There are a lot of templates that are already built-in. They give you quick-to-create and quick-to-apply policies that are typically a little more complicated for people.
Systems Architect at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Jul 26, 2019
The ability to do operations on multiple firewalls at once is valuable because it saves time and mental effort. The solution's ability to make bulk changes makes it very convenient to manage things at once on multiple targets.
Network and Data Centre Platform Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Jul 24, 2019
The most valuable feature is being able to do centralized upgrades on the ASAs. We can select all of those ASAs, and say, "Upgrade these ASAs at this scheduled time." It will copy down the ASA image, ASDM image, and then do the upgrade and failovers, and then put it all back into service as required at a scheduled time. It automates that process for us.
I like the upgrade feature. That is pretty valuable to me because I have dual ASAs and when I go through CDO it does it for me pretty well. It's all done in the back-end and I don't really have to be involved. I just initiate, pick the image, and I pick when I want it done and it just does it, whether I have a single ASA or have a dual ASA.
Network and Security Specialist at CONNECTED TECHNOLOGY
Jan 7, 2020
We use a lot of image upgrades. We take some 20 devices and then we update everything at once, including the policies. We apply policies for groups. For certain groups, like anti-viruses, we send out policies and apply them to every single device. It's really easy and simple.
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Aug 13, 2019
The initial setup was straightforward. We spun up the VM onsite. We generated the key that it needed to talk to the Cloud Orchestrator. After that, as I started adding devices, it was relatively quick and easy.
We had some MX devices that were blocking Windows Update from happening. We found out it was a Meraki issue, but it would have been nice if it had been flagged for us: "Hey, these updates are failing because the MX is blocking it." It wasn't a huge problem, but there was a loss of our time as well as the fact that the updates didn't get pushed out... It would have been nice if CDO had let us know that that was an issue.
Network Security Engineer at a manufacturing company with 10,001+ employees
Aug 13, 2019
I'd like CDO to be the one-stop-shop where we could do all the configurations easily. It would be nice, for ASA upgrades, if we could do them from a central repository and not have to reach out to Cisco. That would be a definite plus.
Systems Architect at a university with 1,001-5,000 employees
Jul 26, 2019
I've found dozens of bugs over the year we've been using it. The more I use it for different things, the more problems I find... Most of the problems have to do with the user interface. A lot of thought and work has gone into the back-end component to make the product do what it's intended to do, but the way it is presented for use hasn't gotten nearly as much thought to make it smart and bug-free.
Network and Data Centre Platform Manager at a manufacturing company with 1,001-5,000 employees
Jul 24, 2019
There could be some slight improvements to navigation. In some of the navigation you've got to go back to be able to get into where you need to be once you've made a change. If I make a change, I've then got to go back to submit and send the change.
The main thing that would useful for us would the logging and monitoring. I have to check it out, to get the beta, because I don't have access to them... I wanted CDO to be a central place so where I could do everything but right now I don't think that's possible. I really don't want to go back and forth between this and FMC. Maybe the logging portion, when I look at it, will give me some similarities.
Network and Security Specialist at CONNECTED TECHNOLOGY
Jan 7, 2020
CDO doesn't have a report, an official report that I can check daily. It has another module called FTD, but it doesn't have that specifically for ASA. In the reporting, there are a lot of things that aren't there. There is also room for improvement in the daily monitoring.
If I make a change locally to the firewall, CDO gives an alarm or an error message and says there's a change in compliance: "The firewall has this configuration but the last time it was compiled it had that configuration." That view of new changes versus the old could be better... I had to log in manually, locally on the firewall, to check which version, which configuration was actually running. I couldn't see it in CDO.
Network Engineer at a healthcare company with 10,001+ employees
Aug 13, 2019
When logging into the device, we sort of had problems with it staying in sync. If somebody made a change onsite, it wouldn't do an automatic sync. It would have to wait, as you would have to do a manual sync up.