We performed a comparison between Azure Firewall and Cisco Secure Firewall based on our users’ reviews in five categories. After reading all of the collected data, you can find our conclusion below.
Comparison Results: Cisco Secure is the clear winner in this comparison. It is powerful with a larger feature set than Azure Firewall. In addition, Cisco Secure also has excellent customer support and a significant ROI. Azure Firewall does have an edge in the pricing category, however.
"The most valuable feature of this solution is the analytics."
"FortiGate Secure SD-WAN includes best-of-breed next-generation firewall (NGFW) security, SD-WAN, advanced routing, and WAN optimization capabilities, delivering a security-driven networking WAN edge transformation in a unified offering."
"Their proxy-based inspection is responsive and secure."
"The license management is very valuable. You can get a new license each year, or you can enroll every two to four years. You can get the logs, and you will get the information on the risk in your network and the entire organization. With this information, you can take action on your actives, computers, or devices. You can bring your own device as an SSE."
"The most valuable features are simplicity, management, and that it's constantly evolving."
"It's user-friendly and easy to operate."
"The product is easy to use and is stable. The SV1 functionality is a benefit."
"We purchased Fortinet because of the pricing, its functionality, because it met our requirements, and the total cost of ownership over five years was quite reasonable. In the market, Fortinet is rated quite well."
"All its features are good. That's why we recommend it."
"It's helped us improve our security posture."
"We use the solution for application and server deployment."
"Great security and connectivity."
"The solution is very stable. When comparing it to other environments, it's actually quite impressive."
"The Layer four features are okay and meet my business needs."
"The most valuable feature is the integration into the overall cloud platform."
"The solution is stable."
"Cisco Secure Firewall is reliable, which is why we opted for it during the pandemic for our remote users."
"The most valuable features are the flexibility and level of security that this solution provides."
"The remote access, VPN, and ACL features are valuable. We are using role-based access for individuals."
"URL filtering is valuable."
"You can also put everything into a nice, neat, little package, as far as configuration goes. I was formerly a command-line guy with the ASA, and I was a little nervous about dealing with a GUI interface versus a command line, but after I did my first deployment, I got a lot more comfortable with doing it GUI based."
"One of the nice things about Firepower is that you can set it to discover the environment. If that is happening, then Firepower is learning about every device, software operating system, and application running inside or across your environment. Then, you can leverage the discovery intelligence to get Firepower to select the most appropriate intrusion prevention rules to use for your environment rather than picking one of the base policies that might have 50,000 IPS rules in it, which can put a lot of overhead on your firewall. If you choose the recommendations, as long as you update them regularly, you might be able to get your rule set down to only 1,000 or 1,500, which is a significant reduction in a base rule set. This means that the firewall will give you better performance because there are less rules being checked unnecessarily. That is really useful."
"Cisco ASA Firewall is a well known product. They're always updating it, and you know what they're doing and that it works."
"This solution helped us to identify the key areas where we need to focus to block traffic that is malicious to our organization."
"They've become quite expensive."
"Fortinet should focus on enhancing the capabilities of FortiGate by consolidating its various products, such as FortiGate Cloud, FortiManager, and FortiAnalyzer."
"I think there could be more QoS features"
"There aren't really any negative aspects to discuss."
"The inability to scale the FortiAnalyzer to match our growth necessitates the purchase of new hardware."
"The security of Fortinet FortiGate could improve."
"One area for improvement is the performance on bandwidth demands for smaller devices, as well as better web filtering."
"There are just some services that aren't available. For example, the Ethernet or point-to-point protocols. They could add these services to their product offering - especially services for ISPs."
"The solution doesn't offer the same capabilities of Fortinet. It should offer intrusion prevention and advance filtering. These are two very useful features offered on Fortinet that Azure lacks."
"It has fewer features than you can get from other firewalls, like anti-spam and anti-phishing. Those kinds of things are not included. It only includes IDS and IDB."
"An Azure firewall is not a real firewall."
"The interface could be improved, it's not very user friendly."
"You have to have a defined IP range within your network to associate it with your network. The problem is you have to plan ahead of time if you expect to use the firewall in the future so that you don't have to reconfigure your subnets or that specific IP range. Other than that, I don't any issues. I use it for basic configuration for a single application, so I really don't try to leverage it for multiple applications where I might find some complexity or challenges."
"Azure should be able to work better as a balancer also, instead of just being a firewall. It should have a wider mandate."
"Azure has new versions including a premium firewall. But I would like to see them not put the premium features on Azure Firewall Premium alone because it is quite expensive."
"It needs a lot of improvement, especially on intruder detection. They are working hard on that."
"FlexConfig is there as a bridge for features that are not yet natively integrated into Firepower. It is a way of allowing you to be able to configure things that wouldn't otherwise be possible until the development team can add them into Firepower's native capability. There is still some work that needs to be done around FlexConfig. There are still quite a few complex things, like policy-based routing, that have to be done in FlexConfig, and it doesn't always work perfectly. Sometimes, there are some glitches. It is recommended that you configure FlexConfig policies with Cisco TAC. It would be good to see Cisco accelerate some of those configurations that you can only do in FlexConfig into the platform, so that they are there natively."
"We would like to see MS Word BPM as a feature."
"One thing that Cisco could improve is the GUI. The graphic user interface should be more user-friendly."
"Cisco still has a lot of work to do. You can convert an ASA over to a Firepower, but the competitors, like Palo Alto and Juniper, are coming in. And believe it or not, they are a little bit more intuitive. Cisco has a little bit more work to do. They're playing catch up."
"A feature that would allow me to load balance among multiple ISPs, especially since we have deployed it as a perimeter firewall, would be a great addition."
"The security features in the URL category need more improvement."
"Other products are becoming easier to access and configure. They are providing UI interfaces to configure, take backup, synchronize redundant machines, and so on. It is very easy to take backup and upgrade the images in those products. Cisco ASA should have such features. If one redundant machine is getting upgraded, the technology and support should be there to upgrade other redundant machines. In a single window, we should be able to do more in terms of backups, restores, and upgrades."
"In terms of next-generation capabilities, Cisco is a little behind, and it is way behind the market leaders."
Azure Firewall is ranked 17th in Firewalls with 33 reviews while Cisco Secure Firewall is ranked 4th in Firewalls with 404 reviews. Azure Firewall is rated 7.2, while Cisco Secure Firewall is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Azure Firewall writes "Easy to use and configure but could be more robust". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall writes "Highlights and helps us catch Zero-day vulnerabilities traveling across our network". Azure Firewall is most compared with Fortinet FortiGate-VM, Palo Alto Networks NG Firewalls, Palo Alto Networks VM-Series, Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Netgate pfSense, whereas Cisco Secure Firewall is most compared with Palo Alto Networks WildFire, Netgate pfSense, Meraki MX, Sophos XG and WatchGuard Firebox. See our Azure Firewall vs. Cisco Secure Firewall report.
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