There's a lot of different stuff, solutions which integrate into companies' ticketing systems. It depends on what your needs are. Even stand-alone, with FirePOWER, Umbrella, and AMP for Endpoints, there is Threat Grid - think CDO but on a very small scale. Prior to CDO, Cisco had, and they still have, Threat Grid. To me, Defense Orchestrator is a higher-scale evolution of Threat Grid. People wanted more, and that "more" was delivered with Defense Orchestrator. 

Threat Grid is like a small, short-line railroad; it handles a small area of traffic. In the metaphor it might take stuff off ships and put it on the back of 18-wheelers. CDO is more like a Class I railroad like Union Pacific or BNSF or Norfolk Southern. They're going to go all over the place, on a much larger scale. The strength and power that CDO has is huge. It's like comparing a lawnmower engine to a V12 from a Bentley or an Aston Martin.

There's a huge difference in cost between these solutions. With the smaller solutions there's lag, even if it's not huge. What you're getting for almost no cost is a huge, valuable piece. But it's not going to be the same type of visibility and logging speed that you're going to get with CDO.

This is the first solution of its kind in our organization. Before that, I was managing everything as a point solution. We came to the realization that we needed something like CDO when we were doing firewall upgrades. It was taking us a couple of weeks to go through all of our firewalls and upgrade them and reboot them. It was clear that we needed a centralized solution that would do this for us.

I originally saw Defense Orchestrator at Cisco Live. It was Derek who did the demonstration, and it was clear that that was the right solution for us. Also, it was at the right price point.

We have something different, but at this point we are mostly using CDO. We use Cyberhub only to monitor vulnerabilities. That's all it does. With CDO we try to do SSH and all the language. But CDO doesn't have vulnerability monitors. That is something that they definitely need to improve on.

We actually got it before we decided to buy it. I heard about it at Cisco Live about three years ago and brought it back here. We decided to try it out. We thought, "Man, it looks pretty good. Let's buy it." And we bought it.

We didn't have a competitor's solution before CDO and that was another big reason to buy this. If nothing else it was, one of the things we were happy about, and that we feel justified the spend, was having the configurations kept in a central spot, where we can go really quickly and pull them down as need be. Without CDO, we had a problem with that a lot. A firewall would go offline and maybe our on-call didn't have the config, or the config was six months old, and changes had been made. With CDO, it is right up-to-date. It's so much easier.

We just kept tape backups all the time. With that many firewalls, it's hard for one person to do that and have an up-to-date configuration for all the firewalls. It was near impossible. This makes it possible.

I didn't use anything prior to CDO. I went to CDO for better management, central management. CDO was suggested to me and they gave me a free trial for a couple of devices. We eventually signed the agreement for security, which is included.

Before, we were using a completely manual process which is obviously less efficient, but also more controllable. We chose how to do things, which is something we can't do anymore because of product limitations or shortcomings that they may or may not fix eventually.

I'm using Cisco ISE, and I use Firewall Device Manager, and FireSIGHT Manager Center. I haven't worked with Defense Orchestrator in-depth as I have been with the FireSIGHT Manager Center (aka FirePOWER Manager Center) but what I can see and what I have experienced is that Defense Orchestrator is better built than FirePOWER Manager Center.

There are a lot of things you can't do with the FireSIGHT Manager Center. You have to have FirePOWER Management Center to get all the features. You install the FirePOWER device manager on the device to get rid of FirePOWER Management Center, but some of the features aren't available in the Firepower device manager if you don't have the FirePOWER Management Center. That's not good.

Now there is Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM). If we compare these two, Defense Orchestrator is much better because you can handle many devices at once.

We didn't have a previous solution.

This product was the first firewall security manager that we installed at our organization, and we didn't really consider anything else because we were already very dedicated to Cisco products.

Prior to this solution, I was working on Skybox. It is primarily used for firewalls.

Previously, we were not using another solution. We have been using Cisco Defense Orchestrator from the beginning.