On our end, the initial setup was pretty straightforward. We did receive some training along the way. I had done some test deployments, which I would tell anybody to do. There are certain things you can do inside of Cisco's dCloud to prepare you for deployments. But overall, it's efficient, simple, and there's the visibility on the security side. Deployment is fast. As a security person, I love the visibility and the ease of use when doing my upgrades.

In terms of implementation strategy, even before making the sell, we start from that standpoint. I don't want to say we're in the tank for Cisco, but it's what we have bought into. A lot of our engineers have training in it and they get ongoing training. Maybe it would be different if Fortinet gave us a ton of more training on their stuff.

There's a community that we're connected with, so when there are issues we typically hear about them in the communities beforehand. We know limitations going into projects and already have a good idea, a vision, of what direction we're going to go, so we can start planning properly. Cisco does a good job of training us in that process: When we model and design everything, how it's going to be set up; and once everything is deployed, how to analyze, how to remediate, how to get visibility into everything.

The time to deploy depends on the size of the deployment. In my experience, the longest part of the process is getting everything built and approved in CCW (Cisco Commerce Workspace). From a deployment standpoint, it's pretty easy at our end. We get the equipment in place, we stage the gear, we have all the existing stuff in place from the original infrastructure. The longest we've taken is about a month, once we have the gear in place and all the configs lined out. Typically, we've done a lot of front-load work in the process. In general, from first meeting the client to completing the end-to-end process, we're in and out in 120 days.

Everybody has a different part that they play, including the people who are doing racking and stacking. For the size of deployment that we've been discussing, we typically need ten to 12 people. There can be some travel involved so sometimes we need resources elsewhere, depending on the scale of the client and how far they are spread out.

Once it's deployed, an example of maintenance requirements is a location with a 24-hour operation, three eight-hour shifts, meaning three people are monitoring it and it works fine. You might need a fourth if you include like a "float guy" for when people go on vacation or get sick.

It was all in-house, with support from team if needed. I did all the install and deployment myself. 

It's maintained by my team. But, on a daily basis, it needs very little maintenance. In fact, we don't even go into it every day. There are eight or nine users of the solution in our company. They are operational users, and they would be maintaining it as required.

Cisco assisted us. We were among the first group of customers to try it out.

It was just myself who set it all up. 

Once we got the virtual machines spun up for the onsite piece of it, we got it connected to the cloud, added a few devices, and went on from there. It was straightforward. There wasn't anything that really required much human interaction.

We did it ourselves.

To implement the product originally we used a consultant from outside our company. It was 
SIGMA IT. They had a small team of two come to do the deployment. We keep a security team of three to monitor and maintain the system.

We deployed this solution with assistance from Cisco.