My advice would be: Don't let the price scare you.

I would describe the maturity of our company's security implementation as "working on it." It is an evolving process. When it comes to the Cisco product line, we try to keep it as up to date as possible when they release new products. An example would be their DNA Center which we're looking at installing in the next year. From a product standpoint, we're pretty well off. From a policy and procedure standpoint, that is where we're somewhat lacking in our organization.

In terms of the number of security tools our organization uses, we have a lot of them. From a software standpoint, we use tools from eight to 12 vendors, but there is more than one tool from each. We have anywhere from 30 to 40 security suites that we run across our environment. When it comes to hardware manufacturers, Cisco isn't the only one that we use. We use products from three different hardware manufacturers and layer our security that way. The way this number of tools affects our security operations is that there's a lot of overlap. But there are different groups that look at and use each set of tools. It works because that way there are always the checks and balances of one group checking another group's work. Overall it works pretty well.

In terms of other products and services we use from Cisco, we're a Cisco shop. We have all of their routing and switching products, AMP for Endpoints for security, Cisco Prime Infrastructure. We also have their voice and whole collab system, their Contact Center. We have their CUCM as well as Unity Connection. A lot of our servers are Cisco UCSs, the Blade Servers are in our environment. We have Fabric Interconnects, fibre switches. Pretty well anything network related is Cisco, in our environment.

We do layer it. We do have some F5 firewalls deployed in front of the Ciscos. We have had Barracuda firewalls in line as well, along with spam filters, so that we get that layered security.

Cisco's cross-platform integration and data sharing between their products are very key. Cisco is really good at that. It's nice to be able to see the same data through multiple product sets and be able to view that data in different ways. Cisco-to-Cisco is really good. 

Cisco integration with other products depends on the product and what you're trying to get out of it. Most of it we have to send through different SIEMs to actually get usable data between the two product lines. It depends on what we're doing. Every scenario's a little different.

As for automated policy application and enforcement, we actually bought a couple of other tools to do that for us instead. We're getting into Tufin software to do automations, because it seems like they have a little bit better interface, once they pull the Cisco information in.

Overall — and I don't want to get too full of Cisco because everyone's vulnerable in a way— we've had very few issues, even when a lot of these Zero-days are attacking cities and organizations, and there are ransomware attacks as well. We've seen items like that hit our network, but not have any effect on it, due to a lot of the Cisco security that's in place. It has been very strong in helping us detect and prevent all of that. Overall, it's given us a certain comfort level, which is both good and bad. It's good because we haven't run into the issues, but it's bad in the sense that our organization, a lot of times, takes it for granted because we haven't run into issues. They tend to overlook security at times.

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My advice would be to talk to people who work with different vendors and get some hands-on experience. Don't just listen to or look at sales documents. See whether the performance actually matches that mentioned in the sales documents. Check with other competitors for hands-on experience as well.

I would give Cisco Secure Firewall an overall rating of eight out of ten because I'm not 100% happy with the management dashboard.

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We have used different types of solutions. We had Cisco ASA for about 10 years, and then we switched to an on-site firewall to MX from Meraki, Cisco. For our cloud, we have Cisco Services Routers.

The migration to the cloud has been a lot of work. Not all of our systems were compliant with being on the cloud so we had to work on some applications and delete some of them. For the old systems, we had to do extra work but for the newer systems, it was fine. The migration took around 18 months to migrate 99%.

We had more than 2,000 on-prem firewall sites.

Cisco helped with the migration to the cloud with the migration tool. Migrating MX was really easy and the tools helped us to migrate from the old ASA we had to the new MX. The cloud, firewalling, and CSR helped us from the data center on-premise approach to the cloud because at the time we didn't have a lot of experience with the cloud. It was easy to use the Cisco appliances in that space.

I think that this solution has saved our IT staff time because of the ease of deployment. When I first started as a network engineer, it took a whole day to configure a firewall because of all the particularities you could potentially have at a site.

I think that this solution saved our organization's time because security saves money because. At the end of the day, firewalls block threats.

This solution helped with the consolidation of tools as we had all the observability tools in the solutions. Some 10 years ago we all had third-party solutions doing the observability. Now, we have the whole package and not only the firewall.

We choose Cisco 10 or 20 years ago mostly because it was a market-leading solution. I also think it's because of MX's user-friendly solution that you can get on board easily. As far as CSA goes, I believe it's because you have a lot of features on the firewalls and it's the stability of course.

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My advice would be to compare equitable vendors and see where Cisco is strong and where they're not as strong. However, take into account your wider environment. If you've got a Cisco house and the solution has the same look and feel, those who are managing the service will say that it's Cisco and that they know it. That carries a huge weight, so pay careful attention to the rest of your environment.

Overall, I'd give this product a nine out of ten.

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To someone researching this solution who wants to improve cybersecurity in their organization, I'd say that the main thing to look for is usability. Find something that you can understand and that provides you with actionable intelligence because a security device that's not administered and monitored properly isn't going to do much for you. It's not going to be very effective. So, you want a device that's easy to use and that gives you a lot of that visibility and makes your job as a security administrator easy. It should make identifying and responding to threats as seamless as humanly possible because the quicker you can respond, the more security you're able to keep in your organization.

Cisco Talos is an excellent product. I've been using Cisco Talos since Cisco introduced it. In fact, I was a Sourcefire customer before Cisco acquired them, so I'm very familiar with the roots of that team and where it's from. I've been all in on them since day one.

Overall, I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine out of ten. There's always room for improvement, especially in security because the security world is changing on a daily basis. We're always looking for what can we do better and how can we improve, but what Cisco has done since the Sourcefire acquisition and where they've taken it, I'm very excited for the future.

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I rate Cisco ASA Firewall seven out of ten. If you're implementing a Cisco firewall, you must be crystal clear about your business requirements and how a Cisco ASA firewall will address your problem. You need to understand whether this product line contains all the features you need. 

Can it pass a security audit? Does it integrate with your network device? How scalable is it? Will this solution you're implementing today be adequate in the next three years? These are the questions that you should ask.

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The biggest lesson that we've learned is in a couple of different ways. One is how to keep your policy clean. We've learned that we've really had to keep that from overextending what we want to do. It also has great feedback as you're building that out so that you can look at it and you figure out how you are going to be able to really implement this in a way that won't break something or that won't overshadow some other policy that you have. That's probably one of the biggest things that we've learned. The way that you build out your policy and the way that you use that on a daily basis is very intuitive. And it also gives you a lot of feedback as you're building that out.

The advice that I would give anybody looking at Firepower is to look at it from an overall standpoint. If you want something that you can monitor and administer well, that you can update very quickly, and that gives you all of the security aspects that anybody else can on the market, it's going to be really hard to beat because of the Management Console. With this, you've got one tool that you can actually do the device updates, device configuration and all the policy management in one area. So I would say, definitely take a look at it. It's got a great UI that is very straightforward to use. It is very intuitive and it works really well out-of-the-box. And it does not take math science to be able to implement it.

I would rate Firepower a nine out of ten. I can't think of anything that would be a 10. It's mature, it's effective and it's usable.

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We don't use Cisco Secure for securing our infrastructure from end to end to be able to detect and mediate threats. We have other products that serve as our endpoint detection and especially for the end-to-end side of things. That's not really our strongest use case for it. Cisco Secure hasn't helped save our organization any time or operations expenditure because we have other products that we use for that.

Overall, I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a ten out of ten.

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I don't really look at Talos. It's in the background. I don't really look at it. It's there and it works. 

Nothing is perfect so I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall a 9.2 out of ten. I love the product. It's part of my daily routine. I'll hopefully use it until I retire. 

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I rate Cisco ASA Firewall eight out of ten. 

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To someone evaluating or considering Cisco Secure Firewall, I'd advise having a good greenfield approach regarding what component to use. If there is no greenfield, you should evaluate what solutions you need and what type of use case you have and then decide based on that.

I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten. Cisco is a big player in networking and security, and that's basically the pro on their side.

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My advice for others looking to use the solution is to get [together] with a good partner, someone who's got engineers and architects that know the product well, and get their thoughts on it. We can always help compare and contrast against other options out there in the market. My job is knowing the market landscape and being able to help differentiate.

And always take advantage of a proof of value. It's always best to get that box into your network, see how it works with your particular traffic mix and your set of policies. I would always put a PoC/PoV as a checkbox in a buying decision.

I would rate the product somewhere between a seven or eight out of 10. Sometimes there are stability issues, as I referenced before, or just the general TAC support, while good, could be better. There's always room for improvement there. But I feel like it's a really good product that Cisco has definitely improved as time has gone on.

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We are very satisfied with the service and the product. I don't think that any product would be better than Cisco when it comes to next-generation firewalls.

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The biggest lesson I've learned from using the ASAs is the fact that they can do a lot. It's just figuring out how to do it. We don't do a lot, although once in a while we will do something a little interesting. These things can do more than what we're using them for. It's just a matter of our trying to figure it out or getting with our Cisco rep to figure it out.

My advice would be to have a good handle on your rules and, if you can, take the upgrades easily.

We have desktop security, application security, and then we have Umbrella. We use five or six different tools for security, at least. It would be nicer to have fewer but as far as I know there isn't one tool that does it all.

We do application firewall rules where it does deep packet inspection and looks at certain things. We don't use it as much as we should, but we do application inspection and have rules that are based on just an application.

We usually have two people on a call when we do maintenance, and we usually have Cisco involved. It's usually me and a colleague who is also a network/security engineer.

I would rate the ASA overall at eight out of ten. The thing that comes to mind with that rating is the code. As I said, we just upgraded to 6.4.04 and we ran into a handful of bugs. We've done upgrades before and we've run into a bug as well. Just last week, we finished upgrading, and I still have one final service request, a TAC case, open. I had four open at one point. That's at the forefront of my thoughts right now.

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We are currently using the Cisco Firepower firewall, which is dependent on the situations in the data center and regional data center concepts. 

The way that this solution helps secure our infrastructure end-to-end is by enabling us to easily integrate all end-to-ends for monitoring.

Whether this solution saves us time depends on the situation. We use highly secure networks on the national security level and that's why it helps to use different products as Cisco is one of the best.

Overall, I would rate this solution a nine, on a scale from one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best.

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I would rate them as nine out of 10.

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To those evaluating this solution, I'd advise finding out what you want to use it for. Our usage is quite basic. Overall, I am quite satisfied with what we are using it for.

Overall, I'd rate it a nine out of ten.

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We are very pleased with Cisco for the automation they did to help us in coming up with a policy. That was a big challenge because we didn't have any policy in place. It was a big help for us that they came up with a policy or at least proposed a policy for us.

Our engineers are familiar with Cisco firewalls, and they are not new to them. However, things are changing and technology is changing, and new features are getting added. Automation will be the main challenge for us. Some of our engineers are not yet very good at scripting. They're still learning. The way forward would be to have people do some amount of programming to come up with useful information to enhance the solution in the future.

I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a seven out of ten.

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I rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten.

Cisco Secure Firewall has not helped consolidate any of our applications or tools.

We use Cisco Talos to pull the signatures for everything we download. However, we don't rely on Cisco Talos for our day-to-day operations. 

Cisco Secure Firewall is a commendable product and holds a leadership position in the industry. While there are other competitors available, it is certainly worth considering, particularly for organizations that already utilize Cisco switching, routing, and related infrastructure. Cisco Secure Firewall can seamlessly integrate into the existing ecosystem, making it an appealing option to explore.

Having in-house expertise in Cisco and its products is indeed valuable when making a decision to go with Cisco Secure Firewall. The fact that our team already had a lot of expertise and experience with Cisco products played a significant role in the decision-making process.

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The main value we add as Cisco resellers is our consulting services. We have consulting engineers on the backend and we have our own SOC. We leverage Cisco, and on top of that, we add our services, which makes it a great collaboration between every successful system integrator, reseller, and vendor.

I'd advise asking for a demo and getting involved or engaged with the product to see its value. Don't just read about it.

Overall, I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine out of ten.

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The biggest lesson I've learned so far from using the next-gen firewall is that it has visibility up to Layer 7. Traditionally, it was IP or port, TCP or any protocol we were looking for. But now we can go all the way up to Layer 7, and make sure STTP traffic is not a bit torn. That was something that we did not have before on the up-to-Layer-3 firewall.

Do your research, do your homework, so you know what you're looking for, what you're trying to protect, and how much you can manage. Use that to narrow down the devices out there. So far, in our environment, we haven't had any issues with the ASA firewalls.

From the first-gen, we have seen that they are pretty good. We are pretty content and happy with them.

The solution can help with the application visibility and control but that is one portion we have really not dived into. That's one of the things we are looking forward to. As a small utility, a small organization, with our number of employees available, we can only stretch things so far. It has helped us to identify and highlight things to management. Hopefully, as our staff grows, we'll be able to devote more towards application visibility and all the stuff we really want to do with it.

Similarly, when it comes to automated policy application and enforcement, we don't use it as much as we would like to. We're a small enough environment that we can do most of that manually. I'm still a little hesitant about it, because I've talked to people where an incident has happened and quite a bit of their devices were locked out. That is something we try to avoid. But as we grow, and there are more IoT things and more devices get on the network, that is something we'll definitely have to do. As DevNet gets going and we get more involved with it, I'm pretty sure more automation on the ASA, on the network side and security side, will take place on our end.

We do find most of the features we are looking on the ASA. Between the ASA firewall and the Sourcefire management console, we have pretty much all the features that we need in this environment.

In terms of how the solution future-proofs our organization, that depends. I'm waiting to find out from Cisco what their roadmap is. They're still saying they're going to stick with ASA 55 series. We're also looking at the Sourcefire FireSIGHT product that they have for the firewalls. It depends. Are they going to continue to stick with the 55s or are they going to migrate all that into one product? Based on that, we'll have to adjust our needs and strategize.

If I include some of the hiccups we had with the 5506 models, which was a sad event, I would give the ASAs a nine out of ten.

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On a scale of one to ten, I would say Cisco Secure Firewall rates very highly. I'd give it an eight. There are still some places to improve. 

If we look at what some of the other vendors are doing, like Fortinet, for example, there are some next-gen features that it would be interesting to see introduced into the product suite. That said, there are other capabilities that other vendors do not have such as the Firepower IPS systems, which are very useful to us. On the whole, Cisco Secure Firewall is a great fit for us. 

If you were considering Cisco Secure Firewall, I would say your main considerations should be the size of your environment and how frequently it changes. If you're quite a dynamic environment that changes very frequently, then Cisco Secure Firewall is good, but you might want to consider complimenting it with some third-party tools to automate the policy distribution. 

Your other consideration should be around clustering and adding nodes quickly. If you have a dynamic environment, then it is quite hard to find a better product that can scale as quickly as the Cisco firewalls.

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To those evaluating Cisco Secure Firewall, I'd advise thinking about what are your use cases and what's your goal to achieve with this product. It's also a good idea to talk to other customers or a partner and ask them what's their experience and what they think about it, and if it's suitable for this use case or not. And, of course, it's also a good idea to do a proof of concept or something like that.

At the moment, I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a six out of ten. The reason for that is that we are having some problems with the stability and functionality of the product, but there are also features, such as VPN, that are working from day one without a problem. So, there are good parts, and there are parts that are not working as well as we would like them to, but we and Cisco TAC will solve this in the future, and then the rating will go up.

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I'd rate it an eight out of ten.

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I would encourage people to go for the newer version of Cisco ASA. 

When you are procuring that device, be sure to look at the use cases you want it for. Are you also going to use it to serve as your remote VPN and, in that case, do you need more than the out-of-the-box licenses it comes with? How many concurrent users will you need? That is a big consideration when you're purchasing the device. Get a higher version, something that is at least three years ahead of being declared end-of-life or end-of-support.

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It is a good product. I would rate it as 10 out of 10.

Resilience is a definite must. You need to have it because, as we say, "The bad guys are getting worse every day. They are attacking, and they don't care." Therefore, we need to make sure that our customers' data and our data is secure.

It depends on what you need. If there is not a need for multiple vendors or pieces of equipment per contract, you should definitely look at what ASAs could be used for. If you are splitting, you can consolidate using this product.

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My advice to those wanting to implement the solution is to look at their use case and see if it meets those requirements for what they are looking for. There are a lot of security features that people may not be aware of and do not use. Explore the solution and all its features which will help you understand the configurations.

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall an eight out of ten.

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I rate Cisco Secure Firewall eight out of ten.

I recommend taking advantage of the trial by downloading virtual next-gen firewalls provided by OBA, deploying them in a virtual environment, and testing their performance to evaluate their effectiveness. This is a crucial step.

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To those evaluating this solution, I'd say that it's a solid product. It works. It does what we need. It gives us peace of mind to sleep at night. I'd definitely put it up there with some of the other firewalls to consider.

I'd rate Cisco ASA a nine out of ten.

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We have always used Cisco firewalls. Cisco products have been the standard in networking in our company for many years. This has been beneficial because some of our core IT activities are connected with Cisco. Also, it has been proven that Cisco Secure Firewall is a reliable product that can help us have stable and reliable networks and services.

We have some experience with Check Point, which we started using recently. Cisco is more hardware-oriented, and Check Point is more application-orientated. The two vendors have a slightly different approach to the same problem.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall at eight because it's a very reliable product. We can use predefined signatures and don't have to do a lot of customization. However, we have had a few small issues with the deployment of some signatures and with the availability of Firewall Management Center.

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We are using access switches, routers, catalysts, and ISR products. Additionally, we are using Cisco as a platform, which is somewhat old, and Cisco ASA on Firepower devices.

I would advise others to thoroughly evaluate their requirements before selecting a security solution. While some products may seem like an obvious choice, it is important to take the time to assess the available options and determine which one best suits your specific needs. This approach is wise and can ultimately lead to a more effective security solution.

I rate Cisco Secure Firewall a seven out of ten.

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If you're a client evaluating Cisco Secure Firewall, my advice would be to put real-world data through it to get useful data out of it. You can't see the benefits of the solution if you just turn it on and look at the device as it is. It's when you see the traffic going through it that you'll see the power of the analytics and reporting and the event data that comes through. A technical team member will understand how much easier it's going to be to troubleshoot with this platform compared to that with any other platform they've had before. With regard to reporting, a report on how many malware attacks have occurred in a particular month takes one click to generate. That data can be stored for a long time.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten because of the feature parity. It's not quite there in terms of being able to do everything on the GUI platform. The price point is still a bit too high as well.

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Understand what you're trying to protect and what you're trying to protect it from, and then also understand how the solution is managed.

I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine out of ten.

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We are quite Cisco-centric because of the performance we get for the price range. We have a lot of smaller sites, and we are not a very big organization. The price fits us perfectly.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall at nine on a scale from one to ten.

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What it's been configured to do, it does it well. I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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Do not just look at the data sheet that vendors are publishing. Sometimes, they make sense. But, in reality, these documents are made based on specific use cases. Just do a proof of concept and test every single feature. You will find out that Cisco Firepower is much better and more tweakable than other solutions.

When you start using Cisco Firepower Management Center, you need a few days to get used to it. Once you know all the menus, it is kind of easy to find your way out and analyze traffic, not only in terms of the firewall but also in terms of IPS or SSL decryption. Different users are split away who can help you to troubleshoot what you want to troubleshoot, not having everything in one view.

Today, the only use cases that we have for dynamic policies are leveraging the API on Cisco FMC to push some config or change the config. There isn't a feature built automatically on the FMC to build a new policy, so we are leveraging APIs.

I would rate Cisco Firepower between eight and nine. The only reason that I am not giving a full nine is because of the Snort 3 operations, where there is a need for improvement.

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We're just a customer and an end-user. 

We no longer have an SLA for this solution. We're potentially looking for something new.

I'd recommend the solution to others. It works well. It's durable and fast and you don't have to check up on it daily as it is rather reliable. That said, it is pricey.

In general, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten.

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The application visibility and control with Cisco Secure Firewall is pretty great. We have the FTD, the firewall threat defense, and FMC, the management console we use, and we have great visibility using that product.

Cisco Secure Firewall's ability to secure our infrastructure from end to end is really good. We always find things and or block things before they even happen. So it's great, especially with Talos.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped free up our IT staff for other projects to a certain degree. We still have to review logs in the firewall, and hopefully, someday, we'll have AI to help do that for us too. The solution has probably saved our organization about ten hours a week.

We use Talos, among other threat advice tools, and it's very good. Talos automatically updates us on the threats out there, and we can deploy those to our devices if we deem it fit to deploy them.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience. We've used Cisco for so long, and we've never had a data breach up to this point.

Overall, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall ten out of ten.

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Cisco Secure Firewall is a great scalable, secure, and robust product.

There is a dedicated team designed to handle firewalls.

I have a good impression of Cisco Talos and its effects on our security operations. They have a great reputation for doing a lot of great things.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience.

Overall, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall nine out of ten.

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I rate Cisco Secure a seven out of ten.

My rating of seven out of ten for the Cisco Secure is because it's not excellent, but not poor either. It was enjoyable and overall satisfactory.

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My advice to those evaluating the solution right now is this: understand what you're trying to protect and what you're trying to protect it from. Also, understand how the solution is managed.

Cisco Secure Firewall has not necessarily freed up our staff's time as much as it has secured the infrastructure and the OT network behind it. Cisco Secure Firewall was not built as a time-saver. It is not a cost solution. It is a solution meant to isolate and control access to and from a specific set of infrastructure.

Cisco Secure Firewall has not helped us consolidate tools and applications. It allows us to get access. What we're seeing more and more of is business systems like SAP looking to get access to OT systems and this is how our systems get that way.

Cisco Secure Firewall requires the sort of maintenance that any software product would: updates, asset management, etc. Worldwide, we probably have 30 to 40 people managing the solution on the OT side on the various sites and then probably 10 to 15 people on our account team with our outside partner.

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Cisco is amazing at upgrading, so even if we did have to upgrade a device, it is plug-and-play because of that availability option.

Cisco is doing a great job with all the improvements that are coming; they are allowing for GUI setups where many people aren't so used to CLI. Many of the younger grads coming into our field are more used to APIs and automation, so having that GUI feel is a lot better than CLI.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

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One way to evaluate Cisco products is by looking at the experience. Gartner provides a good overview of Cisco products based on customer feedback, but the best way is by trying the product. Try-and-buy is a good model. Nowadays, all customers, enterprise service providers, and ISPs, are aware of Cisco solutions. They don't just purchase based on the technical specifications.

As a Cisco partner for over 25 years, we provide value by bringing our experience. We have worked so far with a different range of products, from the oldest Cisco firewall to the newest one, and we continue to promote them through design recommendation, capacity specification, deployment, engineering, high-level design, low-level design, migration, go-live, and maintenance and support. We cover the whole lifecycle of a product.

Our partnership with Cisco is a win-win partnership. Cisco provides us with the latest experiences and latest solutions, and on the other hand, we are doing business with our customers by using Cisco products, so it's a win-win relationship with Cisco, which leads to enhancing, promoting, and excelling in Cisco products. I would tell Cisco product managers to go fast with security platforms. Other vendors are going fast as well, and we need product managers to tackle the performance and capacity issues. It's not really an issue in itself, but it's something that can enhance and bring Cisco to the first place in security solutions.

I'd rate it an eight out of ten. The reason why I didn't give it a ten is that they have to make it better in terms of the capacity and performance for the 10 gig interface, 40 gig interface, and 100 gig interface, and in terms of how many ports and interfaces we have on appliances.

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For digital banking, this solution's firewalls have greatly improved our economy. Most enterprises in our country are using Cisco products because Cisco has worldwide support and cable devices.

I would rate this solution as eight out of 10.

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Definitely do your research, e.g., how you want to set it up and how deep you want to go in with it. This will actually help you more. When we say Cisco Secure Firewall, is it Next-Generation, running ASA, or running Firepower? Or, does Meraki actually fit in there? So, there are different scales based on what you are trying to look for and how deep security-wise you want to go into it.

SecureX is a nice feature, but it has to be for the right environment. It is nice that we get it, but most people don't take advantage of it.

The dynamic policy capabilities can enable tight integration with Secure Workload at the application workload level, but I am not using much with Secure Workload at this point.

I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall as nine out of 10. I would not give it a 10 because of bugs.

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I would probably ask, "How long do you want to keep the connection and intrusion events for?" You need to remember that Firepower Management Center can only keep a certain amount of events. I think you need to have that in mind as one criteria to make your decision against. 

You need to look at what hardware platform you are going to be deploying. We have a lot of customers who are running ASAs, but they are running the Firepower Threat Defense image on their ASA. For all intents and purposes, those ASAs act as FTDs. Now, try to remember those ASAs were never designed originally to run the FTD code. Now, they can run the FTD code, but some of the dedicated Firepower appliances have a split architecture. So, they have separate physical resources, CPU, and memory for running the traditional firewalling capabilities versus the next-generation firewall capabilities, like IPS, AMP for Networks, and AVC. Maybe, have a think about the hardware platform, because you need to try to assess what throughput you are trying to put through the firewall and how that will impact the performance of the box.

There is definitely some advantage moving to the dedicated Firepower appliances rather than putting the Firepower code on an ASA. Although, it does allow you to leverage an existing investment if you put the FTD code onto the ASA, but you need to be mindful of the limitations that it has. Also, if you are looking to do SSL decryption, then you need a much bigger firewall than you think you need because this puts a lot of overhead on the appliance. However, this would be the same for any vendor's firewall. It is not Cisco specific.

If 10 is the most secure, then our customers are typically in the middle, like a five, in terms of maturity of their organization’s security implementation. This will be because they won't necessarily have things like Network Access Control, such as Cisco ISE. They also won't necessarily have security analytics for anomaly detection, like Stealthwatch or Darktrace. For some of these more sophisticated security technologies, you need to be a large enterprise to be able to afford or invest in them.

While Firepower provides application visibility and control, we don't use it much simply because we use Cisco Umbrella. Firepower gives you application visibility control on a location-by-location basis. So, if we have a firewall at the head office or a firewall at the branch, then we get application visibility control by firewall. However, because we use Cisco Umbrella, that gives us very similar application and visibility control but on a global level. So, we tend to do application visibility and control more within Cisco Umbrella because we can apply it globally rather than on a site-by-site basis. Sometimes, it is useful to have that granular control for an individual site, but it is not something that we use all the time.

I would rate the solution as a nine out of 10.

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Every firewall has its pluses and minuses, but because we've taken such a layered approach and we're not relying on one thing to keep us safe, I've never really gone, "Oh, I've had it." I've heard some complaints about Cisco TAC, but generally speaking, I've been able to configure them and do whatever I need to with the Cisco firewall. There's nothing in my experience with Cisco that leads me to believe that that's going to stop.

I've always felt comfortable with every Cisco purchase we've made and every improvement they've made to it. I think they keep moving in a positive direction and they're pretty good with updates and fixes. You can have 10 people, networking people or security people, and they'll all have different takes on it. That said, I've always been very comfortable. I don't stay up at night and worry about our firewalls.

One thing to remember about Cisco is that whatever they're doing, it just keeps getting better. In my experience with Cisco, I have yet to have a product of theirs that they haven't improved over time. For example, we bought into OpenDNS Umbrella before Cisco acquired them. At the time, I was wondering whether they were going to improve it or what was going to happen with it, because you can never be sure. Again, Cisco has done nothing but improve it. It's a far more mature product than when we picked it up five or six years ago.

While not directly related to the NGFW, it speaks to Cisco's overarching vision for security, which again, I'm always looking at layers. If you're thinking that you're going to secure an environment by buying a firewall, yes, that's a really important piece of it, but it's only one piece of it.

Cisco is a company that is really open about vulnerabilities, which some people could see that as a negative but I see as a positive. I do security all the time, so I'm always going to be paranoid. That said, I've spent so much time doing this stuff that I've developed a lot of trust in Cisco. Again, I think there are other great products out there, but Cisco has made it really easy to integrate stuff into this ecosystem where you have multiple layers of not perfect, but state-of-the-art enterprise security.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this solution is, first of all, to know what you're doing. If you're not sure then get somebody that does. However, I would say that's probably true of any firewall. If your business relies on it, have all of your information ready beforehand, it's just all the straightforward stuff that any security person needs.

In summary, I think what I can say about them is there's nothing I needed to do that I haven't been able to do. I have incredible visibility into everything that's happening. We continue to leverage more features, to use it in different ways, and we haven't run into any limitations. I cannot say that the product is perfect, however, and I would deduct a mark for the interface loading. It's not terrible but sometimes, especially when you're doing the setup, it can chug away for a while. Considering what the device does, I think that it's a small complaint.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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In my opinion, I would rather ask everyone to have a simple network. If you need multiple networking lines, like for the Cisco ASA or the Firepower NGFW, make sure you have ample tech support. 

There are many issues with connectivity in firewall systems, but Cisco quality is good. The connectivity of your network can really reduce your complexity over firewalls. 

I would suggest if you want to configure a complicated network scenario, go for a next-generation firewall. I would also suggest making your firewall options go to Cisco as they have some influential products right now. 

Once you are pushing the Cisco firewall, you'll be able to actually monitor and confirm each and every traffic coming in or going out of your network. 

Palo Alto Networks or Juniper Networks firewalls are ideal, slightly better than Cisco. They are not as easy as Cisco to use right now, but considering the cost and everything else, Juniper Networks equipment is really good. 

The fact is you need to consider just what you're achieving when you put in Cisco firewalls and implement Cisco routers.  For those on the verge of a new purchase, I would say that going for an expired model of firewall is definitely a good buy.

I would rate the Cisco Firepower NGFW with an eight out of ten points.

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Because I don't like the management tool that comes out-of-the-box with it, the FDM, I'll give the Firepower an eight out of 10. That was a real pain dealing with, until they said, "Okay, let's get him an FMC." That was TAC's suggestion, actually. They said, "You really need FMC. The FDM is really trash."

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We integrate it with our ISE solution, TACACS+, etc. We have a Windows NPS server for MFA through Azure. We don't have any challenges with it. It has always worked well. I can't think of a time when we have ever had problems with either of those things. It has worked just fine.

I would rate the solution as nine out of 10.

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We are a customer and an end-user. 

It was earlier named Sourcefire. Cisco acquired that company and rebranded it as Firepower.

We are actually a public cloud provider. We offer data center services to clients.

I'd advise others considering the solution that, for implementation, the product needs some stability and maturity to be offered as a next-generation firewall at an enterprise level. If a company is in need of an enterprise-level solution, they need to be aware of this.

I'd rate the solution a five out of ten. 

The product needs maturity in terms of running without hitting a bug. We have used other products also. A running product is never hit with a bug. It is normally some vulnerability or something that needs to be attended to, however, a running product is seldom hit with a bug and the operation gets stalled. We rarely find this kind of thing in an enterprise scenario. That is what we ask from Cisco, to build a stable product before offering it to customers.

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The solution’s maintenance is very easy, and one person can do it.

Overall, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten.

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I recommend the solution for SMB businesses.

I rate the overall tool a seven out of ten.

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The solution has improved our organization. I think my company was using Check Point back in the day. My company has 12 Cisco products. We used Palo Alto in my old organization. It’s what I'm most familiar with.

The application visibility and control with Secure Firewall are not bad. The product’s alerting is pretty good. There were a couple of things that surprised me about the solution. It works really well because we use it with Secure Client and Secure Endpoint. Sometimes the solutions can cross-enrich each other, which we wouldn’t get with a dedicated, standalone firewall.

The solution has helped free up our IT staff for other projects. We don't even have a dedicated firewall person. I sometimes do some stuff. Mostly the dedicated network admins run it, and they have time to do the rest of their job. Our whole network infrastructure team's only five to six people, and they can manage multiple sites across all different firewalls. It's not unreasonable to demand at all.

The product has helped us consolidate tools and applications. If we were using another solution, we would have had their firewall, management plane, and other appliances to back that up. Having a product in the Cisco universe definitely does help. It's all right there when we're using Secure Client and Umbrella. I want more of what Cisco Identity Services Engine and DNA do. I don't like switching tabs in my browser.

We use a relatively basic subset of Cisco Talos for general threat intel. It's definitely helpful. It's mostly about just getting the Talos definitions into the firewall so it can do all the heavy lifting so we don't have to. Now that Cisco has the XDR product, it will probably make it even more useful because then we can combine the network side, the security operations, and the threat intelligence into one thing to work harder for us.

Cisco Secure Firewall has definitely helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience. I like the IDS a lot. The definitions work really well. Making custom ones is pretty trivial. We don't have to do complicated packet captures or anything of that kind.

My advice would be to lean really hard on your sales engineer to explain the stack to you. There's definitely a learning curve to it. Cisco does things in a very particular way that's maybe a little bit different than other firewall vendors. Generally, it's pretty helpful talking to post-sales about what you need because you're probably not going to be able to figure it out. It's definitely a pretty top-shelf tool. If an organization already uses Cisco, they probably want to invest in the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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I'd rate it a seven out of ten because of the ASDM, non-intuitive CLI, and complication of setting some of the things.

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Compared to other vendors' firewalls, Cisco's firewalls are a bit behind. Overall, however, I would rate Cisco Firewall at eight on a scale from one to ten.

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I haven't really used the GUI features that much.

We have not integrated with any other Cisco solutions yet, but we have been thinking about integrating with Cisco Umbrella.

I would rate the solution as eight out of 10.

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We're a partner. We aren't an end-user. We are a managed security provider, and therefore we use this solution for our customers.

We always provide the latest version of the solution to our clients.

Typically, we use both cloud and on-premises deployment models.

I'd recommend the solution to others. It's quite good.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate it at an eight.

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FTD is pretty good. You can stop new threats very quickly because you can get the threat intelligence deployed to all your IPSs in less than two hours. Cisco works closely with Talos and anything that Talos finds is provided in the threat intelligence of the FTDs if you have the license. It's pretty good to have the Cisco and Talos teams working closely. I know Palo Alto has an similar arrangement, but not a lot of suppliers get that chance.

Our organization's security implementation is pretty mature because we try to avoid the false positives and we try to do remediation. We try to put threat intelligence over a link to our IPS next-gen firewalls.

Overall, we have too many tools for security in our organization — around a dozen. It's very complicated to integrate all of them. What we have done is to try to use the Elastic Assist Pack over all of them, as a main point of centralization of log information. The number of tools also affects training of teams. There are issues because one tool can't communicate with the another one. It can be very hard, in terms of technical issues and training time, to have everybody using all these processes.

We also use Cisco Stealthwatch, although not directly with the FTD, but we hope to make them work together. There is not enough integration between the two products.

Overall, FTD is one part of our security strategy. I wouldn't rely only on it because we've got more and more issues coming from the endpoints. It lets you decipher everything but sometimes it is very complicated. We try to use a mix and not rely only on the FTDs. But for sure it's great when you've got a large network, to give you some visibility into your traffic.

I rate it at eight out of ten because it's pretty good technology and pretty good at stopping threats, but it still needs some improvement in the management of the new FTD line and in performance.

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I would recommend this solution and rate it 8 out of 10.

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Listen to your customers and see what their needs are.

The whole stack provided by Cisco is a holistic solution for cybersecurity experts, like myself, and companies who are looking to secure their network.

You should partner up with a good team to view all products available, which cater and are customized to your needs.

We haven't found any gaps where it is lacking.

I would rate this product as eight or nine out of 10.

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Take the time to really learn it, then it becomes a lot easier to use.

I would rate the solution as eight out of 10.

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The Nextgen firewalls have a good IPS, but that IPS part wasn't very configurable using the ASDM. Later, they introduced the FMC (Firewall Management Center) and we could integrate the ASA with the FMC and get the IPS configured from the FMC GUI. That was good, but you needed two things to monitor one box. For the IPS you needed an FMC server, and for the firewalls, you needed the ASDM or the CLI.

In terms of integration with other solutions, it is a simple firewall that is integrated with the syslog servers and the SNMP monitoring from the NMS. Those types of simple things work very well. I haven't worked with much integration beyond that. You can't attach that many feeds to it. That's more a function of the Next-Generation Firewall with the IPS and FMC.

SecureX is a relatively new cloud-based solution. It's been around for one or two years. It's offered for free if you have any Cisco security solution. It encompasses ADR and NDR. The clients I work with in Pakistan are mostly financial institutions. Because it's a cloud-based security solution, they are not interested. They want on-prem solutions.

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Read the Cisco Validated Designs (CVDs) regarding ASAs. Find some decent blogs, discuss topologies and scenarios with a seasoned engineer, and get your final design validated by Cisco. Your Cisco SE should be able to assist with this. If you need assistance implementing, work with your channel partner.

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ASAv uses the solution as a VPN concentrator and a firewall because it could be used for both. It can be used for landing AnyConnect clients on ASAv and as a firewall.

What sets Cisco Firewall apart from other products is that when we do an update, we know we're not going to break a lot of things, and there are not a lot of bugs. The integration on the Cisco side is pretty good.

Most of our team is familiar with Cisco, and everyone knows what to expect when they log in. So it's easy in that way.

I like the application visibility and control with Cisco Secure Firewall. My only complaint is that the changes made in the GUI sometimes do not reflect in the command line.

I haven't had any problems with Cisco Secure Firewall. It's very straightforward and reliable. Also, it's trustworthy because it has the Cisco name.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped free up our IT staff for other projects. The product is quite heavy into automation. So with it being Cisco, it is very scalable in generating configs. The solution saves a week or two for implementation and integration.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience through the reliability aspect.

You know what you're getting when you use an ASAv from Cisco. Cisco Secure Firewall is a great product in terms of reliability and scalability.

Overall, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall ten out of ten.

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The application visibility and control are pretty good. It seems to do everything we've ever needed it to do. I've never asked the product to do something that it couldn't do. The solution has been pretty successful at securing our infrastructure from end to end. Most of our client’s staff have reported that the product is not as maintenance intensive as they would like. They never had to deal with maintenance before, but now they do. We deploy new systems for our clients.

I haven't had much experience with Cisco Talos directly. I know it's there, but I haven't really been involved. I haven't experienced it, which I believe is a good thing. It's doing its job if I don't have to get involved with it. The product has definitely helped improve our organization’s cybersecurity resilience. We weren't secure at all before, and we are a known target since we’re based in infrastructure. The solution has been very helpful in providing security.

It is a good product. I would definitely look into it. There is great value in going to a partner to a reseller to deploy the product. They understand the equipment and have expertise. Normally, they're local, so local knowledge is always useful. They have done deployments before, so sometimes they know tips or tricks that aren't in the manuals.

People evaluating the solution should give it a look. Definitely, it is worth taking a look at it.

Overall, I rate the product a nine out of ten.

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Our current company, SNC ICT, is already a Cisco Gold Partner. We are actively involved in investing, purchasing, and selling Cisco products to our customers, as well as performing installations, configurations, and providing other related services.

In the Middle East, most people with a budget opt for Cisco. However, I do not have any information about the preferences in Europe, South Asia, or Asia.

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We have Cisco Firepower Threat Defense, email security, web security, and Cisco Umbrella. Most of the time, I am working with Identity Services Engine for identity-related things. That's the main product I work with all the time. I have almost no direct contact with Talos, but I know that below the hood, it just improves all their security solutions.

To those evaluating this solution, I would advise being a little bit careful with it. It interfaces well with other Cisco solutions, so it has value, but it's not always the best solution.

At the moment, I would rate it a six out of ten.

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I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. 

There are multiple data planes that run within this solution. My advice is to unify those data planes into a single data plane, so that traffic is sectioned and can be handled effectively. If you need a next-generation firewall, this is a good product.

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I would recommend a Next-Generation firewall. FortiGate has a Next-Generation firewall but I have never used it. However, it would be similar to the Cisco Next-Generation FirePOWER, which has most of the capabilities, such as running all the BDP sessions and having security intelligence in one system. 

I would recommend everyone to use this solution.

I rate Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall a six out of ten.

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On the IT infrastructure side, we are using Cisco hardware for the network. Then, as a security team, we are looking at adding Cisco's incident response solution, but we have not done it yet.

Firepower provides us with application visibility and control. We don't utilize it to the fullest extent. We rely on some additional tools like DNS, to identify applications being used across our endpoints. However, the Firepower deployment primarily protects the servers. So, on the servers, it is a controlled environment. Therefore, we do know the applications and services being used and deployed out of the servers.

Applying something like this to protect yourself from the Internet, which is where most of the threats come from, besides email. It guarantees that you are able to refocus your energy on internal processes: endpoints, people, etc. Intrusion Prevention is effective because it helps security teams refocus their efforts to build out other components, such as security pillars of the organization.

The solution is effective. My initial exposure to Cisco started through Firepower, since then I have understood that Cisco is moving towards an ecosystem approach. Basically, Firepower represents what I think Cisco stands for.

I would rate the solution as a nine (out of 10). 

It does what it needs to do and does it great with a good sense of confidence, allowing the team and me to focus on other things. If needed, we can always leverage that data to derive different values from it.

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We are using Cisco at a global level. We have internally integrated this solution with Cisco Unified Communications Manager in a master and slave type of environment that we built. It uses a country code for each extension. Also, there is Jabber, which our laptop users utilize when connecting from home. They call through Jabber to connect with customers. Another tool that we use is Cisco Meraki. This is our all time favorite product for the office WiFi environment. However, we are not currently integrating our entire stack because then we would have to change everything. We may integrate the Cisco stack in the future. It should not be difficult to integrate since everything is a Cisco product. The only issue may be compliance since we have offices in the US and Europe.

We are now using a NGFW which helps us deep dive versus using a normal firewall.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Firepower as an eight (out of 10).

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I can't describe a particular scenario where the product has improved security, but I can say that the devices from Cisco are much more trustworthy and reliable compared to other devices in the market.

The most effective feature of the product for threat prevention stems from the granularity of the control that the devices from Cisco provide to its users.

The product offers great integration capabilities.

For our company's daily operations, the user interface provided by Sophos is much better and interactive compared to the one offered by Cisco.

You can choose Sophos if you want a low-budget or budget-friendly product. You can choose Cisco if you want a high-end and highly scalable tool with great integration capabilities, especially if budget is not an issue.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

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I give the solution a nine out of ten.

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This solution helped my clients save money and time. My clients save 50% on time thanks to automation and processing brought on by this solution. 

I have only good things to say about Cisco Talos. It has been quite helpful to our customers.

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They have been keeping up by adding more features to the next-gen and cooperating with other vendors.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10. It is pretty good compared to its competitors. Cisco is doing well. They have kept up their old traditional routing and fiber policies while bringing on new next-gen features.

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ASA morphed from being just a traditional firewall, when they introduced the Firepower Next-Generation Firewall side. There has also been progress because you can reflash your old ASAs and turn them into an FTD (Firepower Threat Defense) solution. So you've got everything from your traditional ASA to an ASA with Firepower.

Cisco ASA has been improved over time, from what it was originally to what it is now. Your investments are being protected by Cisco because it has moved from a traditional firewall through to being a next-gen firewall. I'm a fan of ASA.

I think ASAs are coming towards the end of their lifespan and will be replaced by the FTDs. It's only a matter of time. But there are still a lot of Cisco customers who use ASAs, so migrating that same level of knowledge those customers have of the ASA platform across to the FPR/FTD image, will be a challenge and will require investment.

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My advice to those wanting to implement the solution would be that implementations sometimes do not go as planned. You need to do your research to be prepared. 

We are evaluating other solutions because this one is getting close to its expiration. There are no other technologies out there that offer better features than this ASA solution.

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall a six out of ten.

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This is the number one firewall product that I recommend.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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In Georgia, there is no problem using the Cisco firewall, because it's accessible. You cannot use other products, because they are not accessible. That's the whole problem.

I would rate Cisco ASA NGFW an 8 out of 10.

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I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine out of ten. 

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I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten.

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Look at the features and consider what your migration path may be. Some other vendors offer firewalls with great bells and whistles, but when you look beneath the surface, they don't do exactly what they say. Do your due diligence and make sure you see everything.

In terms of resilience, in general, if we have any box failure, being able to fail over to another box or to fail over to another site helps measurably. Cyber security resilience is important for all organizations. The number of attacks going on just increases every day. There's a cost-benefit to building cyber security resilience. You have to get past that and build as much resiliency as you can. If you worry more about cost than you do about your product or your productivity, something else is going to fail.

Maintenance of the ASA is just the security updates that we watch for and updating the client software.

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We're partners with Cisco, Fortinet, and Palo Alto.

I work with on-premises deployments and virtual firewalls, however, I don't use the cloud.

The solution works well for medium-sized enterprises.

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

I'd recommend users to layer in solutions. At the perimeter, if they have two tiers, I'd recommend Palo Alto as the first and then Cisco ASA as the second. Cisco can work on the data center or Fortinet. In the case of Fortinet, they have the best backline throughput from all of the other products.

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Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

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I don't use the product for application visibility and control. I tend to worry more about blocking or allowing certain things versus looking deep into the servers and applications and how they work.

The product is great for securing our infrastructure from end to end. I'd like to be able to test out some of the other products, like dashboards and IPS/IDS, that work with it. For the most part, I set up a firewall, and I set up the rules. If things don't work, I monitor it through the monitoring dashboard and try to figure it out.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped free up a lot of time for our IT staff. Apart from monitoring, unless somebody needs a firewall rule change or anything like that, there's no need to mess with it. Once we set it up, it just runs.

The solution has helped our organization to improve its cybersecurity resilience. Being a firewall, by definition of the term, the product has improved our organization’s security.

People should always evaluate other products. If you’re looking for a solid firewall, Cisco makes the choice so much simpler, especially now with FMC. We are able to apply policies easily and control different firewalls at the same time.

Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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I chose Cisco because I've been working with them for 23 years. I choose it for its stability and because they have the right range of products. Most of our IT staff is happy with it.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

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The old versions or models saved us time, but the newer ones take our time. Overall, I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten.

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I would rate this solution a nine out of ten because it is a good product that is more stable than others on the market. 

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We use Cisco AnyConnect and we've not had any issues with it. During COVID we had to scale up and buy licenses that supported the number of users we had, and we didn't have any problems with it.

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It is a good product. It is easy to manage, but you need to have good experience and good knowledge, and you need to configure it properly.

Cisco FMC only supports Cisco products. If you have a large network with Cisco firewalls and other vendors' firewalls, such as Palo Alto, you can only manage Cisco products through Cisco FMC. Other vendors have their own management tools.

Most of the organizations nowadays are using the Cisco Firepower and Cisco ASA because of the high level of security. Cisco is known for its security. Cisco provides a lot of high-security firewalls such as Cisco ASA, Cisco FTD, Cisco Firepower. Cisco ASA 8500 came out first, and after that, new models such as Cisco FTD came. 

I would rate Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall a nine out of 10. It is excellent in terms of features, ability, and security. Whoever gets to work on Cisco Firepower, as well as Cisco ASA, will get good experience and understanding of security and will be able to work on other firewalls.

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I would advise understanding its features, advantages, and disadvantages as compared to other solutions. It is simple, but its cost is a negative point. 

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall an eight out of 10.

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Our company has a partnership with Cisco.

We have different clients and therefore use different versions of the solution. Nobody wants to use an out-of-date version, and therefore, we work to keep everything updated.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

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I would not recommend this solution. The technology is old and they should move to Firepower or NextGen Firewall.

I would rate the Cisco ASA Firewall an eight out of ten.

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Talk to your peers in the industry, find out what they use and why, and then look at exactly what you're using it for. We changed a great deal of our infrastructure, adding a lot of extra tunnels, so that made a complicated product even harder to manage. Look at what you're comfortable in managing with their interface.

We start looking at upgrade cost, our constant licensing cost. I look at other products that rank very high in industry ratings. Now I'm looking at similar products that are a little bit easier to manage. That is another fault of the ASA. They're very complicated to manage, but that’s because they have so many features. It's a very feature-rich product.

When selecting a vendor the most important factors are

• Security - obviously that is number one because we are a financial institution
• stability of the vendor
• how the product is ranked in the market.

In terms of security, right now is a really tough time for us because, even as a smaller community bank, we’re targeted. We have huge targets on us right now from hackers. I have to have a product that is stable, that will hold up, from a reputable company. I'm looking at companies that are top-tier.

I would rate the ASA equipment itself a nine out of 10. The software and manageability would rate a seven and the reason for that is the complexity of it. It is extremely complicated, even for our Cisco-certified person who manages it for us.

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Compared to Cisco Secure Firewall, other firewall solutions are easier to handle because they do not use ASDM. They have direct access via web browsers.

If you're considering Cisco Secure Firewall, take a look at what you want to use the firewall for and what kind of handling you prefer. If you prefer easy handling via browsers, then you may need to use another solution because ASDM is no longer the state of the art.

Overall, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall at seven on a scale from one to ten.

The I add as a reseller is the professional background.

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On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall at seven.

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My advice to leaders who want to build more resilience within their organizations is that they should help make policies. Leaders don't want to make policies; they don't want to put their names on policies or write policy documents. I as a firewall administrator am the one saying what the policy should be. I tell them what should happen, and sometimes, they resist.

Also, because the system is just too big to really manage without TAC, you would need TAC along with Firepower.

My advice would also be to go with HA or a cluster up front and not to be cheap. You really need to go in with a robust solution up front.

I would rate Firepower an eight on a scale from one to ten because the firewall and tech support together make it a very robust solution.

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Each use case is different and things depend upon your cost analysis and how much you need. We have these firewalls in different avenues over about 30 different sites.

The biggest lesson from using the solution is being agile which has included learning to understand how to use the ASDM and figuring out how to configure everything—the little nuances—and what can and can't be done on the CLI.

These firewalls, along with the upcoming Firepower that they're being replaced by, are going to be very good assets for two-factor authentication and VPN access.

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I would rate the solution as 10 out of 10.

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I like the ASA product, maybe because I'm an old guy, more so than the transition to the Firepower. The ASAs have worked ever since the PIX days and they work very reliably. Even with the upgrades, your rules don't change. That's true even with a major OS upgrade.

Things are changing and the ASAs are becoming dated. People want content filtering and so on now.

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We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with Cisco.

It's a solid, reliable product, however, if it's right for a company depends on the use case and the size of the organization. For a startup, this might not be a suitable option.

Overall, I'd rate this solution nine out of ten. As a comparison, if I was rating Palo Alto, I would give it a ten out of ten.

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I believe that Cisco Firepower NGFW is the future leader in NGFW, with only maybe Palo Alto being the main competitor. This is very good, as we all know that having a rival is good for us, the users :) 

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If you're looking for a complete solution, such as URL filtering and threat protection, we recommend Palo Alto firewalls, but this Cisco product is also good.

We are using three to four security tools: one for web security, and another tool for application security, and another for email security. For email we have an Office 365 email domain so we are using other tools for that. For firewall security we are using Cisco ASA, Palo Alto, and Fortinet for protecting our business.

We have about 15 people on my team managing the solutions. They are network admins, and some are in security.

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I rate the solution's ease of management and configuration an eight out of ten. I would recommend Cisco Secure Firewall to other users based on what they want it for and a combination of price point and supportability.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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I rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine out of ten.

The Cisco Secure Firewall is not a remediation tool but rather designed for secure remote sessions.

We use the same ASAs for firewall functionality as we do for VPN functionality.

Our organization is currently considering Palo Alto as an alternative to Cisco. However, I am not involved in the decision-making process.

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I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a seven out of ten.

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The solution does help us save time because it enables us to do a good job of filtering from the get-go. This ensures we have fewer potential threats to look through.

Cisco Secure Firewall has not helped us consolidate tools because part of our security strategy is having multiple firewalls from different providers. Our company policy is that it is better to have different technology, so we do have some overlap.

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When talking with our customers, I would not recommend our company's Cisco products for their security. It depends on their requirements, but if they want full security, I wouldn't say that Cisco ASA is the one choice.

My advice would be to do a PoC first.

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I am happy with the web security. However, I am not happy with the groups, reports, and integration with Active Directory.

We are using the web security, and only the web security feature. Therefore, if someone asked me to give them advice about the Cisco product, then I will definitely not recommend it since it is not fulfilling our requirement. We have different sites located domestically and at overseas sites, which is about 30 to 35 sites. It is not locating any of the clients. This is compared to the Barracuda web agent on the client computer, which is always connected to Barracuda with live IP addresses, pushing and pulling all the procedures and policies to that client and computer. This is why I will not recommend the product to anyone who has a similar situation to ours. .

I would love to use the product in the future, if my requirements are met.

I would rate the product as four out of 10.

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I will tell potential users that the data center firewall is a good solution. But most of the companies are using other firewalls like Palo Alto and FortiGate. Most of the design architects prefer the parameters of the firewalls like we prefer the data center firewall.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall a ten.

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Our client didn't implement dynamic policies for dynamic environments because they were a small company, and they didn't need that kind of segmentation. I am not sure if it reduced their firewall operational costs because they were a small company, and the traffic was not so high.

I would rate Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall an eight out of 10.

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We're Cisco resellers.

We're always on the latest version. I don't actually keep track of the version numbers myself, however, part of what the service that we provide for our clients is updating their firewalls to the latest version.

We use multiple deployment models. We use both on-premises and cloud versions. They are also all different sizes, according to the requirements of the company.

I'd advise other companies considering Cisco to be sure to factor in the cost of the ongoing security subscriptions and the ongoing SmartNet into the purchase price. Those things, over the years, represent more than the cost of the firewall itself - significantly more. However, I'd advise others to get the security subscriptions due to the fact that it really dramatically increases the security of the solution overall.

On a scale from one to ten, I'd rate them at an eight. We love the product, however, we feel like it's not Cisco's future direction, which is the only reason I would downgrade its score. To bring it up to a 10, they'd have to make it their main product line again, which they aren't going to do.

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You must know exactly what features are important for you, and how you can manage all this infrastructure in the future. Sometimes you can have a product that is superior but it might demand an increase in manpower to manage all the software or platforms. Another point to consider is how good the integration is between products? You should check what features you need, what features you can have, and the integration with other products.

In terms of the maturity of our security implementation, we have had security appliances, software or hardware, for more than 15 years. So we have a long history of using security products. We started using Cisco competitors in the past and we still use them for our headquarters, where I am. Our main firewall is not currently Cisco, although we are in the process of evaluation and we will replace this firewall soon. Cisco is one of the brands being evaluated for that.

In the past, while it's not a next-gen firewall, we also used a Cisco product for URL filtering, up until this year.

We are moving to the cloud. We are starting to use Office 365, so we are moving email, for example, from on-premises to the cloud. But until June of this year, we mainly used security from Cisco. But we also have antivirus for endpoint protection. We also had Cisco IPS in the past, which was a dedicated appliance for that, but that was discontinued about two years ago. Those are the major products we use currently. In addition — although it's not specifically a security product — we use Cisco ISE here to support our guest network for authentication. We plan, in the near future, to increase the use of Cisco Identity Services Engine. When we start to use that to manage policies and the like, we will probably increase the integration. I know that both products can be integrated and that will be useful for us.

There's one other product which we use along with Cisco next-gen which is a SIEM from Splunk. Currently, that is the only integration we have with Cisco. We send logs from next-gen firewalls to the Splunk machine to be analyzed and correlated. 

Although I'm not involved on a daily basis in operations, I helped in the process of integrating it. It was very easy to integrate and it's a very valuable integration, because we can analyze and correlate all the events from the next-gens from Cisco, along with all the other logs we are collecting in our infrastructure. For example, we also collect logs from the Windows machine that we use to authenticate users. Having those logs correlated on the Splunk box is very valuable. The integration is very easy. I don't know who built what, but there's a kind of add-on on the Splunk that is made for connection to firewalls, or vice versa. The integration is very simple. You just point to the name of the server and a user name to integrate both.

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It is definitely not for Telco.

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I would say that this solution did help free up staff. Today, and even during COVID, a lot of customers are interested in VPN solutions and this demand will only keep increasing. I work from home mostly and the solution saves me two hours per day.

I do want to stress that this solution saves our organization time. We have 13 engineers in our company and even more staff in other departments and they also have the opportunity to work from home and with this, they save a lot of time. We plan on buying a smaller office thanks to this and this too will save a lot of money for the company.

The reason we chose Cisco is that some of my colleagues partnered with the provider when they came to Hungary, so they have been working with these solutions for a long time.

I do not have experience with the Cisco migration tool, but my colleagues do and they are really happy with it and its ease of use.

I would rate this solution a nine, on a scale from one to 10, with one being the worst and 10 being the best.

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We're a customer and end-user.

I'd recommend the solution to organizations that have around 1,500 people that need to access the solution. 

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. 

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Compare Cisco ASA with other vendors' products and compare the features one-on-one. Pay special attention to the security portion, such as traffic inspection. That's probably the most important aspect. And then look at performance.

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Know specifically what you want out of the firewall. If you are looking for something that will build the GRE tunnel so you can route between different sites, I would go with ASA over Firepower Threat Defense.

I like the ASA. I would probably rate it as eight or nine out of 10, as far as the firewalls that I have worked with.

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Do your homework and know what you are doing. Know how to use your product, stay current, and hire smart people.

I would rate the solution as eight out of 10.

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My advice is that you need to know your flows. If you're upgrading to Firepower, you should know what traffic matters and what traffic doesn't matter. If you really want to be successful, you should know all the flows of traffic, how they function, what they do. That way, when you get the box up and running, you know exactly how it should operate.

You can split Firepower users into two buckets: help desk and admin. Help desk will usually be read-only and admin will be read-write. If there's one engineer at a customer, he might have admin rights. If there's a help desk and one senior firewall guy, he might have admin rights where his help desk has read-only. It varies by the size of the customer. Most midsize organizations have one or two firewall guys. When you get into the big enterprises, the number goes up.

Regarding Firepower's Snort 3 IPS allowing you to maintain performance while running more rules, the "book answer" is yes, it's supposed to. We're not really running Snort 3 a ton on those yet because of some of the risk and because some of those customers haven't upgraded to 7.0 yet. Those that are on Snort 3 are just not running policy sets that are large enough that to notice any major or even minor improvements. I have seen an uptick in performance improvements with Snort 3, even on firewalls that are not 100,000-rule firewalls. We are seeing improvements with Snort 3. It's just that Snort 2 performance hasn't really affected the box overall, it just runs a little hotter.

When I mentioned the risk for Snort 3 for our larger clients, what I meant is that with new things come new risks. Snort 3 is one of those new things and we have to evaluate, when we upgrade a customer to it, whether the risk of the upgrade warrants doing it for the customer. In some cases, the answer is no, because of burn-in time. With some of our riskier locations or locations that require 24/7, it makes more sense to run Snort 2, which has been out there since forever on the Firepower platform. It's a lot more stable on Snort 2 and the problems are known problems, from a design perspective. We've mitigated those and worked around them. With Snort 3, there could be new bugs or problems, and in some environments, we want to mitigate that risk.

My expectation is that by 7.1 or 7.2 we will upgrade more generally to Snort 3. It's not that it's far away. It's just that with 7.0 being the first release of Snort 3, and 7.0 only having one or two patches under its belt, we thought it better to remove some risk and just use Snort 2.

Cisco Secure Firewall helps to reduce firewall operational costs, depending on the firewall vendor it's replacing. In some cases, customers are coming from old platforms where the security wasn't nearly at the same level as a next-gen firewall, so the advantage of moving to a next-gen firewall is the increase in security. But that comes with an operational burden no matter the firewall type. There is a lot more visibility and capability out of the NGFW platform, but it comes at a cost. There's more data to work through and more things to configure. Still, in most cases, Cisco Secure Firewall is going to decrease operational usage with the caveat that it has to be an "apples-to-apples" situation, which is very hard to come across these days. 

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It is a very good firewall for small companies that don't want to do deep packet inspection at Layer 7. It is not easy, but you can manage it. You should know how to use the command-line interface. Otherwise, it would be difficult to work with it.

For Cisco ASA Firewall, there will be no improvements because they will not make these firewalls anymore. They want to make changes to the next-generation firewalls, and they are killing the old ones.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a 10 out of 10. I like it very much.

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We have not integrated Firepower with Cisco SecureX because it needs IOS 6.6. It's a limitation. If we have an external device, we would need downtime and in a financial organization, management will not allow us the downtime.

In my experience, the deployment procedure with Cisco is not the easiest, it's not plug-and-play. I hope that Cisco will give us that type of implementation.

Overall, I would rate Firepower at eight out of 10.

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We are a customer and an end-user.

We are using physical Cisco appliances.

We use a lot of Cisco products, Cisco router (the 3900-series routers), and Cisco switches.

In the next quarter, we will implement SD-WAN. Once the SD-WAN is implemented, then we will go with an automated policy and DNS kinds of tools. We are in the process of upgrading to Cisco ASA Firepower in the next quarter. We have not integrated Cisco ASA with Cisco's SecureX solution.

I'd recommend the solution, especially for medium-sized or larger companies and those who are looking for long-term solutions (for example those with a user base of around 2,000 plus users in and around 20 plus applications). It's reliable and offers users a lot of features. This helps companies avoid having to rely on other third-party solutions.

If you are new to Cisco, you should take advantage of the education they have on offer. Cisco provides access to training and it's worth taking advantage of this.

Overall, I'd are the solution at a nine out of ten.

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My advice to anybody who is considering this solution is not to think twice about it. There are a lot of features that come with the cost. These institutions secure our network and they have to do research. The price of this solution is justified when you consider that it secures our network and protects our valuable assets.

This is a very good solution but it is not perfection.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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This is a good product from a trustworthy vendor, but it is not perfect.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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Cisco ASA is a good solution. I never had a problem with. I will say that I mostly recommend Fortinet because of their ease of management and Palo Alto Networks because of their reputation for business efficiency.

I would rate Cisco ASA with an 8 out of 10 points.

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Try it. You will be happy. 

I'd rate Cisco Secure Firewall a ten out of ten.

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Being a partner, we work with customers who already have different vendor solutions as well. At times, there are a mix of small SMB sites, which could be, let's say, a grocery. There are smaller stores and there are bigger stores, and at times, they do local DIAs or local internet breakouts. [That's where] you do see some cloud-based or very small firewalls as well, but when you look at the headquarters or bigger enterprises, that is where we would probably position Cisco.

[My advice] would depend [on] if they are comfortable with a particular product, if they've been working with a particular vendor. If it's a Cisco shop, or if they've been working on Cisco, or the customers are quite comfortable with Cisco, I would say this is the way to go. Unless they have a mixed environment. It will still depend on the SME's expertise, how comfortable they are, and then looking at the use cases and which products would nullify or solve them. That is where we should position it.

My lessons are endless with ASA, but my lessons are mostly toward product knowledge. When you look at the deployment side of things, or for me, personally, when I was TAC, to know how things work internally within ASA—like an A to Z story, and there are 100 gaps between and you need to know those gaps—and then, eventually, you will get to the problem and solve it in minutes rather than hours.

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My advice to others would be to design it well and get it validated by the Cisco team or by a consulting company. Don't be afraid of the solution because they have skin in the game. It's been in the market for so long, it's like buying a Corolla, as odd as that sounds. If you have a use case for your car where you're just driving from A to B, then get that Corolla and it will suit you well. It will last you 100 million miles.

Cyber security resilience is super important. We have super important data and we need to secure it. We're regulated and audited by the government and we're audited all the time. I get audited when I breathe. We have to make sure everything is super transparent and make sure that we have all of the fail-safes in place and done well. We have to be very accountable so that there are no "gotchas."

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Stay more up-to-date with equipment. The old equipment is what will get you, e.g., leaving Windows 7 machines on your network or 15-year-old switches.

Heavily research what can do cluster mode, HA pairs, etc. That is where we ran into the "gotchas". You have to run it in certain ways to have it clustered and run it another way to have it as an HA pair.

I would rate ASA Firewall as nine out of 10.

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My advice is to take care of and monitor your policies and be aware of the threats. You also have to be careful when changing policies. When you do, don't leave unused policies around, because that will affect performance. You should have audits of your firewall and its policies and follow the recommendations from Cisco support.

Among the things I have learned from using Cisco ASA is that integration is easy, especially with Cisco products. And the support helps you to integrate with anything, so you can integrate with products outside of the Cisco family as well.

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My advice is "go for it," 100 percent. If ever I was told to implement a network, ASA would definitely be part and parcel of the solution.

The biggest lesson we've learned from using the product is about the rapid growth of the product's offerings.

In terms of the maturity of our organization's security implementation, I would like to believe that we are about midway. We still need to harden our security. We need to conduct penetration testing every two years and, resources permitting, maybe yearly. The guys out there who do cyber security crimes are becoming more and more advanced, so there is a need for us to also upgrade our security.

We have a two-layer firewall setup, which is what is recommended as the standard for the payment card industry. We probably need solutions linked with cloud providers from the likes of Cisco, and to put in some bank-grade intrusion detection solutions. Because we have already adopted two technologies, Cisco and FortiGate, we might be looking at solutions from those two providers.

We're also looking at end-point security solutions. We've been using the one which comes with our Office 365 and Microsoft product, Windows Defender. We are going to be trialing their new end-point management solution. We are trying to balance things from a cost point of view and providing the right level of security.

In addition to Windows Defender and the firewalls — ASA and FortiGate — and the network access control, we also have SSL for the website.

As for application visibility and control, currently we're just using logging. We don't have the Firepower installed, so it's just general logging and scheduled checks here and there. As for threat visibility, for us the ASA is a perimeter firewall. Behind that firewall we have an IDS and an IPA. We actually have the license for Firepower but we haven't implemented it; it was just an issue of priorities at the time.

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When you calculate the capacity you need, you should add a buffer for performance.

There are 25 users of the solution on my team and they are all network security specialists.

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We are just a customer and an end-user.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Obviously, you need to have one tech person on your online when you are configuring it, or just implementing when you are integrating with your live environment and organization. My advice is that the configuration is easy when a network engineer like myself handles it. A trained person is more than capable of the task. Other than configuring, a less technical person can manage the solution.  

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The neat part about this is how Cisco continues to evolve its product line and help us stay secure, while still doing our day-to-day business.

My advice would depend on how you want to use it. What are you looking for Firepower to do?

Firepower added features that, until we introduced into our environment, we could not have done. We probably could have added a third-party product but we would hate to keep doing all that. It's nice to be able to have our products from the same organization because then, if something's really wrong, we can talk to the same organization as we're trying to troubleshoot something through our environment. We use Cisco switches, Cisco routers, we use ISE, and Umbrella. We have a lot of products through Cisco.

We use the ACLs. We use the intrusion side, just to watch traffic. We have used the malware and have actually caught stuff in there. We do have a DNS policy so that at least we can check to make sure someone's not going to a bogus site; things can get blocked for that, but Umbrella is really good at what it does. We also have it connected to our Active Directory so I can see which users are going where, and that is valuable. But I can also see that in Umbrella, so there's some overlap.

For managing the solution it's me and at least one other person. I'm the primary resource on it.

We used to use AMP for endpoints through the Firepower but we decided to discontinue that. We have AMP on all our endpoints but with all the other things we have, such as Umbrella, we were satisfied enough with the security we have. We didn't want two different things possibly stopping files instead of having one console area to be able to see those kinds of things.

Overall, I would rate Firepower at eight out of ten. Every product can improve. But for what we're looking to do, it does a very good job.

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For any organization looking for a secure solution that can be deployed in their domain or infrastructure, my advice is to go with Cisco Next-Generation Firewalls because they have a complete bundle of security features. There is a single pane of glass with complete management capabilities and analytic features to understand and gather information about the traffic.

The lessons that most of our clients have learned is that in deployment it is easy to configure and it is easy to manage. It's quite stable and they do not get into difficulties in terms of day-to-day operations. 

We haven't faced any problems with this product.

Compared to other OEMs, such as Juniper and Fortinet, Cisco's product is excellent. There are no bugs and I don't see any lack in terms of backend and technical support. In my opinion, at the moment, there is no room for product enhancement.

Most of the users are system administrators working on their own domains. The minimum number of users among our clients is a team of 15 to 20 we have clients with up to 700 users at the largest site.

The product is quite extensively used in each department, to protect assets and data centers. We are using the attack prevention engine and URL filtering is also used at most of our sites. We are also using it for data center connectivity and for offloading transactions.

I would rate Cisco at ten out of ten for the functionality and the features they provide.

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The next-gen firewalls are a great solution. Be aware of the additional hardware costs (120GB SSD) that are needed to implement some features like the CX module. Also, if you do not need ACTIVE/ACTIVE fail-over there is no real need for the Security plus license. And finally, understand the true speed of the model you choose with and without the IPS module enabled before making a final decision.

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I would rate Cisco Secure products an eight out of ten. 

My advice would be to use them. 

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I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

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You need to be always looking ahead and proactively developing to build resilience.

I would rate the solution as eight out of 10. It is a world-class firewall.

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Go for it.

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Take your time with it. Actually, read the documentation. Don't just assume you know what stuff means since that will sometimes come back and bite you. I have done that too many times. If you go from version to version, it changes a little bit, and so it is like, "Well I don't know why it doesn't work." Then, you go read the notes, "Oh, yeah. This changed and it is done over here now."

Building more resiliency should be a priority, and it's going to take money to do that. So, you need to actually believe and invest in it. Otherwise, it's an idea. It's great, because we all want redundancy, but nobody typically wants to spend the money to do it. Or, they want to do it as cheaply as possible. It's like, "Okay, I can do that," but you're going to have more gaps. Then, it is not really worth it. Therefore, invest the money the first time and do it right.

I would rate it as nine out of 10.

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For specific needs, like VPN, you can use Cisco Firepower. But our expectation is for a next-generation Firewall or UTM solution that includes all the features. I cannot recommend Firepower to others, at the moment, as a unified threat management solution.

Generally, if the customer's number of users is greater than 100, that's when the Cisco solution is more likely to be effective.

Maintenance of the solution requires one or two people.

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We are also using Cisco AnyConnect, Umbrella (as a cloud proxy), and ISE. We have between five or six antivirus, proxy, anti-malware, data loss prevention, VPN client, and firewall tools.

I would rate this Cisco product as six out of 10.

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I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a nine out of 10.

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Cisco ASA Firewall is very stable and very reliable. It requires very minimal support, once you configure it and put it in your environment. You don't need to attend to faults or issues. Once you install it and plug it in, it is good to go.

We have been using the ASA Firewall for a long time, and it is an advanced product for our current use. In terms of improvement, there's not much that can be done to it. It is a solid product, very effective, and it does its job well.

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I would recommend this solution to others if they are not specifically looking for URL filtering and want to use it for their infrastructure. It is a perfect and very reliable solution, but it lacks when it comes to URL filtering. 

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a nine out of ten.

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I would suggest to be sure that it smoothly integrates with the infrastructure that you have. Try to take advantage of the DNA subscription and the new monitoring features that it has. Be informed about what's new with this product.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a nine out of ten.

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I would recommend this solution. I would rate Cisco Firepower a nine out of ten. 

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We are using the on-premises deployment model.

My advice for those considering the solution is this: if you want to migrate something, plan enough time for testing before you come over to the solution. You should also watch as many webinars as you can about that solution, or get a consultant and do a proper lab set up and go through the whole thing with them. It's is definitely worthwhile, given the complexity of the whole product.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

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To leaders who want to build more resilience within their organization, I would say that the ASA, along with its features, is a good product to have as one of the lines of defense.

The solution does require maintenance. We have four network engineers who
are responsible for upgrading code and firewall rules, and for new implementations.

On a scale from one to ten, I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a nine. Also, it's a very good product, and it compares well to others.

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The solution always requires maintenance. I have about two people who are the "experts" and they help maintain it pretty well.

Cyber security resilience has been extremely important for our organization because of our customers' demands for security. The ASA has really helped to accomplish that with the VPN. My advice to leaders who are looking to build resilience is don't go cheap, and make sure you have backup solutions and high availability.

It's a good, robust firewall and VPN solution, with lots of knobs to turn. It is effective at what it does.

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Technically, it is a very good firewall, but some improvements need to be done on the management side. I would advise getting a consultant or someone from Cisco to help you in implementing and using this firewall to its fullest extent.

We don't use workload integration as of now. We also don't use its dynamic policy capabilities to enable tight integration with a secure workload at the application workload level. Similarly, we don't use the solution's tags for VMware, AWS, or Azure for dynamic policies implementation in the cloud.

I would rate Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall an eight out of 10.

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My advice is "buy it." A lot of people prefer a specific brand and it's fairly hard to convince them that something else, like Cisco, is not bad, as well. They are so convinced about their existing firewall that they want to keep that brand because they are familiar with it and they won't need to learn a new firewall. It's hard for a customer to learn how a firewall works in the first place.

But my advice is that people should read about how Cisco security, in general, is set up and how it is trying to protect them with Talos. They need to understand that Cisco security is very good at what it does. They shouldn't blindly believe in what they have at the moment. I always hear, "My firewalls are good enough. I don't need Cisco. I will just buy the same ones, but new." Cisco Firepower is superior to other firewalls and people should not be afraid to dive in. By educating themselves about the firewall, they will be fine in managing it.

Practically speaking, Cisco firewalls are easier to manage than the firewalls they have at the moment, but they need to make the leap and try something else. That is the hardest part. When I do show them what they are capable of, and how you can configure all kinds of different things, they start to understand.

We don't have many customers that use other vendors' security products together with Firepower. We convince nine out of 10 customers to go over to Cisco fully. We do have customers who don't do that, and then we try to find a way to get the solutions to work together. For example, we try to integrate other brands' switches or firewalls with Cisco security products, but most of the time that is pretty hard. It's not the fault of Cisco. It requires that the other brands speak a protocol language that will support integration, but in the end, it's not perfect and the integration does not work very well. The majority of the time, we are not able to integrate into other security products. Cisco is using standard protocols, but the other vendor is abusing some sort of protocol and then it doesn't work well.

I don't prefer using applications in firewall rules, but our customers do use the application visibility and control, and it works perfectly. Firepower is very good at recognizing the application and is very good at showing you the kind of application that has been recognized. Customers use that in their access control policy rules, and I have never heard bad things about it. Cisco Firepower works very well in recognizing applications.

I get questions from customers because they do not understand threat messages generated by Firepower. Sometimes, it's hard to read what exactly the message is saying. In my opinion, that is not something that is specific to Cisco security or Firepower, rather it is an issue with security in general. Most networking people get these fancy firewalls and they get fancy security events. It's hard for some of them to understand what is meant, and what the severity level is of the message. It's more that a networking guy is trying to read security events. Firepower is doing a good job, but customers sometimes have problems understanding it and then they stop looking at it because they don't understand it. They assume that Firepower is taking the correct actions for them.

Firepower is not a fire-and-forget box. It is something you actually do have to take a look at. What I tell customers is, "Please enable Impact-One and Impact-Two messages in your mailbox, and if it's really something that you cannot understand, just forward it to me and I will take a look for you. Most of the time they are not very high-impact messages. There are only one or two high-impact messages per month.

There are customers who say, "We want you to review the messages in Firepower once a week." I have a look at them when I have time. We try to help the customer check security events once a week or so. That's not great, but it's always a question of finding a good balance between the money a customer can spend and the security aspects. When we do monitor all the events, 24/7, for a customer, you can imagine that it is quite expensive.

I configure every customer's automatic tweaking of IPS policies so that the IPS policy is enabled for the devices seen by Firepower, for recognition of what kinds of clients and hosts are in the network. Other than that, we do not do a lot of automation within Firepower.

Since 7.0, I don't have a lot of things to complain about. If I do have suggestions for improvements, I will give them during the beta programs. The speed of the FMC is very good. The deployment time is much better. They added the policy deployment rollback. That was something I really missed, because if I destroyed something I was able to undo that. Now, for me, it's actually almost perfect.

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Get your homework done. Get to know in-depth what Cisco can do and compare it with Palo Alto. If you're happy with Cisco, go for it but Palo Alto is the safer choice. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

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I rate the solution a seven out of ten.

Cisco Secure Firewall should be consolidated with routers, switches, or VOIP.

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If it is possible, I would advise others to try out a demo with Cisco to test their firewalls. The biggest lesson I learned from using this solution is that there are many ways to achieve the same outcome. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. 

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I am very happy with this product in terms of netting, routing, and VPN functionalities. If you are a small organization with around 100 people and you are not thinking of Layer 7 security, deep security, and malware detection, Cisco ASA would be very useful and cost-effective for you.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall an eight out of ten.

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The biggest lesson I have learned from using this solution is that you can't always trust that console. In the particular case of the traffic which I was used to seeing identified in CTR, not seeing that traffic but knowing that it was actually occurring was a little bit of a concern. It wasn't until we actually put rules in that said "block that traffic" that I started to see the traffic in the console and in the CTR. Overall, my confidence in Cisco as a whole was shaken by that series of events. I have a little bit less trust in the brand, but so far I've been happy with the results. Ultimately we got what we wanted out of it. We expected certain capabilities and we received those capabilities. We may have been early adopters — maybe a little bit too early. If we had waited a little bit, we might've seen more about these SIP issues that weren't just happening to us. They've happened other people as well.

The maturity of our company's security implementation is beyond the nascent stage but we're not what I would call fully matured. We're somewhere in the middle. "Fully matured" would be having a lot more automation and response capabilities. At this point, to a large extent, the information security team doesn't even have a grasp on what devices are connected to the network, let alone the ability to stop a new device from being added or quarantined in an automated fashion. From my point of view, posture control from our ISE system, where it would pass the SGTs to the FirePOWER system so that we could do user-based access and also automated quarantining, would go a long way towards our maturity. In the NISK model, we're still at the beginning stages, about a year into the process.

Most of our tools have some security element to them. From the Cisco product line, I can think of about ten that are currently deployed. We have a few extras that are not Cisco branded, three or four other items that are vulnerability-scanning or SIEM or machine-learning and automation of threat detection.

The stuff that we have licensed includes the AMP for Networks, URL filtering, ITS updates and automation to the rule updates, as well as vulnerability updates that the product provides. Additionally, we have other services that are part of Cisco's threat-centric defense, including Umbrella and AMP for Endpoints. We use Cisco Threat Response, or CTR, to get a big-picture view from all these different services. There's a certain amount of StealthWatch included in the product, as well as some of the other advantages of having the Cisco Talos security intelligence.

The integration among these products is definitely better than among the non-Cisco products. It's much better than trying to integrate it with non-Cisco functionality. That is probably by design, by Cisco. Because they can work on both ends of, for example, integrating our AMP for Endpoints into our FirePOWER Management Console, they can troubleshoot from both ends. That probably makes for a better integration whereas, when we're trying to troubleshoot the integration with, say, Microsoft Intune, it's very hard to get Cisco to work together with Microsoft to figure out where the problem is. When you have the same people working on both sides of the equation, it makes it a little easier. 

Additionally, as our service needs have progressed and the number of products we have from Cisco has increased, they've put us onto a managed security product-support model. When I call in, they don't only know how to work on the product I'm calling in on. Take FMC, for example. They also know how to work on some of those other products that they know we have, such as the Cisco Voice system or Jabber or the WebEx Teams configurations, and some of those integrations as well. So, their troubleshooting doesn't end with the firewall and then they pass us off to another support functionality. On that first call, they usually have in-house resources who are knowledgeable about all those different aspects of the Threat Centric defenses, as well as about routine routing and switching stuff, and some of the hardware knowledge as well. We're a heavy Cisco shop and it helps in troubleshooting things when the person I'm talking to doesn't know only about firewalls. That's been beneficial. It's a newer model that they've been deploying because they do have so many customers with multiple products which they want to work together.

In most cases, this number of tools improves our security operations, but recent events indicate that, to a large extent, the tools and their utilization, beyond the people who deployed them, weren't very helpful in identifying and isolating a particular issue that we had recently. Ultimately, it ended up taking Cisco and a TAC case to identify the problems. Even though the security team has all these other tools that they utilize, apparently they don't know how to use them because they weren't able to utilize them to do more than provide info that we already had.

We have other vendors' products as well. To a large extent, they're monitoring solutions and they're not really designed to integrate. The functionality which some of these other products provide is usually a replication of a functionality that's already within the Cisco product, but it may or may not be to the extent or capacity that the information security team prefers. My functionality is largely the security hardware and Cisco-related products, and their functionality is more on the monitoring side and providing the policies. From their point of view, they wanted specific products that they prefer for their monitoring. So it wasn't surprising that they found the Cisco products deficient, because they didn't want the Cisco products in the first place. And that's not saying they didn't desire the Cisco benefits. It's just they have their preference. They'd rather see Rapid7's vulnerability scan than ISE's. They'd rather see the connection events from Darktrace rather than relying on the FMC. And I agree, it's a good idea to have two viewpoints into this kind of stuff, especially if there's a disagreement between the two products. It never hurts to have two products doing the same thing if you can afford it. The best thing that can happen is when the two products disagree. You can utilize both products to figure out where the deficiency lies. That's another advantage.

For deployment, upgrades, and maintenance, it's just me.

We were PIX customers when they were software-based, so we've been using that product line for some time, other than the Meraki MXs that we're using for the branch offices. The Merakis are pretty good firewalls as well.

We also have access here at our primary data centers, but they're configured differently and do different things. The MXs we have at our data centers are more about the LAN functionality and the ability to fail from site to site and to take the VPN connections from the branch offices. For remote access VPN, we primarily used the firewalls. For our site-to-site VPNs, we primarily use these firewalls. For our public-facing traffic, or what is traditionally referred to as DMZ traffic, we're primarily relying on these firewalls. So, they have a lot of functionality here at the credit union. Almost all of our internet bound traffic travels through those in some way, unless we're talking about our members' WiFi traffic.

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We just don't have a lot of the control or customizability that we would like to have over the system. A lot of this has to do with how AT&T is handling the access to it. Also, the hardware is outdated. We would like to go with a product in which everything is very transparent, clear, organized, all in the same place, and we can monitor clearly. The reason that we are looking to change is price: We pay a lot for it. If we had more control over it, we would be better able to control the quality and performance of the network and services, as well as the budget.

The most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• IPsec VPN
• Good stable connection
• Failover support: We need to have dual-WAN, so we can get two WAN connections in there and have failover. 
• Load balancing would be good, especially for those rough patches. 
• Internal web filtering and blocking: We need to be able to control what our end users are looking at.
• Monitoring: As much monitoring as we can get.
  

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The same level of protection can be had at a much lower cost! Look at rolling your own with commodity hardware, Suricata (Or SNORT if you choose, but look at the differences please!), Aanval for the central management and the emerging threats rules.

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We had it integrated with the Umbrella solution a few years ago.

I would rate this solution as nine out of 10.

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I would rate this solution a nine on a scale from one to ten.

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Cisco is a large, good and reliable firewall. They are working on advanced features and catching up with the leaders in the market. I believe that's a score for them. A yearly subscription is cheaper than Palo Alto and Fortinet offer. They provide good support and once it's loaded, it doesn't give a lot of problems, that's very important.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

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I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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We are using about ten different security tools, including analytics, monitoring, threat management, and email security. What we have integrated is the ISE and FTD but the third-party solutions are not fully integrated.

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I would advise that If you want something robust, a good hardware solution, I think it's competitive and you have a good warranty, you have to choose Cisco. 

I would rate the solution 8 out of 10.

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I am satisfied with the current facility and the management environment of the Cisco ASA, it's great for me.

I think that the cost would be the main factor when evaluating solutions since some of the companies or some of our clients ask about costs upfront. Once the client has made their initial request and inquired about any subsequent subsystem connectivity integration ideas, they always want to know how much everything will cost. The deciding factor is mainly based on the price point of the total user solution.

Overall, the criteria that we consider when constructing an integration decision depends largely on the client company we are working with. We evaluate clients based according to their size, industry function, and the total budget that would be recommended for an effective solution.

I would give this product a rating of 9 out of 10!

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I would rate this solution a nine out of ten. Not a ten because I'm reserving the one point for whatever new surprises they are going to provide.

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When you're evaluating the solution, take a look at the customer reviews.

We have had no issues with Cisco Secure Firewall, and I would rate it at nine on a scale from one to ten.

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I wouldn't recommend this solution because it is already considered to be a legacy firewall.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a strong eight out of 10. It is powerful, but it lacks some of the capabilities.

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If configured, Firepower provides us with application visibility and control.

The ability to futureproof our security strategy is definitely there. There are a lot of functions that we don't yet use. When I say we don't use a function, I mean that the functionality or the ability is not turned on yet simply because we have not gotten around to it. The ability is there, the capability is there. That also goes into the reasoning behind why we chose it.

Do your research, know your skillset, be comfortable with your skillset, and don't be afraid to challenge yourself.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight.

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Everything has room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a five out of ten.

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Overall, I am pretty satisfied with this product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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We support ASA 5508, 5585, and 5525 - all the versions of the firewall. Again, we built a HTAB machine too.

We've worked with Cisco for many years and I love working with them.

Right now, ASA is getting older. A better recommendation may be to use Firepower, a Next-Generation Firewall, no ASA. In cases for some remote VPN access, we recommend ASA, however, for all of the deployments, the recommendation now is to use a Next-Generation Firewall from Cisco Firepower. 

Overall, I would rate the solution at a seven out of ten. That said, for remote access alone, I'd rate the product at a nine.

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Cisco ASA Firewall Is not as much of a plug and play solution as some of the others. You just need to make sure that you do your research.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco ASA Firewall a rating of nine.

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I would just say that it's expensive. The product is fine on its own, it's high end. It's got a high brand name attached to it. I would recommend the product, however. The product works great. It does everything it's supposed to do. There's no issues with it, no real concerns. It's just expensive.

I would rate it an eight out of 10 because it does everything it's designed to do, but it is not any better than other industry-leading solution, and it's far more expensive.

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I think I can rate this product as an eight out of ten. A strong eight. The newest version of software and solutions often have bugs and functional problems because they have not been rigorously tested in a production environment. It is not the modern, next-generation firewall, but it solidly serves simple purposes. For simple purposes, it's the best in my opinion. I am used to its CRI (Container Runtime Interface) and its environment, so for me, familiarity and stability are the most important advantages.

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For the Cisco ASA NGFW, it is a bit more expensive than other products, but their method is a lot more stable in my experience. It has all the features that you would need in a next-generation firewall. They are always developing new features and introducing them.

I don't have anything that I'm currently missing with Cisco. On a scale from one to ten, I would rate the product at eight.

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I would recommend the product, but cost is a big factor. Some companies cannot afford expensive products, like Cisco and Palo Alto.

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I would advise someone considering this solution to just go for it. It's expensive but it's a robust solution. The only thing is that you have to convince your finance guy to go for it.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

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As a rule, any device upon delivery is obsolete. Pick up the solution for your business, based on your specific needs.

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We are a reseller, and for us, it's a 10 out of 10 because if we sell it, we will earn money, but customers have to agree with us.

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The scalability, the performance of the devices, the features, and the support, when looking at them combined, make the product a nine out 10.

We're planning the deployment of Cisco ISE soon, to be like our NAC.

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It is a good solution for a big traffic load, but its management is not very easy. FortiGate is better in terms of management and user-friendliness.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall an eight out of ten.

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This is a very stable platform, and you can adjust the engine for malware protection. It is one of the best and a very reliable solution.

I would rate this solution a 10 out of 10. 

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We are the customer. We are in the oil and gas business. We don't have a business relationship with Cisco.

I'd recommend the solution to others straight away. It's more or less a very standard option here in Pakistan.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I'd rate the solution at an eight.

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Cisco ASA is a very robust solution. It does its job and it has all the top features. If you have a solution that is creating a script and you need to deploy many implementations, you can create a script in the device and it will be the same for all. After that, you just have to do the fine tuning. It lacks when it comes to the configuration steps and the pain that that process is. You need to spend loads of time with it at setup. Overall, it does everything they say it does.

It's a very good solution but don't only go with the ASA. Go for Cisco Umbrella and join them together. If you have remote employees, go for AnyConnect to be more than secure in your infrastructure.

You cannot do everything with Cisco Defense Orchestrator. You have a few options with it but cannot do everything from the cloud if you are connected with the console of a device. You don't have all the same options, you only have some options with it. For example, you can manage the security policies, all of them, from the cloud. However, not all the settings and all the things you can do when in front of the device are available with CDO. What you see is what you get.

Most companies using ASA are big companies. They are not SMB companies. There are very few SMB companies using it. There are the banks and consulting companies, the huge ones. Usually the ASAs are for massive companies.

Our reality in Portugal is a little different. I was at a Cisco conference here in Lisbon and the guy said, "Oh, we have this solution," — it was for multi-factor authentication — "and we have different licenses. We have a license for 40,000 and for 20,000 users. And I was thinking, "This guy doesn't know Portuguese reality. There are no companies in Portugal with 40,000 employees."

Large companies who do use ASA use various security tools like IPS and Layer 7 control. From my experience, and from common sense, it's best to have solutions from different vendors joining together. The majority have defense products for the deterrent capacities they need to achieve security. Our clients also often have Cisco ISE, Identity Service Engine. It's a NAC solution that integrates perfectly with ASA and with AnyConnect as well.

As for future-proofing your security strategy, ASA is the perfect solution if you integrate other Cisco solutions. But the ASA alone will not do it because it does not handle some of the core issues, like full visibility of the network, the users, the machines, the procedures, and the applications, in my opinion.

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This is a very straightforward firewall. There is a management platform with its own operating system. Just make sure that everything is set up properly for your uplink switches because that is an issue that we ran into.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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They really need support for deployment.

I would rate this solution nine out of 10 because I think if you have the budget and you plan it properly I think you won't have the initial deployment problems I faced.

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I rate this solution an eight out of ten and I would definitely recommend it to other users. If the developers would add a reporting dashboard, and perhaps lower the pricing, I will rate it higher. But overall I am really satisfied with Cisco ASAv.

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I would advise someone considering this solution to subscribe to the URL filtering and to use malware inspection.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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Almost all IT staff have used, or can easily learn how to use, the Cisco ASA appliance because it’s been around for years and is so popular (with good reason). For us, we stuck with what we know. It was an easy sell to get it signed off by higher-ups as they’d also heard of the ASA device from their time in IT.

This solution gets an eight out of ten because it is easy, has the features we need, keeps costs low, and provides granular control using appliances that are already familiar to the team.

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When you are going to select a product, don't look at the cost, but at the functionality. Also, look at the stability. These days, the startups will show a new function or functionality, but when looking for a partner, make sure the company is sustainability for the new four years? Do they have the funding?

We have a large ecosystem system: Symantec, McAfee, Splunk, Check Point firewalls, Cisco firewalls and IPS IDS from Cisco. They integrate and work well together. Cisco has been security leader for the last 20 years, so the products are quite stable working in sync.

We are using every version of the product: On-premise, Azure, and AWS, which is a new offering.

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Get someone to help you plan and set up the firewall concept, as well as the initial setup and testing. Waiting for later is not the time to test or change anything without an outage.

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Do research. FPMC is great for us but it requires a lot of time and attention.

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Overall, I would rate this solution at seven out of ten because Cisco ASDM needs to be updated.

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For clean and easy protection of an enterprise, it is a really good product. It can be also deployed as a virtualized solution in data centers.

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I rate Cisco ASA Firewall eight out of 10. Cisco offers a great educational series to train users on their devices.

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My main advice would be to utilize all the guides and documentation available from Cisco publicly and not trying to implement it using legacy thinking. Don't try to just replace something else you have. If you have a next-gen firewall, you want to try to utilize what you're getting, and getting the most out of a firewall. There are some great guides and documentation on Cisco that explains what you can do and how you can do it.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

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It is a very powerful device. Firepower Management Center is a great tool, but it is a bit slow.

We don't have Cisco Umbrella integrated with Firepower. We tested Firepower's integration with Meraki Umbrella, but we don't use it because you need better firmware.

I would rate this solution as an eight (out of 10).

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Cisco ASA is a product that I can recommend for its stability.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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I would advise using Firepower and not other products because other products do not have all the features available in Firepower.

We are looking to integrate with Cisco Umbrella next year and we will integrate our switches and Cisco Firepower with it.

It has been a good investment for my organization and I'm happy to be using it. All its features are good. It's a great firewall for a small business. But you really need to know what you are doing to get the most benefit from it. Overall, I don't think anybody can replace Firepower or Cisco.

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This is a solution that I recommend.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from working with this solution is to always update the firewall. If you do not have the latest updates then it will not function well, so always keep it up to date.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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As far as rating this product, I would give it a nine out of ten. The only real drawbacks are the lack of multi-monitoring and not really having clear instructions prior to jumping in and implementing it.

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On a scale from one to ten, I would rate this product at nine. Cisco ASAv is good in many advanced networking features.

I'm working with Cisco. They have competition with many vendors.

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I am really satisfied with the product and I rate this an 8.5 out of ten. The reason why I wouldn't rate it a ten, is because I find it a little more complicated to set up a firewall for publishing than when using Meraki. I therefore believe there is room for improvement.

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I would rate it a nine out of ten. Not a ten because of the horrible initial setup and because you can't handle all operations from one interface. You have to go back into the command line to even be able to type program language, even though you have a graphic user interface for it but it doesn't work properly.

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Do your research, know what you want to achieve.

Cisco ASA needs to be more reliable. Because of the nature of the product, it has to be rock solid and, unfortunately, it's not.

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To make sure they have the cooperation of the networking team that supports the firewalls. It has been difficult for us to get the tool working to its full potential because our network team is resistant to some of the things we want to monitor.

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Cisco utilizes BrightCloud for URL filtering. Web filtering is the main problem with this product.

My advice to anybody who is considering this product is that if they want good security, compared to other offerings such as those by Check Point and Palo Alto, then they should implement Cisco Firepower.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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I would recommend this solution. If you have the money, it's a very stable product. Make sure to keep critical spare parts. You might have for instance some modules that will need acceleration cards and those types of things.

I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

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The functionality is fine.

When they prove to me they cannot be hacked then I can give them a ten.

I would rate this solution as eight out of ten. 

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I would rate it a nine out of ten. 

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If you are looking into implementing VPN or advanced features, I recommend using this product. URL or content filtering is not good as much as the NGFWs are.

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Spec the right hardware model and choose the right license for your needs.

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ASAs are a solid solution. Cisco provides more training and learning materials than any other vendor, which is critical if an organization wants to take true ownership of a technological solution. Documentation and use cases alone tend to make me a fan of Cisco's way of engineering, and they have come a long way over the last few years when it comes to integrating their solutions into comprehensive security communications platforms using tools like PRIME and ISE. FirePOWER and AMP make Cisco an even better overall contender for top FW status.

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You will want to have Next Generation functionality, so choose FortiGate or Cisco Firepower.

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This product is very usable when you need integrity in your network. This product is very functional when you use a Cisco Identity Services engine.

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If it is for a banking domain, your organisation should use Cisco which can assure better security than any other vendors' products. Also, they have the best documentation, reliability and support.

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I am working for a Cisco seller in Mexico, and we have a relationship with Cisco. We are a gold partner. We ensure that the development is of the proper sizing for our clients.  

I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten. We've had a very good experience so far. The only downside is that it's not as advanced as, for example, Palo Alto. That said, if you have the right skills to manipulate the configuration capabilities, Cisco is quite good.

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We are just at the beginning of the deployment of Arctic Wolf for managed detection and response. We don't have a lot of information yet, as we are onboarding it now.

We wanted to have someone watching and we couldn't set up the SOC by ourselves because we need six security dedicated people to man it at all times. With a staff of 80, it was too much. We engaged Arctic Wolf to be our 24/7 eyes on the potential risks that are happening. They can alert us and we can deal with it.

We like to use the integrator just to make sure that the firewall is set up correctly. If you don't have people dedicated to the firewall, then you can't do it in-house.

I would rate the Cisco firepower NGFW Firewall a nine out of ten.

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I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

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At this point, Cisco ASA is not a product that I recommend. My advice is that people should look at other solutions because there are other products available on the market that are just as good, if not even better.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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On a scale of one to ten with one being worst and ten being best, I would rate Cisco SourceFire Firewall as a nine. It could easily be a ten if it had a better GUI interface.

As far as making recommendations to other people about the product, I recommend they buy it if they need an enterprise solution. Also, I would recommend other Cisco solutions like Cisco AMP (Advanced Malware Protection). 

I think most large companies that require strong security should always use Cisco because it's stable, scalable, and has many features. Enterprise organizations will benefit from Cisco because their business requirement will be more complicated and require a better solution and more flexibility. I think all the companies should use Cisco because it's number one the market and has the best security, better stability, and better scalability.

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Watch out for the marketing hype vs objective reality. Do the advertised features actually work correctly/effectively?

We chose a different solution after performing in-house testing.

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Cisco is still a very good hardware manufacture, but they need to catch up on the software portion. We used the Cisco product because we know they tried very hard to get back into the market and we were willing to give them a chance since we are still using a lot of Cisco product. For those who are non-Cisco trained, it would be very hard to pick up.

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Budget a lot of money, especially on the initial setup and the annual licensing and maintenance cost.

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We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with Cisco.

It's a very good solution. I'd recommend it to other users.

Overall, I'd rate it seven out of ten.

Although I can't speak to the pricing, I've found the solution works quite well for us. I'd rate it higher if it could integrate a bit better with other solutions.

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Have a plan. Find out how much bandwidth and throughput you need before you implement it because if you don't scale it well from the start, it can slow down your environment. Keep in mind that it adds so much security that the total data throughput can take a hit. 

We have many customers, but in general, many of our customers are using all the tools they can to secure their infrastructure, such as AMP, Umbrella, and Firepower. Many companies are doing what they can to secure their network and their infrastructure. But there are also customers that only have a firewall. In today's world that's not enough to secure the network at all, but that's a decision the customer has to live with. We have tried to push them in the right direction. But the majority of our customers have a secure infrastructure.

The other Cisco products or services our customers are using in conjunction with their firewall include AMP, AnyConnect, cloud mail Email Security Appliances, Cisco ISE, and Web Security Appliances. We are only a Cisco partner. We don't do HP or Check Point or Palo Alto, so our customers do have a lot of Cisco features. For regular use, the integration among these Cisco products is pretty easy, but I have also worked with these products a lot. But it's easy to implement a firewall solution on Firepower and you can tweak it as much as you like. ASA is also easy to set up and configure, in my opinion, but I'm a security professional. For a regular user, both products can be pretty cumbersome.

Firepower 7.0 gives you visibility into how it inspects the packets, but it's tough to say how deep or how much visibility you get. However, if you have a Layer 4 firewall, it is clear that a Layer 7 firewall gives you more visibility, and you can see the packets that the application connection is using, meaning which application is using them. It's not how much visibility you get but, rather, the fact that you get Layer 7 visibility.

Cisco Secure Firewall has reduced our operational costs because it is faster to deploy configurations to firewalls. But when using it, it's more or less the same as it was before 7.0. The amount of time it saves when deploying configurations depends on how often you deploy policies or how many changes you have. But if you compare 7.0 to earlier versions, deployment time has been reduced from five to 10 minutes down to two to five minutes. If you make all the changes at once and only do one deployment, the time saved is not that big of a deal. But if you do one change and deploy, and another change and deploy, and another change and deploy, you will save more time.

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I would not recommend Cisco.

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall a six out of ten.

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I would rate Cisco ASAv a six out of ten.

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Think before you buy, as this solution can be your success or failure. Always work with professionals and not promoters.

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I would advise someone considering this solution to have a technical support or maintenance contract with the vendor or a third-party to help maintain the product. Without help with maintenance, there is no value to the product.

You should have a good technician and admin support for all this product in order to maximize the value and benefits. 

I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

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I would rate it a seven out of ten. I would recommend this solution to a colleague. No product will give you 100% of what you're looking for but this solution is close. 

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Customers should take note that the migrations steps are not easy. The tools cannot solve all configurations and handle all configurations directly so you will have to do some coding by yourself. The solution is not complete at the moment but it will get better.

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I would advise someone considering this solution to just read the release notes before doing anything. You should know what the exact architecture is and what the exact details of the software are before trying to deploy it.

I would rate this solution a ten. 

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We like that Cisco has a lot of experience on the market trends.

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Yes, it's a good provider when it comes to firewall solution, but maybe limiting when you are looking at the wall UTM management. It's delayed behind some of the competitors.

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All you need to succeed is careful design, professional setup, and a support contract.

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I would recommend that you understand the needs of the business case before choosing the product and start implementing it. It is very important to choose the right licenses from the beginning.

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Make sure you tune your rules very well, as some clients just leave the firewall as it is and don't maintain the access rules or tighten them to be more granular and efficient.

In terms of maintenance, you need one person for security analysis and one to create rules and for daily support.

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I utilize different brands of firewalls depending on the needs of a client, i.e., in-house IT versus outsourced. I am vendor agnostic as much as possible.

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Do research in to the types of offerings out there and make a determination of what may be the best fit for your organizations requirements and future security goals.

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I would definitely recommend this solution. You just have to learn how to configure it. It is a Cisco solution, and there is not much to be improved. I plan to keep using it and expand its usage.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall an eight out of ten.

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My advice to anyone considering Cisco ASA Firewall is that you need a lot of money to implement the Cisco solution. But it's a good solution. If you want to go to Cisco, you need a lot of money.

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My suggestion for anybody who is looking at Cisco ASA is to work with the vendor, as they have newer products.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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We use this solution with Cisco CPEs and background routers. These work well together. 

We have some other VPN options and AnyConnect. We do have routers with firewalls integrated, using a lot of ISR 1100s. In the beginning, we had a few problems integrating them, but as the software got better, we have seen a lot of those problems disappear. The first software wasn't so good, but it is now.

We have disabled Firepower in all of our firewalls. We don't use Cisco Defense Orchestrator either. We have a pretty basic setup using Cisco ASDM or command line with integration to customers' AD.

I would rate the product as an eight (out of 10).

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It's very good to get partner support if you're not very familiar with how Cisco works. Cisco Certified Partner support is a priority.

For application visibility and control we're using a WAN optimizer called Silver Peak.

To replace the firewalls within our data center we're planning to put in FMCs and FTDs. With the new FMCs what I like is that you don't need to log in to the firewalls directly. Whatever changes you do are done on your FMCs. That is a much needed improvement over the old ASAs. You can log in to the management center to make any configuration changes. 

There are two of us managing the ASAs in our company, myself and a colleague, and we are both network specialists. We plan to increase usage. We're a company of 650 employees and we also have consultants who are coming from outside to gain access to certain services on our network. We need to make provisions on the firewall for them.

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If you're really looking into Cisco Firepower, they have a good product, but I would say study hard and look around. If you want an easier product, you can always use Palo Alto. If you are a Cisco guy and you want to be with Cisco, you'll need to get an integration service engineer from the Cisco side. That will actually help you out a lot. Alternatively, maybe you can go for Palo Alto. That would be the best thing to do.

If you are not worried about the technical integration part and learning how it works and how well it can go with the environment, I would recommend you go ahead and take an integration engineer with you. Doing a POC could be troublesome for you. We have professional services. You can leverage that.

If you do not want to invest much money on all that stuff you can go ahead and hire someone who's already aware. Or if not, you can use any other vendor like Palo Alto.

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ASA is one of the the state-of-the-art firewall devices for security.
It is affordable and not too complicated to use if you are doing standard operations (modifying ACLs, natting and so on) on an existing deployment.

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Cisco's ASA product line will be replaced by Cisco FTD. And Cisco FTD software is not ready for production (lack of many basic NGFW features). So, maybe only high-performance Firepower 41xx/21xx/90xx Series is good as IPS.

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Unfortunately, the ASA 5500 is EoS and EoL, and I hope that Cisco’s NGF 5500-X series will be a worthy successor. This does not mean that Cisco will stop software support and will continue to release new software versions with new and improved features for the ASA 5500 series.

As with any other product, the main things for a successful implementation are to decide what you want to achieve, and what your main goal is, and then, you need good planning, not only for your current needs, but you also need to keep in mind further grow and needs. Good planning is, at least, 80% of successful implementation.

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This is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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I would recommend this product. I suggest this solution to my colleagues because it is a great product and is really stable. When looking at other products in use in other companies this product is superior. 

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall ten out of ten.

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I would recommend Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall to potential customers.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall a ten.

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In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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Cisco firewalls are not for kids. They are for people who understand security. Now I know why people with Cisco training are very good, because they train you to be competent. They train you to have ability. And when you have ability, their firewall becomes very easy to configure.

When Cisco is teaching you, Cisco teaches you the concept. Cisco gives you a concept. They don't focus on how to configure the device. With Fortinet, for instance, Fortinet teaches you how to configure their device, without giving you the concepts. Cisco gives you the concepts about how the technology is working. And then they tell you how you are going to configure things on their box. When you are an engineer and you understand the technology from Cisco, it means that you can drive everything, because if you understand Cisco very well, you can work with FortiGate. If you understand security from Cisco, it means that you can configure everything, you can configure every firewall. This is why I like Cisco.

When it comes to other vendors, it's easy to understand and it's easy to configure, but you can configure without understanding. And when you configure without understanding, you can't troubleshoot. To troubleshoot, you need understanding. 

I'm a security analyst, so I deal with everything about firewalls. I'm talking about ASA firewalls, and I'm talking about ASA with Firepower, FTD, and Cisco Meraki MX. When it comes to security tools I am comfortable with Cisco and everything Cisco.

One of our clients was using Cisco ASA. They got attacked, but I don't think that this attack came from outside their company. They were managing their firewall and configuring everything well, but they were still getting attacks. One of their employees had been compromised and his laptop was infected. This laptop infected everything in the organization. So the weakest link can be your employees.

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I would recommend this solution to someone considering it. I would recommend to study and know what the requirements are exactly. One of the things that might be a problem, or might be a complex thing to do is to go through Cisco Firepower, because Firepower is a software that's complex to explain to somebody. There is the previous ASA code that Cisco had and there is the source file that they acquired. Cisco started to send it as ASA Firepower services. Then they combined the two codes together and they started to send a new code called the Firepower Threat Defense, FTD.

Any customer who wants to buy it needs to understand all of these options and what the limitations of each option are, the pros and cons. Any customer who wants to deploy Firepower needs to understand what Cisco has to offer so he can choose correctly.

I would rate it a seven out of ten. 

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If people want to build a solid security solution for their company, I think this solution is the best but it would depend on the configuration of your company. For a good company to have a good solution for security, you can choose the Cisco firewall for that and be confident. 

I think I can give that product an eight out of ten. It comes down to the user interface. It needs to be easier so that more people can quickly develop the skills to manage the product. It would be better for us right now for more people to have certification or to just develop the skills to use the product. But if Cisco made it easier and took away the need for certification, it would be easier for us to use company-wide and have more people involved.

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I would recommend this solution. I would rate this solution as eight out of ten.

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To test the product in their network and to evaluate other products. I am sure that the Cisco ASA Firewall will be the winner.

Our complete relationship is based on the following partner competencies:
Certifications:

• Gold Certified Partner
Specializations:
• Advanced Collaboration Architecture Specialization
• Advanced Data Center Architecture Specialization
• Advanced Enterprise Networks Architecture Specialization
• Advanced Security Architecture Specialization

Cloud Partners:
• Storage: EMC
• Virtualization: VMware
• Cloud Management: VMware
• Cloud Professional Services
• SaaS Simple Resale

Other Authorizations:
• Registered Partner
• Cisco Certified Refurbished Equipment
• Cisco Developer Network Cisco Products Marketplace
• Cisco Meeting Server formerly Acano
• PSPP Defense
• Smart Care Registered Partner
• ATP - Unified Contact Center Enterprise

Partner since:

• More than 10 years

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Do look at Palo Alto for comparison, SonicWall is also on the market. But before anything, you need to know your infrastructure really well.

For example, we brought a PAN firewall for east-west traffic control so we could implement a zero trust network. But our business traffic is a bidding traffic which has extremely small packet size and huge connection size per seconds happening, which sent the PAN firewall into a tailspin. Since we bought the device without a POC, we had to eat the cost. So make sure to do a PoC with all the vendor equipment before you purchase it.

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No.

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The product line offers tremendous capability. Please look into all of the solutions it can provide for you to maximize your investment.

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I have used many versions of the software over the years, versions 8.6 to 9.1 and 9.9 to 9.12.

Keep in mind before purchasing the solution, if you do need to scale the solution then ASA is probably not right for you.

I rate Cisco ASA Firewall an eight out of ten.

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Currently, I would give this solution high marks because I have not had a problem. However, keeping in mind, my evaluation period has been short. I would not give the solution a ten, nothing is perfect.

I rate Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall a nine out of ten.

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In the future, I would like to see friendlier configuration and only one license because everything needs a license. You need a URL license, security license, everything is based on a license. I would like to have one license that covers everything. But I am really impressed by the program and my rating is nine out of ten.

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Once you deploy a virtual database or virtual machine for any product, like Cisco. The first thing to do with your data is test it. So, you need to be prepared with the test that you want to test before you deploy the instances. Because after deploying instances, you wait and see what the data come back with, how to configure it, and review what doesn't work. Therefore, you need to do some background homework before starting, such as what type of data you need to put into it, how to test it, and will the system process it.

We have used both the on-premise and AWS version. We started using AWS in the past six to seven months. Prior to that, we used the on-premise version. The AWS version is better as it is quick to spin up and configure. Also, with AWS, everything is preset, and it is more flexible.

We have it integrated with many other products, like threat intelligence and analytics. For example, all our logs go into Splunk, then we receive our analytics from there. We also have Splunk on AWS. Thus, all the data stays on the cloud, so there is no latency, etc.

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I give this solution a seven out of 10. Some of the tools are still a little bit difficult to use.

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Cisco has done great job in introducing new features in their security product by acquiring specialized companies in the past. However, they still need to improve their unique feature products as they are in a challenger position, but not on top, at various product review portals.

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I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

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I do not hear anything bad about the competition. I am difficult to change my ways and learn a new product. Unless somebody comes and makes a SWOT analysis and shows me the evidence of how the alternative is better, I am fine with Cisco.

I would recommend this solution to others. 

I rate Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall an eight out of ten.

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With this solution, we have everything that we need. I don't know about other people's use cases, but ours is pretty straightforward.

My advice to anybody researching this type of solution is to stick with Cisco products, no matter which one it is. We've had pretty good luck with everything from Cisco.

I don't have any issues with this solution, so I would rate it a ten out of ten.

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My advice would depend on what your comfort level is. If you have already used Cisco, I would recommend this, to evaluate it at least. Evaluate it and learn how useful it is.

It gives good performance, the technology is quite good, sufficient for our objectives, protecting our network, etc. The missing two points are because they have to do make more improvements.

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Plan very well in order to have a seamless project implementation and transition.

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Plan well the hardware requirements for future growth and heavy usage.

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If you are using Cisco, then you will be very familiar with the product, and maybe you won't encounter any problems at all. However, if Cisco is a new solution, you should ask for a demo to see the interface of the ASDM and the defense system in action, and then decide if this is the kind of insight you need of your network.

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Cisco ASA Firewall is a good product. I would recommend it to others who are interested in using it.

I would rate it a seven out of ten.

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We're just customers. We use it in our office and suggest it to clients. However, we don't have a business relationship with Cisco.

We try to adhere to our client's needs, and therefore, if they specify hardware they want to use, like Fortinet, we tend to accommodate them.

That said, if they ask my opinion, I usually recommend Cisco ASA.

I know a lot about the product and I'm good at controlling everything. I have a lot of knowledge and understanding after working with it so closely. That's why I tend to favor it when my customers ask for advice.

Overall, I would rate the solution seven out of ten. If the user interface were a bit better, I'd rate it higher.

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Configuration on Firepower is currently madness as you have to redeploy it again with all its configurations if you use it as a module.

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If I were to advise others who are looking into implementing this product I would say I don't think they will like it. They would be able to meet business requirements better with other products, other vendors' firewalls. That's what I think, that's what I know from my own experience, from dealing with customers.

If those features, which I mentioned above in the first few questions, if they can add those features into the firewall as a standalone box, it can definitely become a player on the stage. They already have a good platform, even if it's a legacy product, it has that bit of maturity. So if, on top of that very good platform, they can add those features - security, threat intelligence features - they can get back into the market.

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Cisco ASA is a reliable product and it benefits you a lot in your network.

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Make sure you get the right product/license to do the job you need done. If you are in doubt ask a consultant or a Cisco Partner. I have seen cases where a firewall wasn't the right hardware for the job and you can't just switch off the firewall/inspector for some interfaces or networks.

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Its a nice professional product with lots of scalability. Easy to troubleshoot and there is tool called PACKET TRACER which simulates the packet and it will tell you whether a packet is allowed inbound or outbound for testing purposes.

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ASA is a very reliable product and I have been using it since I cam across it. I strongly recommend the use of the product

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We're both a customer of Cisco and a reseller.

This month we plan to upgrade from our existing hardware.

Overall, we've been happy with the results we've gotten. I would rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

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This is a product that I can recommend to others.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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For those who have the technical know-how with Cisco products, I would recommend going with the ASA firewall, but if you're new to the field and running a smaller business, deployment will be complicated. 

I would rate this solution a nine out of 10. 

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Take a look at the features included in the unified image. Some classic ASA functionality has not been integrated yet, go for non-unified image if the deployment requires something that is not available – classic ASA iOS plus Sourcefire code.

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The Cisco ASA product line will be replaced by Cisco FTD. Cisco FTD software is not ready for production, due to a lack of many basic NGFW features. Maybe only the high-performance Firepower 41xx/21xx/90xx Series is good as an IPS, because it is using a stable Sourcefire engine.

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I'm not overly familiar with ASA. I only work with it on an administration level.

I work with the latest version and I use the ASDM version server.

I wouldn't recommend that an organization choose ASA as a solution. They should look into other options.

Overall, I would rate the solution at a six out of ten. We haven't had the greatest experience.

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I can recommend this product because it is one of the most stable firewalls on the market. The suitability, however, depends on the environment and what is needed.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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They should incorporate it with FortiGate, or Sophos firewalls. 

If they are looking for a layer 7 type of security then they need to go with another solution.

I would rate Cisco ASAv a nine out of ten.

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It's difficult to give specific advice on the solution because it always depends on the design solution and the strategy. So what I would recommend is to use different firewalls and to use Cisco ASAv as a border firewall.

I would rate this solution as 7.5 out of 10. I wish the Cisco interface was not so granular. Check Point was easier to create specific rules than on ASAv, so that's why I say this. If you want to make things easier for an engineer, you always have to work on the interface. But the product, in and of itself, there's nothing wrong with it.

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There are other solutions, like Fortigate, which are very good solutions, and cheaper for the customer. Even the support via subscription is favorable, in terms of pricing. I would really advise the customer to do some research first and come up with the best solution for their needs

I rate Firepower as an eight out of 10. It is a good solution but it is expensive compared to other products, like Fortigate. Still, some of our customers do prefer Firepower over the others.

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Know what features are needed, and then purchase the necessary hardware and license.

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I'd say it would be very beneficial to posses certification such as CCNP Security, at least, to get the most out of it. It's a complex product which requires good knowledge of procedures and best practices. Being a CCIE R&S I know the value of those certifications, and I wish I had a CCNP Security to better handle the task.

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I have worked on the best firewalls in the market, and Cisco ASA is one of the best.

The below screenshots are taken from a demo of ASDM.

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I rate Cisco ASA Firewall a six out of ten.

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My main concern is the full revamp of the management console. We'd like to see a more user-friendly total revamp of how to manage the firewall rules. Also, there are a lot of additional features that need to be granular because with Cisco, at this point in time, all these features are still working in silos. A lot of integration needs to be done in general. 

Personally, I would discourage people from using Cisco. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of six.

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I always encourage our existing customers to move to the Cisco ASA Firepower version, i.e. the next generation Firepower like 2100, 4000, or 9300.

I would rate Cisco ASA an eight out of ten. An eight and not a ten because some of the features are limited and some are awful. We had to install other solutions for security and had to spend a lot on other hardware. Other vendors like Fortinet or Palo Alto Networks focus more on offering complete solutions.

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It is a very good device to use for those who value their network security.

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I would advise new users to look at next-generation firewalls like FTD or other models from Cisco. It's better than Cisco ASA. Cisco ASA Firewall isn't a next-generation firewall.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco ASA Firewall an eight.

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I would absolutely recommend this solution. It is a very straightforward and reliable solution. I would definitely like to propose and offer this solution to other colleagues.

Cisco doesn't have any plans to develop this kind of solution more. Cisco ASA Firewall will not be developed in the future. The next-generation firewall is the next step in the development of the Cisco firewall. For this reason, we are investigating the possibility of migrating to another product.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a nine out of ten. We are very happy with this solution. It is very straightforward and reliable, but it is quite a legacy solution and lacks performance. 

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My advice for anybody who is implementing Cisco ASA is that it is not very difficult to deploy and not very difficult to understand how to continue adding more rules to it.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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Most important criteria when selecting a vendor:

• Quality of the product
• Cost.

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I think Cisco has all the solutions: switching, routing, security, they have wireless. You can cover all the devices with Cisco. They have all the network and engineered tools to help resolve the issues that we have. They are really very good devices.

In terms of advice, I would say Cisco is the best company. They're very stable, there aren't too many issues. And when there is an issue they have many engineers who can solve the problem.

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I would go for bundle licenses and hire a Cisco engineer for implementation.

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In summary, this is a good product and I recommend it.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

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We are using ASA5585-X with Firepower SSP-20 (ASA version 9.6(1)3, Firepower version 6.1.0.5).

When looking at different solutions, take a deep look at the features.

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Choose it if you aim to have a stable environment.

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I would recommend this solution to other users.

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I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a seven out of ten. It needs improvement in terms of a few features and cost-friendliness. 

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This solution has good security and it's a good product. You can trust Cisco, and there's support as well, which is really good.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. 

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It is a good datacenter firewall, as they have now overcome integration issues with latest versions.

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If your company is small or mid-range, it is better to go with other vendors, because of the pricing.

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Cisco is good. Look at your requirements and create a matrix to figure out the best option.

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Read, read, read and understand your requirements beforehand.

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I give it a thumbs up.

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You should analyze the current setup and implement it as per the customers' requirement.

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Excellent product and excellent customer support.

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In my opinion it is a nice firewall product at a low price and good value for medium and large enterprises. View full review »

Cisco delivers a powerful firewall -- it’s not just a firewall but also a modular device that can deliver IPS hosting and wireless LAN controller as well. It also provides site to site VPN and remote access VPN services. View full review »

We have a gold partnership status with Cisco, however, we are also partners with companies such as Fortinet and Palo Alto.

For a next-generation firewall, I would likely recommend Palo Alto. However, if a company had the budget, I would recommend Fortinet. That said, for a VPN gateway, I would recommend Cisco ASA.

In general, I would rate Cisco's ASA Firewall at seven out of ten.

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Go for it. I really like how, once you get the ASA set up properly, it can run for a whole year without any major issues, apart from the normal daily administration.

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You have to find more confidentiality, integrity and availability.

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I would suggest implementing this product ascand has advanced security features.

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I would recommend Cisco ASA Firewall to potential users. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cisco ASA Firewall an eight.

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If you are looking for a stable run and it is easy to find someone to configure the service, then better go for Cisco; their support is very professional.

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Evaluate other product before using this product.

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Look through what your needs are.

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Best value will always be delivered by adding FMC (Firepower Management Console); at least their virtual edition.

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I rate it an eight out of 10, as it’s a new platform. Compared to Cisco ASA, it’s far better, per my usage to date.

Make sure you have an expert resource or subscribe to OEM technical support.

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Overall, this is a legacy product. 

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Make sure to plan your network carefully.

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This is a product that I would recommend to others.

I would rate Cisco ASA Firewall a nine out of ten.

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I would rate this solution an eight out of ten. An eight because it's a good security solution. It's more mature than its competitors. 

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Use the best practice guides and online documentation. Cisco has more information online free that any other brand, so use it!!!

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You should try it without restraints, and it is worth every penny.

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I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

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We need to upgrade our security requirements due to the new security requirement applicable in Europe (from GDPR) and the cyber security guidelines for our vessel (we are a US shipping company). 

Most important criteria when selecting a vendor: familiarity, reliability, and price.

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Be careful with temperature control in the rack area, since Cisco ASA 5585-X with SSP-10 heats up a lot.

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It's a great product.

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Its very difficult to write something about this product as it has so many options. I have studied 1000 pages about this product and most of the organizations use this firewall as it is the best in the world. I have never seen such a powerful device which can handle 2 million connections at 20Gbps speed. It can also inspect 4 million packets per second. View full review »

Good product, give it a chance.

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This is a product that I can recommend for an internal firewall. It's good enough.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

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I rate it an eight out of 10. 

I am only handling or supporting the ASA 5520 model in our company.

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I know that Cisco acquired Sourcefire and they re-introduced next-generation firewall features and I think they’ll improve NX features.

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You must specify your needs and choose the right options depending on the network requirements.

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