in the configuration, related to our uplink switches, that caused us to contact technical support, and it took a very long time to resolve the issue."
"The visibility for VPN is one big part. The policy administration could be improved in terms of customizations and flexibility for changing it to our needs."
"The change-deployment time can always be improved. Even at 50 seconds, it's longer than some of its competitors. I would challenge Cisco to continue to improve in that area."
"There should be a bit more customer care, with regular review meetings on it or regular reports. It would be nice to have a quarterly or biannual review of what ShieldX has blocked."
"We are having some issues with their LDAP and integrating it with the Active Directory. We can't seem to set it up."
"I would like better reports and in-depth reporting."
"They need to be consistent in performance and capabilities over time, given the fact that this is new and I want to see where this goes in the next year or so. As the vendor continues to evolve and add future functionality, we want to make sure that we are still keeping up with the integrations, etc. Time will be the key factor here. The proper support for some of the latest technologies, Docker containers, etc. They need to keep up with threat landscape, so we will see how the security get layered. This is what we are going to be keeping an eye on."
"With any kind of tool like ShieldX, where you're in the cloud instead of a traditional firewall, you're using CPU resources in those environments to provide the protection. So there's a cost associated with CPU resources. I'm pressing upon them to make the product much more efficient and use less CPUs to do the same thing."
Earn 20 points
Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews while ShieldX is ranked 47th in Firewalls. Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2, while ShieldX is rated 9.2. 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 ShieldX writes "Proactively monitors, blocks, and reports what it has blocked; and self-updates meaning there is zero maintenance". Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, whereas ShieldX is most compared with . See our Cisco Secure Firewall vs. ShieldX report.
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