Cisco Secure Firewall ROI
JT
JoshuaThums
Network Administration Lead at Forest County Potawatomi Community
We have absolutely seen return on our investment. For example, before Cisco started doing the AMP for Endpoints, just as an example of Cisco security overall, we had Norton Antivirus on all of our workstations and we ran McAfee across all our servers. Our helpdesk and support staff were cleaning up anywhere from six to 13 malware-infested PCs a week. It was a full-time job for two individuals going around and continuously cleaning these, even though we had McAfee and Norton, which are supposedly some of the better ones out there.
After deploying AMP, we might have one incident every three months that our helpdesk or support has to deal with. We freed up two full-time individuals. AMP definitely has a cost, but then you look at the cost to end-users of not being able to use their PCs, or of the payroll department not being able to run their reports for payroll because the PC is too slow because it's infected with malware.
So not only was there the cost of the two IT resources we gained, but other departments also gained hours back by not losing their PCs and devices.
View full review »RV
Rob Vreede
Principal Network Engineer at a retailer with 10,001+ employees
We have seen an ROI. Compared to that of other vendors, Cisco's pricing is in a good range. We use Cisco products for their complete lifespan. With the support context that we have, we also know what we spend over the lifetime of the solution.
There was no specific investment to make because there was a requirement to implement data center security. That's certainly been fulfilled, and the benefits now versus those previously are time to deliver change and having a more secure, rounded posture. Both of these are being realized.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Firewall
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Secure Firewall. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.
In the past, the company experienced multiple ransomware attacks, but we haven't seen any since installing ASA Firewall. It was a huge improvement. It's hard to quantify that in financial terms, but we had 40 or 50 machines damaged.
View full review »PS
Paul Stadlbauer
System Engineer at Telekom Deutschland GmbH
I'm not a salesperson. I'm more from the technical perspective, and I don't know if there are any savings at the end, but I believe that all that was bought in the past was used the way we wanted it to use. So, the money was well spent.
JB
Jake Billingsley
Enterprise Architect at People Driven Technology Inc
In terms of return on investment, I have multiple clients that have been through multiple generations of ASA to Firepower to the next generation of Firepower. They definitely find the return on investment there. They find it's a valuable product to have in their network. It definitely checks that ROI box for them.
View full review »RH
Rifat Hyseni
Director of Information Technology at a government with 501-1,000 employees
It's hard to talk about ROI when it comes to security, but security now is expensive. You have to pay for it.
View full review »JS
JoelStech
Senior Network Engineer at Orvis
Just in terms of cost, the Check Point number was ten times as expensive as the Cisco number, so there was "instant" ROI in that sense. But we needed to replace our firewalls. Check Point had been in for five or six years. They did a bake-off to see which one was the best one to go to.
View full review »We haven't calculated the overall ROI. There are different areas we use it for. For some management areas, we can calculate ROI, but in some areas, we can't.
View full review »We've definitely seen an ROI. It was a requirement, and looking at the way it went, especially in terms of coming up with the policy and securing our data center, there has been a value-add. We now have a security zone, and we have policies. We can manage and monitor the traffic coming in and going out.
In addition, we have the flexibility of sending any traffic to the firewall, even internally from the data center. Whenever we have a doubt about any application or traffic to any application, we can just send it to the firewall and let it check and monitor. We have this visibility that we didn't have before. We can see any traffic that comes in.
View full review »We have witnessed a return on investment through the capabilities of Cisco Secure Firewall itself, along with its numerous threat defense technologies. As a result, we do not need to purchase additional tools to enhance the firewall; everything is already integrated. Therefore, I believe this was a significant victory for us.
View full review »My role is mainly technical, but on the business side, there would be an ROI in terms of seeing the clients happy.
Our clients are happy. They always get an update about the roadmap and the features that Cisco is releasing down the road. Cisco is always ahead of others not only in terms of security but also in terms of portfolio.
MR
MohammadRauf
Security Officer at a government
On the engineering side we have definitely seen ROI. So far, we haven't had much downtime in our environment.
View full review »BB
Bryan Broadhurst
Cybersecurity Designer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We've seen a good return on investment. The primary return that we have seen is fewer outages due to firewall issues, and also the time to detect and respond to security incidents has come down massively. That's been hugely useful to us.
View full review »FH
reviewer8276195
Product Owner at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
I would expect that we have seen an ROI because our sourcing department would make sure we get the best price for the solution.
We have seen ROI with the Cisco ASA, especially because we've just come to the end of the three-year subscription. We are now renewing it. We've not had any major security incident that was a result of the firewall not being able to detect or prevent something. That's a good return on investment.
Our device, the 5516, has been declared end-of-life. The cost of upgrading is almost equivalent to deploying a new appliance. But having had it for three years, it has served its purpose.
As with any security solution, the return on investment must be looked at in terms of what could happen. If you have a disaster or a cyber attack, that is when you can really see the cost of not having this.
View full review »We have seen ROI. When I first started, everything was physical and one-to-one. Now, with virtualization, we are able to leverage a piece of hardware and use it in multiple environments. That was definitely a return on investment right out of the gate.
View full review »NH
reviewer2212515
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
We've seen an ROI in terms of our high-level engineers having to work less on the product. I've been able to provide it to the NOC because of the use of the solution. They see value in that.
View full review »We spend a lot of time developing our consultants and our sales staff to know the product and learn how to sell the product. As a result, our ROI is that we get more clients deploying Cisco Secure Firewall.
FC
reviewer1667103
Global Network Architect at a agriculture with 10,001+ employees
In this specific use case, the biggest return on investment is that we do not have incidents, and this ultimately, in some of our factories, ends up being a health and human-safety use case.
FM
Francesco-Molino
Practice Lead at IPConsul
Whether Cisco Firepower reduces costs depends on the architecture that you are on. I had some of my customers answer, "Totally, yes," but for some of them that is not really true.
View full review »WN
reviewer2211633
CTO at a government with 10,001+ employees
We have seen a return on investment from using Cisco Secure Firewall. From the DOD's perspective, we need a reliable and robust solution that has to be reliable in real-time. Cisco Secure Firewall is a reliable solution that works when needed.
View full review »ZK
Zhanerke Kozhabergenova
Sr. NetOps Engineer at Smart Cities
There has been a positive return on investment observed with the implementation of Cisco Secure solutions. The use of these solutions as our primary security products has been beneficial in terms of cost and security measures.
View full review »FC
reviewer1667103
Global Network Architect at a agriculture with 10,001+ employees
In this specific use case, the biggest return on investment is that we do not have incidents. This ultimately – in some of our factories – ends up being a health and human-safety use case.
View full review »SV
Shawn Vessels
Critical Infrastructure at Wintek Corporation
We have seen a return on investment in the total cost of ownership.
View full review »KB
Kamal Benmekki
CTO at Intelcom
Based on my 25 years of experience, 100% of our ROI expectations are met with Cisco products. The equipment is strong enough, stable, and well-developed. We have had the equipment running for more than five years without any outages, which leads to lesser costs of operations. There is also a reduction in cost in terms of upgrades or replacements, and this is why the ROI expectations have been met.
If we didn't use this NGFW, our company might have been charged by a number of attackers. Therefore, the firewall reduces our costs and operational expenses by around 40%.
Since the product is stable, we do not have to spend additional money to buy other firewalls. Once deployed, we can use the product for a long time. Thus, it is cost effective.
View full review »DC
reviewer1657845
Senior Network Security Engineer at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
We have seen ROI with a better, more secure environment.
Cisco Secure Firewall has helped us to reduce our firewall operational costs. This is based on the fact that the newer models, where we have been replacing older models, have better throughput, capacity, and performance overall.
View full review »MB
Matt Back
Cyber Security Practice Lead at Eazi Security
Everyone who uses the platform has felt more confident in their perimeter security. The Firepower platform makes it very easy to keep track of what software revision you are on, what your revision is versus what the latest is. It makes it really easy to schedule tasks to download the latest geolocation and vulnerability updates, automate backups, and copy backups to a remote location. Operationally as well as from a security perspective, everything has been positive in terms of the feedback.
View full review »As far as return on investment [goes], I would imagine there is some. For the users, as far as saving on commuting costs, they don't have to come into the office. They can stay home and work, and connect to the enterprise from anywhere in the world, essentially.
View full review »It brings us the ability to work from anywhere and has allowed us to work remotely without having to incur a lot of other costs. If we didn't have this type of solution, since we have so many on-prem services that are required, we would have likely lost money and been unable to deliver. We have a video services team who helped build the content for our sporting events. When you are watching a Leaf game and those swipes come by as well as the clips and things, those are all generated in-house. Without the ability to access our on-premise resources, we would have been dead in the water. So, the return on that is pretty impressive.
View full review »There is no ROI. It is functioning as a normal firewall, as a data center perimeter, however, we expected much more than that. At times, there has been downtime with the firewall, and our custom modifications have won at a very high level. The product has to be mature when it is being used at the enterprise level.
We have seen a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall because it provides advanced malware protection and seamless integration with my existing solutions.
View full review »CW
reviewer2212707
Security Engineer at a government with 501-1,000 employees
We have definitely seen a return on investment. It works pretty well. It is important to have everything work together. Our time is probably more valuable than our money. We're not going to go out and grab ten other network engineers to set up another complicated platform when we can just save the hassle.
View full review »PC
PaulChauchis
Security Architect
ROI is a difficult question. We have never done the calculations, but I would say we see ROI because of some security concerns we stopped.
View full review »FS
reviewer1895589
Security engineer at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
We saw immediate benefits after deployment from having more control and visibility.
View full review »When it comes to XDR, the cost-effectiveness of this firewall depends on the use case because you don't always need XDR functionality. SecureX is included free of charge, so from that point of view, maybe Cisco is not that expensive compared to other vendors. Other vendors' XDR products are not free of charge.
But if you just look at just the firewall functionality, Checkpoint is expensive but Cisco is not the cheapest. Fortinet is cheaper.
Where we have seen ROI is due to the support, time savings, ease of management, and the reporting.
View full review »SM
Syed Mohsin Ali
Team Leader Network and Mail Team at a energy/utilities company with 10,001+ employees
I've seen Cisco deployed for five to seven years. The product life cycle is good and they're continuing to support things. If you add more features and utilize it to the maximum, using the remote VPN and the like, it becomes more cost-effective.
Having the IPS part within one box also saves you on costs. Back in 2015, the IPS was a different box that had to be deployed separately. At that time, it cost more if I had to buy another IPS and a box.
View full review »KH
reviewer2212530
Systems Engineer at a engineering company with 5,001-10,000 employees
I believe our clients have seen an ROI. Their networks are more secure. Various agencies have tested a few of them to prove it, and they've proven okay. Since they weren't attacked, they have received an ROI.
View full review »MK
reviewer1288518
Security admin at a wholesaler/distributor with 10,001+ employees
We have experienced a return on investment in terms of security that has added value.
MB
reviewer1376670
Director IT Security at a wellness & fitness company with 5,001-10,000 employees
The automated policy application and enforcement saves us at least a third of an FTE per day. In terms of time, that is about 30 percent per day. By deploying the solution, we are saving $600 a week, which is significant.
In some cases, resources, like a security engineer, are actually hard to come by because they are expensive. Substituting some of that engineering time with an effective technology, like Firepower, is probably a good strategy.
View full review »MS
Maharajan S
VSO at Navitas Life Sciences
We have seen ROI. Our productivity has increased.
The change to Cisco Firepower has reduced the time it takes for our network guy to generate our monthly report. It use to take him many hours where he can now have it done in an hour.
View full review »We do see a lot of ROI from Cisco Secure Firewall. We are in the process of migrating a lot of end-of-support devices with some new ones and the return on investment is there.
View full review »Your investments are protected because of the innovations over time and the fact that you're able to migrate to the latest and greatest technology, through Cisco.
There are also a lot of Cisco ASA skills out there in the marketplace, so if you have ASAs deployed and you get a new employee, it's more than likely they have had experience with ASAs and that means you're not having to retrain people.
View full review »PC
Paul Crist
Senior Engineer at Teracai Corporation
From a security standpoint, the return on investment is hard to quantify. You've stopped something that was going to cost you money, but how do you quantify that? How many times did it stop something from coming in that would have cost you a bunch of money? You don't know.
View full review »IK
reviewer2212692
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 5,001-10,000 employees
In general, we have seen an ROI on the product. Using it, applying policies, setting it up, and leaving it alone is helpful. It helps save resources.
View full review »CM
reviewer2147430
System Engineer at a computer software company with 201-500 employees
We have seen ROI from using Cisco.
View full review »It's a great investment and there's a lot of value for your money if you're a CSO or a C-leader. As an engineer, personally, I have seen it work great wonders for us. When we're doing code upgrades or other maintenance we are able to keep the business going 100 percent of the time. We have definitely seen return on our investment.
View full review »MB
Manuel Briones
Voice and data infrastructure specialist at a tech services company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We've seen an 80% ROI.
View full review »MB
Mitku Bitew
Head of Network Administration Section at Zemen Bank S.C.
Any security product provides a return on investment. Any gap in security may cost an organization more.
View full review »RS
reviewer1895514
Senior network security, engineer and architect at a computer software company with 5,001-10,000 employees
It took us about six months to see benefits from our ASA Firewalls. We've seen return on our investment in terms of the timeframe of downtime, and the ability to get users connected faster and more easily has been a big benefit.
View full review »AS
reviewer1895487
Senior Network Architect at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees
Our return on investment is having a network that we don't need to think too much about. It works, and that is it.
View full review »HN
Hoang Hanh Nguyen
Network Lead at a tech company with 10,001+ employees
We have seen a return on investment in terms of price because we have a partnership with our provider.
View full review »TM
reviewer1639311
Solutions Consultant at a comms service provider with 10,001+ employees
If you use the full functionality of Cisco ASA, it's worth the cost. But I don't think our company product is using the full capacity of the Cisco ASA.
View full review »We have seen a return on our investment.
View full review »AM
Alexander Mumladze
Network Engineer at LEPL Smart Logic
I think our client did get an ROI. They are very satisfied with what they can do with these firewalls. It fits all of their needs.
View full review »LF
ipmplspr538920
Security Governance at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
I do not know.
View full review »MC
Reviewer43898
Engineering Services Manager at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
There is a lot of value with SecureX. Other customers struggle to bring all the data back to one place, the way you can with SecureX, across a product portfolio. The value of that capability is incredible. I don't know how to put a monetary value on it, but from an operational perspective, it's very helpful to have it all back in one place because you're not having to hop around to multiple UIs to find the data you're looking for.
View full review »AM
Alexander Mumladze
Network Engineer at LEPL Smart Logic
Our clients have seen an ROI because they paid only once, and they have been using their firewalls for five years. They didn't have to pay much for anything else.
View full review »VG
Vipin Garg
Co-Founder at Multitechservers
The ROI we are getting from Cisco ASA is higher availability, which we are getting all the time. On top of that, it's good at blocking traffic and protecting us from cyber-crime issues.
View full review »FL
FranciscoLopez
Team leader at J.B. Hunt Transport Services, Inc.
I don't work with the numbers, but I can say that it's great for security and has improved our effectiveness at the office.
View full review »The return on investment is not going to be restricted to just the box, because nowadays, if you look at the integrated security that Cisco has been heavily investing into, it's not just about ASA doing the firewalling functions. Now, these genres have been expanded to cyber, to third-party integrations, having integrated logging, having integrated micro and macro segmentations. The scope has been widened, so the ROI, eventually, has multiplied.
View full review »AS
Ashraf-Sadek
CSD Manager at BTC
Our customers definitely see return on investment with Cisco ASA because when you protect your network there is ROI. If you lose your data you have a big loss. The ROI is in the security level and the protection of data.
View full review »JM
Jonathan Muwanga
Head of Information Communication Technology at National Building Society
The ROI is the fact that we haven't been attacked.
DC
Dave Cooper
Network Engineer at CoVantage Credit Union
The return on investment would be the fact that I'm just not spending a lot of time either searching for things or trying to stop what's coming in and out of our network. The return on investment is the time I would have to spend during the day looking at things versus it proactively doing its job.
View full review »AG
Amit Gumber
Consultant at HCL Technologies
There would definitely be return on investment by going with Cisco products. They are stable.
View full review »The ROI on the SA520W is 0. As this device is EOL/EOS.
View full review »SV
Sivakumar Vamadeva
Network Support Engineer at a manufacturing company with 51-200 employees
From the perspective of return on investment, implementing the Firepower 2100 series is a bad decision.
View full review »GD
reviewer1884966
Cybersecurity Architect at a financial services firm with 5,001-10,000 employees
It secures the network. The ROI is really incalculable at this point as keeping our data secure is keeping the company's assets secure.
View full review »HR
reviewer1885551
Director of network ops at a non-profit with 51-200 employees
I don't think we've tracked enough data points to see ROI data points, but the value comes from the fact that it's still running and that we are still happy with it. That is definitely a good return on our investment.
View full review »BL
Bryan Litaker
Enterprise Architect at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
There is ROI when you use it more.
View full review »MS
reviewer1627155
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 201-500 employees
It is very hard to say because we don't measure that. It is also very difficult to measure if it has helped in reducing our firewall operational costs.
View full review »HP
Henry Pan
Technical Consulting Manager at a consultancy with 10,001+ employees
18 months
View full review »MH
reviewer1895598
Security architect at a computer software company with 51-200 employees
We have seen a return on investment using this solution based on the fact that we are spending less money overall.
TG
reviewer1217634
Lead Network Administrator at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees
We have probably not seen ROI yet. These are licensed under Cisco ONE and you usually don't see a return on investment until the second set of hardware. We're still on our first set of hardware under this licensing.
That said, our ASAs were ready to go end-of-life. The return on investment there is that we don't have end-of-life hardware in our data center. That return was pretty immediate.
View full review »Lousy! $250K/year just for maintenance and licensing costs for a defense center and five sensors? This is insane! There is a better way.
View full review »FV
Fredy Velazquez
Admin Network Engineer at Grupo xcaret
The ROI is good. Using ASA, we have saved 10% to 20% on our costs.
View full review »BW
reviewer1882773
Network analysis at a government with 1,001-5,000 employees
We have very much seen an ROI in terms of the saving on man time and the costs of standing up new equipment. Compared to what we had before, Cisco Firepower NGFW Firewall is faster.
View full review »The stability is the greatest ROI for this solution.
View full review »RM
Rauf Mahmudlu
Network Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
We definitely got a return on investment with Cisco ASA. We have been using it for eight years, which is a long time for IT. We only had one capital expenditure. Apart from that, there were no other costs or unexpected failures. It supported us for a long time.
View full review »HJ
Hassan Javaid
Senior Executive Technical Support at AITSL
ROI is part of the infrastructure costs. The product has saved us a lot of time, and once we deployed the solution, it worked.
View full review »It is not simple to calculate for IT hardware. To calculate the ROI for using the ASA, I would need to have a lot of statistics on the quality of services, both before and after.
View full review »GS
Germain Safari
Information Security and Compliance Manager at RSwitch
We have gotten exactly what we're looking for, based on the company's requirements.
View full review »FT
Frank Theilen
IT Adviser/Manager with 51-200 employees
Once installed, they last a long time. I would recommend replacing them after some years to get better security features.
View full review »CB
Cesar Beut
Networking Specialist at a healthcare company with 1,001-5,000 employees
We realized that clearly we have issues of security with a lot of attacks. I don't know if it is because with the COVID-19 virus a lot of hackers are at home or working more hours. In the last year, we have seen attacks that are very big, and we need a barrier. So, we use a firewall to block these attacks.
View full review »DC
reviewer1135638
Senior Network Administrator at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees
We certainly have seen a return on investment at the very least from being able to reallocate human resources.
View full review »RO
reviewer1007166
CEO at a security firm with 1-10 employees
I have seen ROI. We use ASA because our provider uses it and they have support. The provider initiates the support with Cisco. The support is good. The license for the support is expensive.
View full review »It's 8/10.
View full review »SC
Simon Chaba
ICT Manager at a aerospace/defense firm
I can't tell right now as I am still investing.
View full review »We cannot determine ROI just yet.
View full review »TR
reviewer1010625
Tier 2 Network Engineer at a comms service provider with 1,001-5,000 employees
We haven't notice any threats. The firewalls is doing its job because we haven't noticed any security issues.
View full review »LX
reviewer1348176
Network Specialist at a financial services firm with 501-1,000 employees
Given that we have been upgrading with Cisco firewalls, I would say that our company has seen a return on investment with Cisco. We would have changed to a different product if we were not happy.
The response time from the tech and the support we get from our partner is quite good. We have never struggled with anything along those lines, even hardware RMAs. Cisco is always there to support its customers.
View full review »Positive. The devices serves thousands of users for many years, outliving other vendors solutions.
View full review »SI
NwkSysAdmin564
Network and System Administrator at a pharma/biotech company with 501-1,000 employees
Calculating the ROI for network security or IT security is complex and dependent on many factors, like the implementation, role, expectation etc. IT security cannot be compromised, but on the other hand, we must ask how much is enough. In our case, we do not have a defined ROI for this product.
View full review »RS
Rizwan Siddiqi
Network Security Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
100%.
View full review »VA
Vikram Arsid
Cyber Security Software Engineer at FireEye
Our individual release cycle has been quicker because the entire development and testing environment has been automated because of these virtual instances. It has aligned our development workflow. This is where we have seen the ROI increase.
For example, if you are working with a physical appliance, then you need to have a dedicated lab administrator to work with it, even to test a simple use case. This takes time because we would need to frequently reset that appliance and load all the data. It is no longer like that.
View full review »AA
NetworkO9ae4
Network Operations Center Team Leader at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
When evaluating a possible solution, I always consider:
- Availability
- Productivity
MZ
Marcelo Zamorano
Middle-Tier Admin Integrator at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
100% in some installations it exceeded the time predicted to keep up with the work load.
View full review »It was initially heavy on my pocket, but it soon actualised its worth.
View full review »RS
Rizwan Siddiqi
Network Security Consultant at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
This solution reduces any downtime therefore business continuity is not disturbed - that is ultimately ROI.
View full review »It is worth every penny that we have invested in it.
View full review »ED
Ed Dallal
Founder, CEO, & President at Krystal Sekurity
We calculated for the entire year, but the ROI seemed very decent from the first six months.
View full review »It's excellent.
View full review »It's not really quantified, but we have not experienced downtime due to attacks.
View full review »It's good.
View full review »Buyer's Guide
Cisco Secure Firewall
April 2024
Learn what your peers think about Cisco Secure Firewall. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: April 2024.
768,740 professionals have used our research since 2012.