Prior to this solution, we were using Microsoft NPS. We switched from the Microsoft solution because we were looking for a more current way for our BYOD devices. 

Prior to ISE, we were using Cisco ACS, which is very old, and ISE was the next logical step. Along with that, we rolled our SSID BYOD over to ISE. That was our initial deployment. 

About a year later, we moved our production SSID over to it as well. So, we have just kind of come more into using it. It has a lot to offer.

We have been a Cisco shop for more than twenty years now. Cisco is a company that we can trust in every aspect of the work that we do together. Cisco is our partner for everything we do on the network.

We are very observant of the kind of solutions Cisco provides us. It is feature-rich. It is very easy to implement. There is longevity there. Our first choice is to go directly to Cisco.

We chose it because we have a lot of Cisco products in our company. Ninety percent of our base uses Cisco. Cisco ISE was one of the options that we had. After studying it with some managers and some other teams, it did provide a lot of options that the others didn't. 

I personally didn't evaluate other products but I dabbled through other software, other interfaces, and GUIs of other products. Cisco does provide a lot more options. You can admin the administration part of Cisco ISE, there are endless options of how you can customize it to your own needs. A lot of the other competitors tend to lose it in the fact that the interface is a lot more complicated or it doesn't provide as many features.

In our field, we need the most secure option. That's something that would work with TACACS, which is something that we all use now. That was one of the main factors. 

We did not use a different solution. We're a Cisco shop, so we've always used Cisco. 

We had ClearPass.

In terms of evaluating other services, that's one of our reasons for being a Cisco Live, to actually know what alternatives there are in that space. We are interested in a faster-performing solution at times.

We did not have a previous solution.

We have actually always been a Cisco shop right from the start, and ISE has always been our AAA authentication tool right from the start. As far as the evaluation and selection process goes, because we're a Cisco shop, it kinda just made sense to choose a product or a tool that neatly integrates with the rest of our products. We use a lot of Cisco products in terms of our wireless control, network management, and legal firewall. So, it was just a natural fit to choose Cisco ISE and use it as part of that existing ecosystem.

We were using regular TACACS, RSA, etc. I can't remember what they were using on their side because it was more of the infrastructure team that was using this. We would just basically go to them and give them requests. Having control through Cisco ISE is much better.

The reasons for going for Cisco ISE were having that control and having a relationship with Cisco. All of our gears are Cisco. It just made it easier and more compatible. I know there are a lot of other tools that we can take advantage of such as NAC and things like that. We're hoping to do that in the future.

We previously used Cisco ACS but transitioned to Cisco ISE because it reached its end-of-life status, and we needed to progress.

We are using Juniper. We are also using Cisco, which is the main vendor. Before, a solution for web portal access was deployed by our internal team, and we moved it back to Cisco. We chose Cisco because, as a NAC solution, it made sense to us since it keeps things together in the last single tool.

I used OpenRADIUS before. That was open source. I switched because I'm the support for everything. It was easy to support with Cisco ISE.

Role-based access is easy to do with Cisco ISE versus OpenRADIUS. That's because OpenRADIUS is something you have to manage yourself. You have to manage the certs and other things. You have to define the roles yourself for special read access and for certain groups and multi-groups.

The only thing I didn't like at the beginning was that Cisco ISE was limited to how many groups you could use. That problem has been fixed. I haven't run into that problem.

This is our first solution for network access control and that level of visibility.

For visibility, we do have CrowdStrike. That gives us visibility into our network, but it only acts on the agent and it uses an ARP request to discover devices that it didn't already know about. You can't really trust that, because if someone gets on maliciously, they're going to know enough to not just be blatantly, obviously there. You want to have a little bit more security in place when they first connect.

We had ClearPass but we found some difficulties with it and those were things that ISE was better at, such as EAP authentication. We had some issues with how ClearPass interacted with the Cisco wireless environment. The merging of the two technologies was hard.

We have jumped around. We were Juniper, Aruba, and then a Cisco corporate environment, and then a mixed environment. We finally consolidated those between retail, warehouses, and our world headquarters, into a unified Cisco environment with ISE as our RADIUS backbone. ISE gave us what we needed to unify all of them. We finally shut down our last ClearPass server a couple of years ago.

We have been working for 15 years with Cisco as a Cisco partner. We like the Cisco solutions.

I've always worked with Cisco ISE. However, in my organization, there's another part of my infrastructure where they use Forescout. The way Forescout implements a NAC solution differs vastly from how Cisco ISE does it. The way Cisco ISE does it is more ingrained in the whole radius process and enhances the security features on a switch or wireless line controller.

Our organization chose to go with Cisco ISE instead of Forescout because, holistically, the solution checked all the boxes needed for a NAC solution.

We did not previously use another solution.

We used to use Aruba ClearPass. It was somewhat clunky to use and it didn't integrate well with third-party platforms. If you used Aruba, it worked great. If you didn't use Aruba, and were pointing things at ClearPass, it had some issues. We found that ISE typically handled things a little bit better. We could point anything at ISE and take care of it.

I'm a reseller from Fortinet and Cisco solutions. I also have experience with Check Point. 

We previously used ACS.

Prior to using ISE, we were using a solution by Trustwave. It is a different product because it uses Name Poisoning methods. It was an interesting solution but we changed because the price of support is too high. We opted to instead purchase a new product.

[The main challenge] was authentication and not using PSK, traditional pre-shared keys. They wanted to get away from pre-shared keys; people share them. They wanted something that would allow clients to just connect automatically, not have a pre-shared key, and be secure. That's the most important part, making sure that the right clients are getting on our internal corporate network.

[Our company] was just using PSK and that solution was really built around access control of our corporate networks. They were using PSKs at every site and rotating those PSKs, or had site-specific PSKs. Now, when somebody comes into the office, they can just connect to the employees' network automatically, and it's the same across the board at every site. 

It was this idea that we needed to simplify things. We needed to make it easier on our users to go into an office and connect to the internet and not have to ask an IT guy there or make a ticket. That was the important part.

We didn't have a previous solution.

We didn't use any other solution previously.

We didn't have any network access control. For the wireless, we had ACS, and some places used NPS from Windows.

We chose Cisco ISE because we have a Cisco network. It seemed like the obvious choice.

Before Cisco ISE, we didn't have a similar solution.

We used Secure ACS, which was a Cisco tool. Cisco discontinued support for it, so we switched to Cisco Identity Services Engine.

We did not previously use another solution.

We were looking to solve the challenge where people were moving devices that they were not supposed to.

We weren't using anything in place of Cisco ISE previously. We were pretty lacking in that department. When we got Cisco ISE, we improved our security significantly.

We went for Cisco ISE based on a suggestion from one of our vendor partners who helped us with our network refresh. They said that Cisco ISE was something that they had used previously in lots of larger deployments, and they had seen great success with it.

Some of our customers have considered using Juniper NAC, ClearPass, etc. They switched to Cisco ISE because they had a lot of network infrastructure in place and wanted a single vendor they could use end to end. Everybody has a good relationship with Cisco because they know that if there is a problem, their technical support team will resolve things in a quick and timely manner.

We didn't use a solution before ISE.

We previously used ACS.

We have been using ISE for a while. We didn't have another solution beforehand.

We did not have a previous solution.

I've worked with ISE before, and it was actually my suggestion that we buy the license for it.

I am familiar with ClearPass. I prefer ISE because most of the environments I'm dealing with are Cisco networks. Having the device administration based on TACACS+ is a plus, with it being a proprietary protocol. ISE definitely implements it better than other solutions. From a conceptual standpoint, ISE makes more sense.

ISE may be a bit difficult for my customers because they're not used to it, but the reality is that the workflows make a lot more sense to me than they did with other solutions like ClearPass.

Currently we have two solutions that do the same kinds of things. For our wireless infrastructure, we use Aruba, but for our wired access, we use ISE.

We did not use other solutions prior to the current one and will likely not explore others in the future. The current one should be fine. 

I am also using FortiNAC and it is similar to Cisco ISE. However, Cisco is spread across the globe with bigger clients, large enterprises. FortiNAC is not as mature, but they are still working their way up in the market

I don't know about other alternative products. I don't have any experience with other alternative products. I've only ever used Cisco ISE.

I've only ever used Cisco. I used to use NAC, however, they changed to ISE. I've never used any other product.

Cisco ISE was the first full solution we've used.

It has been pretty much Cisco from the beginning. With another VAR recently, we were pitching the Aruba ClearPass. And actually the ClearPass will run on top of a Cisco infrastructure, which is kind of cool. That's unique, but the ISE doesn't go that way. You won't run ISE on top of an Aruba infrastructure, but Aruba built that solution from day one to be compatible with Cisco switches and routers and wireless stuff. I thought that was pretty compelling.

Cisco has their ISE, their Identity Services Engine. The other one that I would tell a customer to look at would be the Aruba ClearPass. I don't know enough about the Juniper Solution to make any comment about that. But those are the two that I think about the most for identity solutions.

Currently, I am using SD-WAN (Software-Defined WAN) from Silver Peak.

I previously used Portnox, but it only gave us network access control, so we switched to ISE, which has more features like device administration.

We have used 3Com wireless controllers previously.

We didn't use any other solution previously. We went for Cisco ISE because we're a Cisco shop. It helps to have one vendor for network management and security.

We used to use Cisco ACS and that evolved to Cisco ISE.

Cyber security resilience has been at the top of our list since 2020 because we had so many people working from home and that increased as time went on. That opened our eyes.

I previously used the older versions of the hardware that were the original predecessors to ISE.

We previously used an open-source solution. We switched for vendor support and scalability.

We also currently have Microsoft RADIUS, but we are planning to move away from it and use ISE as our only authentication solution.

We were very late adopters in the education arena of wireless. We didn't adopt until about five years ago. We had a great relationship with our partner and got to see this demo several times. It was really good.

We were using Cisco ACS previously. I have found Cisco ISE to be a more advanced and easy-to-use solution than the Cisco ACS.

I have not worked on any other product.

We use this product because we mainly sell this as a premier class NAC solution, compared to other similar products.

We did not use another similar solution prior to this one.

We were using ACS and IAS servers for radius and TACACS. ISE is one stop shop for everything with more to offer.

Yes. I am a consultant, so I have used many competing products over the years.

I have used Microsoft IAS/NPS, Funk, and Aruba ClearPass. ClearPass is the only product in the same league as Cisco ISE.

We are also currently using ForeScout for another feature but we are facing multiple challenges with ForeScout implementation.