Cisco Secure Firewall Scalability
JT
JoshuaThums
Network Administration Lead at Forest County Potawatomi Community
Scalability is also excellent. I don't have any complaints about it. As long as you're willing to put the money forward, they are very scalable, but it's going to cost you.
Their ability to future-proof our security strategy is also very good. They continuously improve on and add items, functionalities, and features to their software.
User-wise, the government side of our organization doesn't have that many. There are maybe 1200 altogether. We had to upgrade our 5555s to 4110s and our 4110s are just about maxed out. We're pushing the max of the capabilities of all the equipment that we have. The 4110s average about eight gigabits a second all day long, for about 12 hours a day, through each of the devices. There are terabytes of traffic that go through those things a day.
We're always increasing the usage of these devices. They are the core of our network. We use them as our core routers and all traffic goes through them. They are the integral part, the center of our network. They're everything for us.
We have three people on our network team who maintain the entire network, including those devices.
View full review »RV
Rob Vreede
Principal Network Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
There haven't been any performance issues. We run HA clusters and don't do multiple clusters for scaling. We scale the boxes to our performance needs. We have nine staff members who work with this solution.
It's tough to scale because it's a firewall appliance, but in terms of the ability to deploy it virtually, it's inherently scalable. That is, as far as a firewall can scale, it's very scalable.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Firewall
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Secure Firewall. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.
I've implemented them anywhere from a 500 MB throughput device up to a 20 GB throughput device. Particularly around scalability, some improvements in terms of clustering would be good.
View full review »SB
Shashidhara B N
Director & CIO of IT services at Connectivity IT Services Private Limited
Cisco ASA Firewall is scalable to a certain extent.
View full review »EV
Ed Vanderpool
IT Technical Manager at Adventist Health
Scalability so far has been fantastic because we started with four Firepower Threat Defense boxes, but really after that, now we have 14 and we're going to be pushing that to 44 to 46 devices. The implementation has been pretty seamless and pretty easy. It's been great.
We use it exclusively for edge and core for firewall and for policy and for IPS and AnyConnect. We plan on continuing to integrate that tighter. So in the future, we probably will not grow that many physical devices, but we plan on actually integrating those tighter into the system, tighter with integration, with Cisco's ISE, and tighter integration with our ACI infrastructure. So at the end of the day, we don't see us going any further away from using Firepower as our core security edge device.
View full review »We have 105,000 users, and they all have access to use a VPN to connect back into our network. We found that it works very well for us, and it's very scalable to the number of users that we have. That's why we continue using it.
View full review »I'm a team of two. Either I'm looking at it, the other guy's looking at it, or no one's looking at it. It's part of my daily routine as I get in there and I make sure that I have the status quo before I move on to other projects or other tickets for the day. It's a daily process. They log the information right in.
I'll find out about scalability in a few weeks. I need to change out some firewalls that are a lower model to a higher model because of the VPN limitations. I'm going to have to do some more work and see how long it takes.
View full review »I don't think ASA Firewall is very scalable. It depends on the models and the license. However, it's pretty simple to update and upgrade the models, so I would say it's moderately scalable.
The scalability of Cisco Secure Firewall is really good. That's down to the management platform and the way it structures your access policies, what allows traffic in and what allows traffic out. You can easily add multiple regions, locations, and types of firewalls to the management platform. As soon as you do, they get all of those policies. Previously, you'd have had to configure each one time and time again. With this version, you import it, and it's ready to go. Thus, for scalability it's easy.
PS
Paul Stadlbauer
System Engineer at Telekom Deutschland GmbH
It's very scalable. Cisco is for mid to large businesses. For small businesses, there are solutions that are cheaper, but that's not the main focus.
A large environment comprises several thousand users. We have small to large size environments, but we mostly have mid to large.
JB
Jake Billingsley
Enterprise Architect at People Driven Technology Inc
In terms of scalability, they've got all different sizes of firewalls for different scales. Being able to understand how to size the firewalls appropriately is definitely key in that. That's where a partner can help, or even the customer Cisco account team can help with the scalability. They have the big multi-instance 9300 chassis down to the small 1000 series. There's a lot of scalability within the portfolio.
View full review »RH
Rifat Hyseni
Director of Information Technology at a government with 501-1,000 employees
The scalability of the solution is better than the other firewalls we have, due to technical features. Our technicians have realized that this is much more scalable compared to other solutions.
View full review »JS
JoelStech
Senior Network Engineer at Orvis
The devices we have can scale pretty well. We have 600 to 700 people and we have an e-commerce site. It's deployed across the entire organization, although we have multiple firewalls.
We have plans to increase usage. We're going to do more DMZ to protect ourselves. So we'll be having more interfaces off the firewalls and we'll be protecting more VLANs. That's probably as big as we are going to get. I don't see us doing too much more than that.
View full review »We use them for smaller campuses. Though, if we need to upgrade a model, then we go ahead and do that. For example, with our bigger campuses, we need to have a bigger model. They have specs out there that you can kind of line up with what you need.
View full review »KB
Kamal Benmekki
CTO at Intelcom
For daily operations and projects, scalability is very important. Cisco provides a way of mixing and clustering firewalls to enhance scalability. We have many ways to scale, and as our clients grow, we can have the Cisco firewall solution grow as well.
The scalability of Cisco Secure Firewall depends on the different models available, as each model may have a fixed scalability level. Therefore, the scalability we obtain will vary depending on the specific model we utilize.
View full review »MR
MohammadRauf
Security Officer at a government
We are a very small environment. Based on our scale, it's been perfect for our environment.
View full review »BB
Bryan Broadhurst
Cybersecurity Designer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
The scalability of the firewall is one of the main reasons why we looked to Cisco. The ability to add nodes and remove nodes from clusters has been hugely important, particularly in some of our more dynamic environments where we may need to speed up a few hundred machines just for a few days to test something and then tear it all back down again.
Within our data centers, we have around 6,000 endpoints, and then our user estate is around 4,500 endpoints and all of that connectivity is controlled by Cisco Secure Firewall.
View full review »I know that there are several models for every type of scale that you need. For small branches up to the data center or even for the cloud, there are models, but so far, we only have one cluster. Among all these different types, we found the perfect matching size for our company.
View full review »It's easy to scale it up and extend it to other operations. When we merged with another company, we were able to extend its usage to serve the other company. It became the main firewall for them as well. It works and it's scalable.
It's the main perimeter firewall for all traffic. Our organization has around 1,000 users spread across the country. It's also our MPLS solution for the traffic for branch networks. It's able to handle at least 1,000 connections simultaneously, give or take.
View full review »It is very scalable with the ability to virtualize, which is really easy. We do it during our maintenance window. Now, if we plan it, we know what we are doing. We can spin up another virtual machine and keep moving.
View full review »AK
reviewer1570647
Senior Information Security Analyst at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Since this is a hardware solution it does not scale as well as cloud versions. We have approximately 20,000 people using this solution in my organization.
View full review »NH
reviewer2212515
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
We've had no problems with scaling our business. We went from using probably 200 active VPNs an hour to over 600 VPNs without blinking an eye at that.
View full review »Our company has approximately 2,500 employees and 500 devices. In terms of scalability, Cisco Secure Firewall is sufficient for our needs.
FC
reviewer1667103
Global Network Architect at a agriculture with 10,001+ employees
So far, in this use case, it has met our scalability requirements in terms of traffic and management.
Scalability is not a problem because I still have a span of five to seven more years. After that, I might have to go for a bigger device. For now, I have no issues. I can scale up or down. I'm good with that.
View full review »FM
Francesco-Molino
Practice Lead at IPConsul
Cisco Firepower scalability is something that can be done easily if you respect the best practices and don't have any specific use cases. If I take the example of one of my customers moving to the cloud, there is one FMC and he is popping new Firepower devices on the cloud, just attaching them to the existing policy and knots. This is done in a few minutes. It is very easy to do.
View full review »The product can scale nicely. If a company would like to expand it, it can do so.
We have about 10,000 schools use the solution in general, and 1,000 to 2,000 that use it simultaneously daily.
View full review »BW
reviewer2211648
Network Security Team Lead at a government with 10,001+ employees
We bought scalable products, and we're in a good position.
View full review »WN
reviewer2211633
CTO at a government with 10,001+ employees
Cisco Secure Firewall is a very scalable solution.
View full review »FC
reviewer1667103
Global Network Architect at a agriculture with 10,001+ employees
Cisco Secure Firewall has met our scalability requirements as far as traffic and management goes.
View full review »SV
Shawn Vessels
Critical Infrastructure at Wintek Corporation
The solution is scalable because Cisco keeps up with new technology, the security application, bandwidth, optics, and the kind of speed that one can use.
View full review »It is scalable. All our users utilize this firewall. We have more than 30,000 users who are end users, admins, and developers.
View full review »DC
reviewer1657845
Senior Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Scalability has been fine. I haven't had an issue with it. I just haven't had a need to deal with scalability yet.
View full review »MB
Matt Back
Cyber Security Practice Lead at Eazi Security
The thing that restricts the scalability would be Firepower Management Center. It is constrained by how many events it can record. It suits customers who have a smaller number of sites, like a dozen or maybe 20 sites. You can still record your connection and intrusion event history for a significant period of time. But, if you are talking about a customer with hundreds of firewalls, then Firepower Management Center probably is not the right proposition.
If I am a customer with a dozen sites, I probably don't have the money to pay for a dedicated SIEM platform. So, Firepower Management Center is great for me because it is like a mini SIEM from a perimeter security perspective. I can store my connection and intrusion event history. I can get an idea of which IPS intrusions are things I should focus my attention on. These are the things that a SIEM could help you with. I can manage my firewalls from a single management location, which is really good. However, if I am a customer who has hundreds of firewalls, then it is not really scalable because I wouldn't be able to store the amount of intrusion and connection events that I would need for those firewalls.
Cisco Defense Orchestrator would probably be the better option if you had an environment that had hundreds of sites with hundreds of firewalls. Even if you acknowledge that Cisco Defense Orchestrator doesn't store events per se, it just allows you to manage and deploy policies to the firewalls, when you have an environment with hundreds of firewalls, then you will definitely have the budget for a SIEM platform. At that point, you would be scaling by having separate platforms for separate functions rather than one platform to do everything.
Firepower Management Center is great for some customers with whom we work because they don't have hundreds of sites with hundreds of firewalls. They just have somewhere between two and 10 sites. So, it is a good fit for that kind of customer.
View full review »MK
reviewer1512729
IT Administrator / Security Analyst at a healthcare company with 11-50 employees
We have integrated these firewalls with other products, such as Cisco ISE, and it hasn't been a problem. ISE is a Cisco product so it would make sense that it integrates well, but ISE integrates with other firewalls as well.
Everything that I've done with these firewalls has been pretty seamless. We've had no downtime with them at all. They've been very rugged as we expanded usage through integration.
View full review »AI
Al Faruq Ibna Nazim
Head of Technology at Computer Services Ltd.
I would put the Cisco Firepower NGFW firewall into Transport mode, as you can do with most firewall systems for scalability. We used to have about 60% of our users on hold during six-week events. We still have certain problems without a firewall, but these days with the Cisco Firepower, we have over 80% of the load working.
As the customer integrator for enterprise contracts, we've been able to introduce Cisco Firepower to around 10 of our new customers in Bangladesh. At least 50 of the previous Cisco customers are still using the firewall solution right now under our support.
These are enterprise customers who require Cisco firewall support. We used to have a specialty in that which is really like the holy grail in rocket science. It used to be like that but now with Cisco's enterprise user base, we offer operational system support to reduce complexity a lot. It's really easy. It's not like you have to be a specialist.
View full review »It scales because you can deploy a cluster. You could have up to 16 Firepowers in a cluster, from the class I [was learning] in yesterday. I only had two in that particular cluster. It scales up to 16. If you have a multi-tenant situation, or if you're offering SaaS, or cloud-based firewall services, it's great that it can scale up to 16.
View full review »We have never had to ramp up more than a small- to medium-business use case. For that, it has been great. Limitation-wise, we would run into challenges if we ever hit 2,000 to 2,500 users. We would then have to move onto hardware. Its scalability is only limited by the size of the appliance. So, if you ever have to exceed that, then you just have to buy a new box.
View full review »The solution is very scalable.
View full review »Cisco Secure Firewall is a scalable solution. Around 400 users are using the solution in our organization.
I rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine out of ten for scalability.
Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.
Around 2,500 people use the solution in my company.
JP
JayPatel1
Network Engineer at Ulta Beauty
It has the scalability to replace the firewall with a higher model number.
The scalability meets our needs and future needs.
View full review »HP
reviewer1318416
Senior Solutions Consultant at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
The solution can scale quite well. A company that needs to expand it can do so easily.
In our case, we have clients with anywhere between 1,000 and 10,000 users.
View full review »PC
PaulChauchis
Security Architect
Scalability depends on the site. At some sites we have ten people while at others we have a data center with a full 10 Gig for all the group. We have had one issue. When there are a lot of small packets — for example, when our IPS is in front of a log server or the SNMP servers — sometimes we have issues, but only when we get a peak of small packets.
View full review »The solution is extremely scalable and based on my experience, I would rate it 7 out of 10.
View full review »
DJ
Dejan Jovanovic
IT Consultant at ACP IT Solutions AG
Cisco Secure Firewall is a scalable solution.
View full review »FS
reviewer1895589
Security engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
It is pretty scalable. We can add as many devices as we want.
View full review »PR
reviewer1895532
Senior Network Engineer at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We haven't scaled it much at this point.
View full review »The model we have is okay for our environment, so it's scalable. We haven't seen any problems in that regard. There are 50 or 60 devices behind it and about 500 clients. It is used in a very specific environment for a large Slovenian system.
The device has achieved its purpose. We won't implement any other features.
View full review »The newer clustering capabilities have introduced some solid scalability design options. From a cost perspective, scalability is quite intimidating.
View full review »TO
TomOneill
Solutions Architect at Acacia Group Company
We did not see any limitations with Cisco Secure Firewall’s scalability.
View full review »KH
reviewer2212530
Systems Engineer at a engineering company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The solution seems to be very scalable. I probably don't have much experience with scalability because, by the nature of how our networks work, we don't scale them; we just add another one.
View full review »FS
Faheem Shahzad
Networking Project Management Specialist at Bran for Programming and Information Technology
The scalability of the Cisco Secure Firewall is excellent.
View full review »MK
reviewer1288518
Security admin at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
This is a scalable solution.
GU
Gyaneshwar Upadhyay
Senior Network Engineer at BCD Travel
There is room for improvement in the scalability of this solution.
View full review »MB
reviewer1376670
Director IT Security at a wellness & fitness company with 5,001-10,000 employees
Cisco accounts for scalability by having different hardware recommendations, depending on what the throughput is, the required coverage is in terms of number of devices, the amount of traffic, etc. In our case, I don't see any issues. We are appropriately sized, but I could see how if someone's environment doubles, then someone should account for that by either procuring another appliance and separating some of the traffic flows or getting a bigger, more powerful system that can handle increase in throughput.
We try fitting to an ecosystem mentality. For example, we have four different Cisco products, which is technically a single ecosystem. If you were to think of it that way, then it is four different tools from Cisco. Then, there are two additional ones on the network, which makes six. There are additional two or three for an endpoint, plus another two or three for email, and another two or three for identities. So, I would say there are probably around 20 security solutions total.
The network team as well as the security team use it. Combined, that is approximately six people.
We are perfectly sized. I don't think there will be a need to increase the footprint or anything like that, at least for a while.
View full review »MS
Maharajan S
VSO at Navitas Life Sciences
Scalability is one of our major business requirements. We are seeing 20 percent growth year-over-year. The plan is to keep this product for another four years.
View full review »The product offers good scalability.
KB
reviewer1884756
Data center design at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
We have at least a pair in every one of our data centers. We gateway our applications around the firewall system, meaning all application data goes through firewalls.
View full review »I give the scalability a one out of ten.
View full review »MZ
reviewer2107434
Senior Network Administrator at a comms service provider with 201-500 employees
It depends on the model. We are hitting some issues with scalability. It's getting very expensive to scale out.
LS
Lucas Sousa
Network Administrator at Bodiva
Currently, we have approximately 20 site-to-site VPNs operations.
View full review »SN
SherifNour
IT Manager, Infrastructure, Solution Architecture at ADCI Group
This is a scalable solution.
In terms of the number of users, it depends on the customer. A small customer may have less than twenty users. A larger customer can be complicated by having different branches with different users and different security rules. This means that you can reach up to the hundreds.
View full review »BG
Beka Gurushidze
System Administrator at ISET
We are growing. In the next two years, we will have an additional 600 users, so we will double the capacity. We will see even more in the next three years.
It will be like very tough. In about five-year cycles, you need to update the firewall and add other new Cisco devices for the next generation of innovation.
In five years, we will be ready for a complete upgrade cycle for everything. The stability and scalability of the Cisco ASA NGFW are good for when we need to grow.
For the next five years, everything is fine. After that, we will see because there will be a lot of changes.
TI
reviewer2109165
Senior Network Consultant at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We had an issue where we had to install another cluster for the firewall because we went out of the capabilities on one of them. You need to analyze in advance how much your usage will grow in the future and you have to decide based on that. It's about adding more firewalls. We can scale in this way, and it's good.
RW
Roger Waelen
System Administrator at a healthcare company with 501-1,000 employees
There are no issues with the scalability. It works fine.
It is simple to upgrade.
We only need one person to maintain the product.
View full review »PC
Paul Crist
Senior Engineer at Teracai Corporation
It's very scalable. You can go to different models of the ASAs and they scale up to as big as you want to go.
View full review »AE
Ahmed El-Ghawabi
Technical Consultant at Zak Solutions for Computer Systems
The scalability of the solution is very good. We have no trouble expanding the solution.
They have multiple products that fit in multiple areas. They also have virtual firewalls, which are working well in virtualization systems. They have the data center firewalls feature for data centers. It's scalable enough to cover most of the use cases that might arise.
View full review »IK
reviewer2212692
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The solution’s scalability is excellent. I don't know if the scalability has a downside or even a limit.
View full review »This solution would need an adjustment to be scalable.
RG
Raufuddin Gauri
Network & Security Engineer at Oman LNG L.L.C.
There are no issues in terms of the number of users. This is the main firewall for the organization. All users are behind this firewall. So, all departments and teams, such as HR, finance, application team, hardware teams, are behind this firewall. All users have to cross the firewall while accessing applications and websites. They cannot bypass the firewall.
MB
Manuel Briones
Voice and data infrastructure specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The scalability is great.
View full review »MB
Mitku Bitew
Head of Network Administration Section at Zemen Bank S.C.
It doesn't have an expansion card. So, it may not scalable for huge buildings. It also lacks a lot of standard interfaces. Other products are providing capacity for a data center. Other technologies are expanding their interface bandwidth from 10 gigs. In my opinion, Cisco ASA doesn't have this capability.
View full review »RF
reviewer1263240
Data Analyst at a hospitality company with 201-500 employees
I've never tried to scale the product. I haven't worked with it too long at this point. I wouldn't be able to comment on its scalability potential.
View full review »This product is scalable. We have 100 users in our organization.
We will not continue to use this solution. We will be upgrading to either Firepower or Check Point.
View full review »CM
In432TchMn89
IT Manager at Citizens Bank
The scalability is very good. We use the 5600 models and the lower 5000s. We were able to upgrade as needed. We added a ton of VPN tunnels to them and they handled all that traffic quite well.
View full review »MC
reviewer1895580
System programmer 2 at a government with 10,001+ employees
We have about 8000 end users. Scalability-wise, it's already handling a large amount of traffic.
View full review »RS
reviewer1895514
Senior network security, engineer and architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
You can vary scalability from very few users to thousands of users.
View full review »AS
reviewer1895487
Senior Network Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
The solution's scalability is very good.
We use it on customers who have two employees up to customers with 5,000 employees. It is also used for customers who have one site or several sites. It is all over the place
View full review »CE
reviewer1885329
Network engineer at a government with 10,001+ employees
It's very scalable. Every organization sets it up differently, but we've been able to perform upgrades with minimal service disruption. We have ASAs in multiple locations.
View full review »AR
reviewer1309845
Lead Network Engineer at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
The scalability of the product is pretty good. If you need to expand it, you can do so with relative ease.
View full review »ZK
Zhulien Keremedchiev
Lead Network Security Engineer at TechnoCore LTD
Cisco Firepower NGFW has a large variety of devices that are able to accommodate every company's needs, be they small or large. Overall, the scalability of the devices is very good.
View full review »The scalability is also good. But in terms of future-proofing our security strategy, it depends on the points I mentioned elsewhere that Cisco needs to work on.
CD
ChrisDaly
Senior Solution Architect at Teras Solutions Limited
Cisco Secure Firewall is a scalable solution that allows you to add capacity.
View full review »BL
reviewer2212524
Network Engineer at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Cisco Secure Firewall is scalable.
View full review »TM
reviewer1639311
Solutions Consultant at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
As a firewall, it's in use all the time. Whether there will be increased usage depends on how security risks increase. But at the moment, there's no expectation for an increase in use.
View full review »Scalability is good, but just like the issue with Palo Alto and Fortigate, there is also an issue with Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall. I can configure it easily because of my Cisco background, but others in my team aren't comfortable with it.
View full review »AM
Alexander Mumladze
Network Engineer at LEPL Smart Logic
Its scalability is very good. It was a small implementation. Traffic was maximum of 150 megabits per second.
View full review »EH
EricHart
CEO at NPI Technology Management
The scalability of the solution is good. Within our customer base, it is absolutely scalable. You can go very large with it. However, if you really want the highest speeds, you have to move off of the IOS ASA line and onto the newer stuff.
Typically our clients cap out at 500 employees.
View full review »EV
EduardoViero
IT Infrastructure Specialist at RANDON S.A
It is scalable in our scenario. It is scalable the way we deploy it. It's the same template or architecture, and that was our intention, for all our remote sites. From this point of view, the scalability is okay. But if one of those remote sites increases in demand, in the number of users or in traffic, we don't have too much space to increase the firewall itself inside that deployment. We would probably need to replace or buy a new, more robust appliance. So the scalability for the architecture is fine. It's one of the major requirements for our distributed architecture. But scalability for the appliance itself, for the platform itself, could be a problem if we grow too much in a short period of time.
I don't know how to measure how extensively we use it, but it's very important because without it, we can't have VPN and we can't communicate with our headquarters. We have SAP as our ERP software and it's located in our data center here at our headquarters. If we can't communicate with the data center, we lose the ability to communicate with SAP. So if we don't have the firewall running on those remote sites, it is a major problem for us. We must have it running. Otherwise, our operations at these remote sites will be compromised. In terms of volume, 40 percent of our sites are deployed and we still have plans to deploy the other 60 percent, this year and next year.
Regarding future demands, if we create new business, like we are doing now in Mexico, our basic template has this next-gen firewall as part of it. So any other new, remote sites we deploy in the future, would use the same architecture and the same next-gen firewall.
View full review »LF
ipmplspr538920
Security Governance at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Yes, the throughput highlighted on the datasheet (10Gbps) should be reviewed. This throughput is only for a UDP running environment, which you will never find in the real world. Rather consider a multiprotocol throughput.
View full review »MS
Maharajan S
VSO at Navitas Life Sciences
At this moment, we have not thought through scaling. The model which we use is less than 60%. What I heard from them is you can cascade it to another box, and scaling can be done.
We have between 400 to 450 concurrent users on a daily basis accessing this box. Overall, we have 2,000 devices that could be easily communicated via Firepower.
View full review »It's used around the world. We have 20 data centers and each data center handles six offices. We have Cisco in every single location. If something new comes up, we'll increase our usage of the product.
View full review »VW
reviewer1885482
Network Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
We have been just using ASAs for a smaller environment.
I don't know if I have ever worked with ASA in a highly scalable environment.
View full review »Scalability is actually pretty exponential. In the grand scheme of things, we are a small network. We only have 15,000 subscribers. However, if we need to expand, it is reasonable.
View full review »MC
Reviewer43898
Engineering Services Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
It scales, but it depends on the growth rate of the customer and the amount of bandwidth. It's usually a speed and feed problem: Is the firewall box big enough to handle the traffic? Snort 3 has made some improvements there and it's even given some life back to older boxes because of improvements in code and in how Snort processes data. But, overall, the box just has to be big enough for the amount of traffic you're trying to shove through it.
View full review »AM
Alexander Mumladze
Network Engineer at LEPL Smart Logic
It is not much scalable. It is only a Layer 4 firewall. It doesn't provide deep packet inspection, and it can see packets only up to TCP Layer 4. It can't see the upper layer packets. So, it is not very scalable, but in its range, it is a very good one. What it does, it does very well.
View full review »AA
Ahasan Ahmed
Deputy Manager at Star Tech Engineering Ltd
The scalability is good.
View full review »VG
Vipin Garg
Co-Founder at Multitechservers
We have it in our infrastructure for around 15 plus users, including Fortinet sites.
We have found that whenever the traffic spikes at peak times, the product automatically scales up to the requirement. We have also implemented the single sign-on it, and therefore, it automatically scales up. We haven't felt any limitations. Currently, we are using it for 1500 plus users. At any given time, there are around 700 plus users available in the office. It's a 24/7 infrastructure. We have tested it for up to 750 plus users, and it's perfectly fine.
This solution is really scalable and reliable. In my opinion, Cisco products are always scalable.
View full review »FL
FranciscoLopez
Team leader at J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc.
This solution is very scalable.
View full review »MD
NSA0898776
Network & Security Administrator at Diamond Bank Plc
The scalability is based on module support. We have a stand-alone version. It is not 100% applicable to talk about scalability at this point.
There is another Cisco ASA module available that is more scalable than ours. For the module I have, the stand-alone, the scalability is not as good as on the higher model.
The 5585 model, allocated for data center security, can be facilitated into the switching spot or the working spot in our data center. We can recommend the scalability there.
For the module I have, I'm using it as a stand-alone. I don't think it is scalable too much at this point.
I'm using Cisco ASA in my organization to support about 150 staff. For maintenance, I do all of the work myself.
View full review »It is scalable. A thousand-plus users are using the solution in my company.
View full review »MF
reviewer2109264
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
It's better to have a higher speed. I'd rate it an eight out of ten in terms of scalability.
We have multiple locations and multiple departments. We are a big company, and we have a lot of remote sites. We have about 6,000 of them.
We look at scalability for any product of Cisco. I cannot be confined to the ASAs. We have physical, virtual, and cloud deployments. Everything is possible, so scalability is no issue.
View full review »SG
reviewer1900203
Network Automation Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
Scalability is probably a 10 out of 10 for what we're looking at.
View full review »BB
reviewer1895535
Network Engineer at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
We haven't had to really scale up too much.
View full review »AS
Ashraf-Sadek
CSD Manager at BTC
It is scalable, with virtualization and other features.
In terms of future-proofing our customers' security, we recommend the ASA. We have tested it in large environments and it's working well. The lesson I have learned from using Cisco ASA is that Cisco's research is continuous. They provide enhancements every day. It's a product for the future.
View full review »JM
Jonathan Muwanga
Head of Information Communication Technology at National Building Society
We haven't maxed it out in terms of its capacity, and we've got up to about 200 users browsing the internet at any given time. In terms of throughput, we've got an ASA 5525 so it handles capacity pretty well. There aren't any issues there.
View full review »AN
Asif Najmi
Network Engineer at LIAQUAT NATIONAL HOSPITAL & MEDIACAL COLLEGE
The firewall is very scalable. Most contact versions are available depending upon the organization you have. It works for very large organizations. They are scalable for many scenarios. The scalability obviously is there for sure.
View full review »DC
Dave Cooper
Network Engineer at CoVantage Credit Union
We haven't hit that issue of scalability. We have increased the amount of traffic through it and it's handled it, but I think that's also a product of the ASA as well. If the ASA is going to choke, Firepower is going to choke as well.
We're going to be bringing in two new firewalls, as early as the fourth quarter or first quarter of 2020, and those are going to be pure FTD appliances. We'll probably be using those a little bit more extensively. I don't think we're going to be using the SSL portion, but we'll probably have the IDS/IPS, and we'll probably have the AMP turned on. That's because with the endpoints, we're not sure if we're going to be able to install an antivirus, so we can at least watch that. We'll probably use most of the suite on it.
View full review »AG
Amit Gumber
Consultant at HCL Technologies
Scaling is quite easy.
View full review »The 5512-x with a BASE license does not have many options for scalability. However, the Security Plus option allows multiple contexts and ACTIVE/ACTIVE fail-over options. I currently do not use those features, but I can definitely see the need for both of these options.
View full review »ZM
Zaur Mirzayev
Network Engineer at EURODESIGN
I use just two devices. I've not tested anything else.
GD
reviewer1884966
Cybersecurity Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
Scalability is unparalleled. It is easy to scale.
We don't have plans to increase our usage at this time.
View full review »HR
reviewer1885551
Director of network ops at a non-profit with 51-200 employees
The product we have has some limitations when it comes to scalability. That's one of the things we're looking to address with a new solution.
View full review »BL
Bryan Litaker
Enterprise Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We haven't done much with scalability. We have always just done active standby. However, it scales once you figure out how to do it. If there are site-to-site VPNs within your own location, it is easier because there is a template, where it is, "Here, change this IP address. Change this IP address. There, it's done."
Third-parties weren't bad. Once my side was done, then we could easily cut and paste it, and say, "Okay, here's what my side's configured for. If you have something that is not working, then you can tell me what it is and I will help you." However, we never really had anything that we couldn't fix. It was also possible to scale on the other side.
View full review »We have 200 users using this solution.
View full review »WS
Win Sein
IT Consultant at Hostlink IT Solutions
It is scalable.
View full review »WM
WilliamMugobogobo
Head of ICT Infrastructure and Security at City of Harare
We have 2,000 users who connect through this product. We are planning to increase use as we go, toward the end of the year.
View full review »CS
Chandan-Singh
Sr Technical Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
It is scalable. Cisco is pretty popular with organizations, and many customers are using it. It is suitable for all kinds of customers. It can cater to small, medium, and large organizations.
View full review »EL
ERIK LABRA
Technical Specialist, consultant at a computer software company with 10,001+ employees
There is no real limit to the way they can scale. It is very easy to integrate additional firewalls or even nodes on appliances. Whenever needed, they are stackable. They are very flexible in that sense. Our clients are large businesses.
View full review »MG
Seniorntwrk56
Senior Network Administrator at a construction company with 1,001-5,000 employees
For us, the scalability is good, because we sized everything right, right from the beginning. If you size it right, it's very good. We don't plan on adding more firewalls, unless we suddenly grow exponentially, which we're not expecting to do at this point.
View full review »ME
reviewer1895547
Director of network engineering
It's a very scalable solution.
View full review »DJ
reviewer1895523
Network Systems Manager at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
It scales well. We've had no issues ramping things up.
We're going to expand our usage of it. We rolled it out to about 200 users and now we're going to expand that to about 1,000 users out of our 3,000-user base. It has been really good.
View full review »MS
reviewer1627155
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
Its scalability is very good due to clustering.
In terms of our plans to increase its usage, it has everything we need. We don't plan to add anything more because it has all that we need as of now.
View full review »JV
Joland Van Londen
Project Engineer at Telindus B.V.
In the Netherlands, where I work, we don't have very big customers requiring very high throughput. So I cannot say anything about clustering where you can pile different ASAs or Firepower devices together to increase performance when you require it.
But scalability, in general, is pretty hard. Competition-wise, sometimes it's hard to sell Cisco security products because, in my opinion, Cisco is quite honest about the real throughput they are able to provide. Other vendors may be giving figures that are a little bit "too perfect." Sometimes it's hard for us to sell Cisco firewalls because a customer says, "Well, when I go to other brands they say they have double the throughput for half the price." Well, that's great on paper, but...
In general, after we have installed Cisco firewalls, our customers are very pleased by the performance. They also like that they can tweak settings to get more performance out of the firewall by enabling specific policies for specific traffic, and by disabling inspection for very internal data center traffic. That provides a big boost to the overall firewall performance. When a customer complains that we didn't scale it correctly, and they say it's not performing as well as they expected, I'm always able to tweak things so that it performs the way the customer requires.
View full review »HP
Henry Pan
Technical Consulting Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
The scalability is reasonable and okay.
One of the clients we have has 21,000,000 node.
View full review »MH
reviewer1895598
Security architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
This is a very scalable solution as long as you get the right hardware.
View full review »PS
Pardeep Sharma
Network security engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We have more than 400 employees. We are currently not thinking of increasing its usage because we need more security, and Cisco ASA is not good for Layer 5 to Layer 7 security.
View full review »CB
Cesar Beut
Networking Specialist at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
The scalability is great.
We have five devices in four locations.
Three network administrators who work with Firepower, including myself.
View full review »TG
reviewer1217634
Lead Network Administrator at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
The scalability is awesome. That's one of those features that this product adds. Not only does it scale so that we can add more firewalls and have more areas of deployment and get more functionality done, but we have the ability that we could replace a small-to-medium, enterprise firewall with a large enterprise firewall, with very little pain and effort. That's because that code is re-appliable across multiple FirePOWER solutions. So should a need for more bandwidth arise, we could easily replace the products and deploy the same rulesets. The protections we have in place would carry forward.
We hairpin all of our internet traffic through the data centers. Our branch offices have Cisco's Meraki product and use the firewall for things that we allow outbound at that location. Most of that is member WiFi traffic which goes out through the local connections and out through those firewalls. We don't really want all of the member Facebook traffic coming through our main firewalls. I don't foresee that changing. I don't see us moving to a scenario where we're not hairpinning all of our business-relevant internet traffic through the data centers.
I don't foresee us adding another data center in the near future, but that is always an option. I do foresee us increasing our bandwidth requirements and, potentially, requiring an additional device or an increase in the device size. We have FirePOWER 2100s and we might have to go to something bigger to support our bandwidth requirements.
View full review »NC
Nathan Chadwick
Technology Associate at a financial services firm with 1-10 employees
I don't see it being very scalable. I don't have access to the actual interface on it. However, it is an older product, so it probably doesn't have high availability features. So, it's scalability is probably limited. I know that we kind of put it through the ringer with our fewer than a hundred connections into it.
View full review »The only issue I have is with the price, as SourceFire is VERY expensive.
View full review »FV
Fredy Velazquez
Admin Network Engineer at Grupo xcaret
It has really good scalability.
View full review »BW
reviewer1882773
Network analysis at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
It is highly scalable. It has some limitations, but for medium to large-sized deployments, it is excellent.
View full review »The scalability is very good.
View full review »WM
William Murray
Consulting Engineer at IV4
In our organization, we only have one in our data center that all of our people pass through. However, I've got clients that have thousands running through large Cisco firewalls.
View full review »SA
reviewer1208142
Senior Network Engineer at a consultancy with 1,001-5,000 employees
It's scalable.
View full review »MC
Michael Collin
Senior System Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
I don't have a sense of the scalability. I never extend the processes or usage.
View full review »As far as scalability, I haven't had any performance issues so far. There really isn't high utilization coming from the operations environment, so I don't need to upgrade the tier at the moment.
View full review »RP
Ryan Partington
Systems Administrator at Universal Audio
Scalability has been a pain point for us.
It's great for what it does. Just make sure you know whatever environment you are using it in is not going to have to scale. Just use it for sandbox. As long as they stay competitive, use the ASA, but make sure you have a plan to grow out of it.
View full review »RM
Rauf Mahmudlu
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We feel we didn't even try to make it scalable. We had 30,000 end users.
View full review »SZ
Stoyan Zhekov
General Manager at MS Solutions Ltd.
We have not tried to scale our network. It was established a long time ago and nothing has changed since then.
View full review »HT
Hernan Trinco
Presales Engineer at a comms service provider with 51-200 employees
We typically work with large public organizations. Our customers are quite big. Some are even up to 8,000 employees.
My view is that the ASA is for data centers. When you need more performance or something like that, this may be a problem. This is due to the fact that we don't have the ability to add more performance - more CPU or more equipment - in our cluster when we deploy the solution in a perimeter. It's complicated to expand the performance with ASA on the perimeter.
View full review »TH
reviewer1395819
President at a tech vendor with 11-50 employees
Within their limitations, yes, they're scalable. You don't want to put a 5506 in when you need a 5525 — you'll never get it there. If properly sized, they're scalable, but you can't make a 5506 a 5525 — there're different processors and everything. You have to know where you're going. You have to know your customer first.
View full review »It's pretty scalable. Cisco is a large enterprise solution and it's designed to be able to serve large enterprise, so, it's fairly scalable. We're using the solution minimally at this point, and we're decreasing usage because it's too expensive to upgrade.
View full review »WB
reviewer1084986
Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
We've used several models of the product, from the smallest to the biggest. I think that this family of the ASAs is scalable enough for everything up to an enterprise environment. I think the family of products is able to handle small and large company needs.
View full review »MT
Mbaunguraije Tjikuzu
Information Security Administrator at Bank of Namibia
It can easily scale. If you want, you can scale it to a lot of traffic. It's an X file, so all of our users are going through it.
We only require one administrator for the solution. For deployment and maintenance, it depends on how many developers you have. We require two dedicated staff at a minimum.
Naturally, we employ both security technicians and administrators. Cisco ASA NGFW is being used at all our branches, and we'll continue using it in the future.
View full review »HJ
Hassan Javaid
Senior Executive Technical Support at AITSL
The scalability is good.
View full review »NP
Nadika Perera
CEO at Synergy IT
Cisco is expensive and when you want to grow, it means you're going to need to spend some money but you can justify it.
We have closer to 50 users on the firewall at the moment and do have plans to increase usage.
View full review »I currently do not need to scale on my network.
View full review »GS
Germain Safari
Information Security and Compliance Manager at RSwitch
The scalability is fine.
View full review »These are big devices. They have multiple models, but most of the models can be virtualized. You can create many virtual firewalls and add whatever you want.
View full review »VM
Victor Mejia
SOC & SECURITY SERVICES DIRECTOR at BESTEL
The scalability is no problem.
View full review »FB
Farooq Bashir
Sr Network Administrator at Orient Petroleum Inc
We've never tried to scale. We have a pretty small set up in our country. It's unlikely we will have to scale.
Currently, we have between 200 and 300 people on the solution.
View full review »JF
reviewer1357989
Cisco Security Specialist at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
You can go for other models for scalability and sort it out that way.
My suggestion is to think about scalability and about your tomorrow — whether you'll increase or not — and already think about the next step from the beginning.
View full review »DS
NGFW677
IT Specialist at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
This solution is very scalable.
View full review »BS
Bashir Bashir
IT Administrator at Vegol
I haven't had to scale, so I can't speak to this aspect of the solution.
View full review »NA
Nasser Abd EL Rahman
IT Infrastructure Manager at Beltone Securities Brokerage S.A.E.
I haven't tested scalability yet, but I believe it is a very scalable solution. We currently have 250 employees working on it without any issues.
View full review »CR
Net823Eng2
Network Engineer at a media company with 51-200 employees
It is a scalable product. We have a lot of demand. But, it supports any additional network that we add. It expands easily.
View full review »AA
Ali Abdo
Technical Manager at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
Scalability is great. We have around 1,500 users.
View full review »MG
Munish Gupta
Partner - Consulting & Advisory at Wipro Technologies
Scalability is not an issue.
View full review »FT
Frank Theilen
IT Adviser/Manager with 51-200 employees
You need to buy a new product if you want to scale. I once tried to put in another network card and ended up in a support nightmare. I had to buy more support, licenses, and it was more expensive than buying a new one.
View full review »There have been no scalability issues from my point of view. I was handed the solution, so some of the initial work was done.
View full review »LA
reviewer1895511
Lead Network Engineer
It's not really cost-effective when it comes to scalability. It is a really expensive product if you go to the modular firewalls. You need to get new appliances to get new features.
View full review »Cisco Firewall's scalability is fine.
View full review »JJ
reviewer1662657
Network Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
We just recently enabled Snort 3 so I'm evaluating the functionality. That's what we've considered, but we haven't done any performance testing. Our company would qualify as a small to medium business company. The average office environment is about 100 to 200 people. Performance-wise, my company is about 120 people.
Scalability is really not relevant. I know there are features that address some of those parts, like clustering and stuff, but that's really not applicable in my use cases.
View full review »JG
Jua GARCIA
Gerente de Unidad at Redescomm, C.A.
The scalability is good and it can be used for organizations of all sizes.
View full review »CM
Cassio Maciel
Network Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We use it specifically for DMZ, so we don't need it to scale it up. Because we are using this solution for a specific environment, we don't plan to increase its usage.
We have a few teams who use this solution. We have the information security team for reading the logs and policies. We have administrators, and we also have contractors for the network operation center to analyze some logs and reports.
ON
Omid Najafi
Managing Director at Fasp
Scalability of this solution is ok. They have the IPS (Intrusion Prevention System), online updates, and signature updates.
One customer might have, for example, two hundred and fifty users, whereas another might have one hundred users. There are different models for different numbers of end-users.
View full review »FF
Farhad Foladi
Cloud Services Operation Engineer at Informatic Services Company (ISC)
The scalability of ASAv we can easily manage. We can have good scalability in different times but we don't have HA in ASAv. Some features are removed in ASAv.
If it's a normal ASA, i.e. a physical device, you have many more ways to scalability.
View full review »PR
PATRIK ROSENDAHL
Information Systems Manager at a non-profit with 1-10 employees
We are a rather small firm so we don't have much growth leads but there is a wide range of firewalls that I can expand onto. We can also set up cluster solutions. It's rather indefinite in its expandable possibilities.
View full review »We have had no scalability issues.
View full review »PS
Pardeep Sharma
Network security engineer at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I have extended my Cisco solution and did not have any trouble.
We have more than 400 users and we plan to increase usage.
View full review »RO
reviewer1007166
CEO at a security firm with 1-10 employees
What I use now is sufficient based on the traffic that we are generating. We won't have to expand.
We have two providers for ASA. There is only one administrator. We have about 1.2 million connections going through one ASA per month.
View full review »GK
George Karani
IT Manager
Scalability depends on which device you have.
It's quite scalable if you have either the ASA, even if you had the new ASA firewall services, even if you had the one with the capacity of about 500 MDP. It isn't scalable for three hundred people connecting to it. I would say it is good for medium branch offices.
I'm not sure if we have plans to extend the service.
CS
Cristian Serban
Network Engineer at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
It's not so scalable.
View full review »RM
ramesh1923
Technical Specialist with 5,001-10,000 employees
All product-based firewalls will encounter scalability issues. The firewall sizing is important during the sizing.
View full review »Nope.
View full review »We have not had scalability issues.
View full review »Scalability is limited depending on the chosen model.
View full review »KB
Kiarash Barzoodeh
Senior Network Designer at ODI
This product is very scalable in our experience.
View full review »In certain cases, like an any access-list, if we add a URL the Cisco ASA access-list does not resolve that URL while this can be done in Juniper, and Fortinet.
View full review »GF
Guillermo Fernandez
Security Consultant at IKUSI
This particular product does not have high availability and therefore scalability is limited.
You need a pretty sizable solution for a center.
We have about 300 clients using this solution, and therefore the amount of people on the solution is very high, however, I don't have the exact number of users across all clients. For solutions providers, we have IT solutions for maybe around 5,000 users.
View full review »SG
reviewer1480314
Senior IT Analyst at a insurance company with 51-200 employees
This particular model can't quite handle the bandwidth we need. We're actually replacing it shortly with the new higher capacity model.
View full review »Our current model is reaching its end of life, so it's not very scalable at the moment. We don't plan to increase usage.
It is currently providing protection for about 30 users.
View full review »MA
Mustafa Ahmed
Network Security Engineer at qicard
I don't know that we have plans to scale the business on this site. But Cisco products are expandable. If we want to expand the functionality with new feature sets we can add modules. So in that way, it is a flexible and scalable solution.
We currently have 200 to 500 users who are using this solution at any time.
View full review »CS
reviewer818484
Information Security Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
It should be well scalable. However, we didn't see a good centralized management/monitoring system like the one that Palo Alto has.
View full review »IY
Iz
Assistant Manager (Infrastructure) at SISTIC
SC
Simon Chaba
ICT Manager at a aerospace/defense firm
Upgrading from v8.2 to v8.3 is a nightmare. The risks of down time are so high that I am forced to run different versions. Stay with 8.2 on all NAT dependent on your ASA, but again it's all about the cost.
View full review »ON
Olivier Ntumba
Network & Systems Administrator Individual Contributor at T-Systems
The solution can scale well. that's not a problem at all. If a company needs to expand it to fit their needs, they can do so.
View full review »Firepower scales well if you have the 4100 Series or 9300 Series. They can scale and you can cluster the devices. Otherwise, you can only add one device, but that's more for the small customers. But if you get up to the high-end series of Firepower, it scales very well.
We have customers that have 100 or 200 clients but we also have customers that have 20,000 endpoints. They are using several different appliances. Two devices for internet edge, two devices for core infrastructure, and two devices for VPN. We help customers of all sizes.
View full review »DH
Damascene Hakuzimana
Network Administrator at a transportation company with 201-500 employees
I have found the Cisco ASA Firewall scalability could improve.
View full review »AA
reviewer1416024
Sr. Network Engineer at a construction company with 10,001+ employees
Cisco ASAv is scalable.
View full review »AA
Ahmad Alkoragaty
IT Consultant at MOD
The scalability is good. We have around 1,500 users. The users are regular end-users, network admins, technicians, etc.
We require three admins for this solution. We require five staff members for the deployment and maintenance.
It is used weekly. We do plan to increase the users.
View full review »MA
Mahmoud Ashoub
Team Leader, Information Risk Engineer at National Bank of Egypt
The scalability is good.
View full review »GZ
Gerald Zauner
Data Center Architect at Fronius International
The scalability is good. We have scaled it but at a normal gross so it's not very high. We have designed it for our use case and we have the option to scale but we don't use it at the moment.
View full review »EE
Seniodascie9887
Senior Data Scientist & Analytics at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
I've worked with the 2000 series, the 4000, and the 9000. The 9000 series is really impressive because it's absolutely scalable for large deployments.
View full review »KS
Tech432SrvcMn
Technical Services Manager at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
The scalability of the solution is OK for me. It basically fulfills my requirement.
View full review »JK
Johnsey Kivoto
IT Manager at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
The scalability is a bit limiting, to be honest. In terms of when you look to changing landscape in terms of threats, I think to me, my personal it's a bit limiting.
View full review »SC
Sergei Chernooki
IT SecOps Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees
I believe scalability issues are caused by poor design.
View full review »AK
Alexander Kostov
Senior IT Networking and Security Manager at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
In terms of scalability, this always depends on how the product was chosen and what purpose it will work for. I haven't experienced any issues with the scalability of the product.
View full review »GS
Georges Samaha
Security Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
The scalability is very good. They have a clustering mechanism, so you can start with an appliance and then cluster, adding more bandwidth and nodes into your cluster. If you don't have a big budget you can start with a medium appliance and then cluster appliances. Or if you want to buy it all in one shot, there is a big range.
Although it allows scaling by adding multiple firewalls together (clustering), we have never used that, as all new hardware supports high-performance throughput and connections at a reasonable price.
View full review »There were no scalability issues.
View full review »There are scalability limitations with FirePOWER on the ASA, so determining anticipated throughput requirements is critical. The standalone IPS sensors can be stacked for increased throughput, so depending on your organizations needs, this may be a better path for some organizations concerned about scalability.
View full review »SD
Sergio Díaz
Owner/CTO at FS NETWORKS
We have maybe 100 - 200 end users using the solution.
View full review »OB
reviewer1323300
Principal Network Engineer at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
The scalability is very limited because as a traditional firewall, it's a step behind. As far as the scale goes, my assumption is that you just buy a bigger model.
View full review »TR
reviewer1010625
Tier 2 Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
We don't have any firewalls that can handle more than a couple of gigabits, which is pretty small. I think the largest one we have is the 5525-X, though we haven't checked it for scalability.
In my company, there are probably 16 people (mostly network engineers) working with the solution: seven or eight from my group and the others from our IT department.
View full review »LX
reviewer1348176
Network Specialist at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
You can extend your network. They are cool. They are good for scalability.
View full review »GV
Girish Vyas
Architect - Cloud Serviced at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
We have only one or two firewalls as a site data center firewall.
From what I have studied, they are scalable. You can have eight firewalls integrated with the FTP devices. I don't think scalability would be an issue but I do not have a first-hand answer on that.
There are approximately 2,500 customer base users using Cisco Firepower. It's a data center firewall, so all the sites integrate for one data center.
You do not need extra staff to maintain Firepower. One field technician engineer, FTE would be sufficient and should not be a problem. I don't think extra staff would be needed. For support, for instance, you need one person.
BS
InfSec4893
Information Security Officer at a non-tech company with 10,001+ employees
The scalability is fine. We have no problems with the solution. We have two of them in a standby configuration.
View full review »No, an assessment about the workload is important to select the right device.
View full review »AM
Azar Mammadli
IT Operation Manager
AL
Alberto E. Luna Rodriguez
Network Security Coordinator at a energy/utilities company with 1,001-5,000 employees
SI
NwkSysAdmin564
Network and System Administrator at a pharma/biotech company with 501-1,000 employees
In our deployment, we did not have a scalability issue.
View full review »NJ
reviewer1471347
Administrator at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
The product is scalable.
View full review »YT
reviewer1478394
Information Security Manager at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
It's a scalable solution. We have five or six users in our organization.
View full review »It's scalable. You can integrate AD, you can integrate Cisco NAC. You can integrate quite a lot of things so that makes it scalable.
View full review »YS
sentwrkpres56
Senior Network Support & Presales Engineer at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
We have several thousand employees at the company.
JL
Jonathan LELOU
Ingénieur technico-commercial at ICBM
It is a scalable solution. It may cost money and resources to scale.
Scalability depends on the requirements of the license. The licensing scheme is complicated and not straightforward. I think there were around 200 users, sometimes more.
View full review »DA
Danut Agache
Computer Networking Consultant and Contractor with 51-200 employees
No. Based on their recent acquisition of Firepower, Cisco added "multi 10Gbps" NGFW performance in their solutions portfolio, which can be used by us, as a Gold Partner with Advance Security Architecture Specialization, in our network architecture proposals.
View full review »SS
NetworkE721d
Network Engineer with 201-500 employees
We never had an infrastructure that required scalability.
View full review »RS
Rizwan Siddiqi
Network Security Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Migration to new version is very easy, therefore no issue.
View full review »The ASAs offer several different technologies for HA and we have used all of them successfully.
View full review »JL
reviewer1229682
Network Administrator at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
The scalability is not perfect.
View full review »RP
reviewer1293345
System Administrator at a non-profit with 1-10 employees
We currently are protection approximately 220 users.
View full review »PC
Ntwrksec457
Network Security/Network Management at a educational organization with 201-500 employees
We have 500 users working on the solution and I believe it may increase, so I believe the program is scalable.
View full review »VA
Vikram Arsid
Cyber Security Software Engineer at FireEye
Especially for the AWS version, we can spin up multiple instances and do load-balancing.
We have 15 to 20 Cisco ASA switches with a couple of physical appliances and twelve machines. Our team is using four to five machines.
View full review »DH
David Hartt
Senior Vice President at a transportation company with 51-200 employees
The scalability is good.
View full review »As of now, no.
View full review »MS
reviewer1905519
Network Architect at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees
This is a scalable solution.
View full review »BD
Solution7499
Solutions Architect at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Scalability doesn't really apply to us, as it is just a firewall client.
View full review »MK
asstmana149958
Asst.Manager IT at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
It has limits. If your network is going beyond it, then you'll have to replace it with higher model.
View full review »Scalability has been all-star perfect.
View full review »We did not have scalability issues with the high end devices.
View full review »MZ
Marcelo Zamorano
Middle-Tier Admin Integrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Price maybe...
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »JR
reviewer1473525
Enterprise Integration Architect at a insurance company with 10,001+ employees
It's a scalable product. We have 200,000 users in our organization.
View full review »PS
Phosika Sithisane
Executive Director at ict training and development center
Scalability is not that good, I think. Other firewalls, upgrading is a very easy task; from the graphical user interface, you just need to import the firmware versions into it and install it. In this firewall, you need to have a third-party solution in both. It's a process. It's a procedure, a hard procedure, actually, so there is no straightforward procedure for upgrading.
View full review »RS
Rizwan Siddiqi
Network Security Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
License scalability for SourceFIRE is really not good if you have an ASA in HA as you need two licenses of everything, which is really bad as you wont get double SourceFIRE other than that you need to remember to buy your ASA based on the SourceFIRE's throughput and not the inspection throughput.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »SK
Suebsak Komjezsda
Senior MIS Manager at a tech company with 201-500 employees
We've found the solution to be scalable. A company shouldn't have any issues with expanding it if it needs to.
We have about 300 users on the solution currently. We do plan to continue to use Cisco in the future.
View full review »PK
reviewer1406484
Jr. Engineer at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
It's a scalable solution. We have more than 2000 users in our organization.
View full review »TM
reviewer1461084
Group Information Technology Manager at a mining and metals company with 201-500 employees
We haven't made any changes since implementing and we haven't tried scaling.
View full review »Some clustering functions are not available in the unified image.
View full review »MR
reviewer991773
Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
We only have two to three users who directly deal with the solution within our company. Overall, we have between 100-200 employees. We haven't really scaled it.
I personally would prefer not to use ASA going forward. However, I don't know if the company itself has any plans to increase usage or not.
View full review »It is very easy to scale this product. With SMC, you can control all levels of ASA in a central console. You can simply add a new ASA firewall to protect your network, and you will be able to control it.
We have approximately 300 users.
My clients for this solution are medium-sized organizations.
View full review »SS
Shrijendra Shakya
C.T.O at Sastra Network Solution Inc. Pvt. Ltd.
It's scalable based on the type of license and modules that you require.
We don't have the option to update the box, but we can add features such as antivirus protection.
View full review »EM
Mantechni677
Technical Manager at a comms service provider with 501-1,000 employees
The solution is really scalable.
View full review »In terms of scalability, it is really expensive. It is scalable, but when it comes to pricing, the upgrading is a bit high.
View full review »We had a scalability issue, as each feature is based on license or hardware support.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »One of the major disadvantages with the ASAs is the throughput, while the network evolves, the ASA was usually causing the bottle neck.
View full review »RW
Roger Weiyang
Cyber Security Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
I would say in terms of scalability, they are still the greatest family of products. Scalability means you can actually add on some processing parts to actually increase the throughput when the requirement comes up. They have a range of products for that, but this solution, it's already going out of phase, because at JSC, you can only allow up to a certain amount of upgrades that can be added on.
SH
Seang Haing
Team Leader Network Egnieer at deam
ASA is limited in terms of its scalability because of our customer environments. They are in the banking and microfinance sector. Our clients always want to move to the next generation firewall so they like FirePOWER. When we move clients to Firepower, they need to integrate with Sourcefire and move into more complicated management.
We have the staff perform the migrations to Firepower. We redirected traffic with Sourcefire and also require the use of FMC by our management center with Firepower.
View full review »I have not had scalability issues at all. Maybe it is because I have not used it quite extensively.
View full review »ED
Ed Dallal
Founder, CEO, & President at Krystal Sekurity
There were no issues with scalability.
View full review »VG
reviewer1395702
Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
It's a scalable, high availability solution. It's an active/standby model for VPN. But if you don't use VPN in these devices, it works as an active/active high availability model.
View full review »TS
reviewer1067388
IT Administration at a healthcare company with 11-50 employees
We're just a small company, so we have not had to scale it.
View full review »MM
Moraima Matilda
Coordinator Network Support at a manufacturing company with 501-1,000 employees
It is scalable. We have had no issues.
View full review »When we implement a firewall we need to be aware of whether it is growing over a short time period or a long time period. I think the scalability, from our implementation, is good because you can use the same configuration for another platform. If you implement on a small platform, it It is easy to implement the same configuration to another, bigger device.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »ME
Muhammed Eslami
Solution Architect at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Cisco NGFW is a scalable firewall. My client has more than 100 users.
View full review »No scalability issues.
View full review »There were no problems in terms of scaling an existing solution, though very expensive.
View full review »With ASA, you can scale to the largest deplyments. As an example, I have installed an ASA in an environment with 80.000 users.
View full review »KS
reviewer1441503
CEO & Co-Founder at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Scalability-wise, we did not have much problem because we have a single site. If we have two or more sites, and if we want to have a site-to-site VPN and more number of users, we are not sure about the scalability. We will have to go for an updated version of the new product line.
We have close to 80 plus users. We anticipate a huge increase in the number of users and plan to increase the usage of Cisco ASA Firewall. We may have to open a new center in a different city, which will lead to more sites, users, and usage.
View full review »GS
reviewer994896
Center for Creative Leadership at a training & coaching company with 501-1,000 employees
The scalability is good. I'm happy with the service. We are around twenty users. Some are in finance, some are in a mid-user roles, and some are in other official roles.
View full review »It requires additional licensing to enable 10G ports.
View full review »I did not encounter any issues with scalability.
Not yet.
View full review »Yes, before Clustering was introduced.
We did not encounter any scalability issues.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »Clustering is available for ASA with firepower services.
Also for firepower appliances, there is stacking available for some models.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »As long as you buy the correct model for your company, in regards to throughput, licenses etc., you will be fine.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »HD
Hari Pandu Dairi
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
The scalability is a problem as the solution has a low throughput.
View full review »No scalability issues.
View full review »We have to buy more licenses to get more VPN connections.
View full review »I believe this product is very scalable with our current needs and requirements.
View full review »Sometimes, the throughput and CPU counter issues were faced, maybe because we started to use it a long time ago.
View full review »It is good.
View full review »No scalability issues.
View full review »Still working on this.
We've not had any issues scaling yet.
View full review »There were some issues.
View full review »SF
Shamal Fernando
System Engineer at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees
It's a scalable product. We have approximately 2,000 users in our organization.
We have plans to continue to use it.
View full review »OC
OscarCastillo
Network Engineer at IT Security
Scalability is good.
View full review »We did not encounter any issues with scalability.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »MS
Mufeed Siaj
Network Security Presales Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
It can be used by multiple users.
View full review »I have not encountered any issues with scalability.
View full review »No issues encountered.
View full review »No scalability issues.
View full review »BB
reviewer1445520
Security Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
The scalability is good.
View full review »No scalability issues yet.
View full review »No issues so far.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Firewall
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Secure Firewall. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
765,386 professionals have used our research since 2012.