Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs Cisco Secure Workload comparison

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6,464 views|3,508 comparisons
86% willing to recommend
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3,396 views|2,251 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 26, 2023

We compared Akamai Guardicore Segmentation and Cisco Secure Workload based on our users' reviews in five categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:

  • Ease of Deployment: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation's setup process is straightforward but necessitates careful planning and system labeling. On the other hand, Cisco Secure Workload has a relatively uncomplicated setup process that usually takes one to two days.
  • Features: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation provides flexibility in establishing security zones and offers various interfaces for production and management. It includes a query insight module and allows policy creation at a process level. In contrast, Cisco Secure Workload is recognized for its user-friendly UI and GUI. It offers a comprehensive solution and benefits from helpful technical support.
  • Room for Improvement: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation can enhance its offering for larger organizations, provide an agentless option, and ensure accurate support claims. On the other hand, Cisco Secure Workload should focus on improving integration, usability, data retention, and addressing customer preference for the previous version.
  • ROI: Based on the provided information, the availability of ROI for Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is unknown. On the other hand, Cisco Secure Workload does not prioritize ROI.
  • Service and Support: Akamai Guardicore Segmentation receives positive feedback for its exceptional customer service, as reviewers appreciate the attentive and knowledgeable technical support. On the other hand, Cisco Secure Workload is renowned for its robust networking support but may not excel in supporting higher-layer products.

Comparison Results: In comparing Akamai Guardicore Segmentation to Cisco Secure Workload, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation has a straightforward setup process and offers flexibility in creating network security zones. It is stable and provides good coverage for older operating systems. However, it may face challenges in supporting large organizations and lacks agentless options. On the other hand, Cisco Secure Workload has a moderate setup process and offers additional controls in security scoring. It is user-friendly and provides a comprehensive solution. However, it may have integration issues and a complex dashboard. The pricing for Cisco Secure Workload includes a hardware cost. Both products have received positive feedback for their customer support, though Cisco Secure Workload's support is considered stronger for networking products.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload Report (Updated: March 2024).
768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"The tool's most valuable feature is its visibility.""The most valuable features of the solution are the maps and ring fencing that help monitor events.""That is primarily because I've seen increased rules. It's kind of caught us a little off guard. With GuardiCore, I have had to deal with their technical support and engineering team in Israel. They are amazing. They are very quick to adapt.""Application Ring-Fencing and Deception Server, which is basically like a honeypot, are pretty useful features.""The label-based segmentation is the most valuable feature.""The real bonus is the fact that we can secure applications, all the way down to the individual services, on each host. It's actually more granular security than we can get out of a traditional firewall.""I found the solution to be stable.""The interface and dashboard are amazing."

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"The product offers great visibility into the network so we can enforce security measures.""The most valuable feature is micro-segmentation, which is the most important with respect to visibility.""The most valuable feature of the solution is that we don't have to do packet captures on the network.""A complete and powerful micro-segmentation solution.""Secure Workload's best feature is that it's an end-to-end offering from Cisco.""Instead of proving that all the access control lists are in place and all the EPGs are correct, we can just point the auditor to a dashboard and point out that there aren't any escaped conversations. It saves an enormous, enormous amount of time.""Scalability is its most valuable feature.""Generally speaking, Cisco support is considered one of the best in the networking products and stack."

More Cisco Secure Workload Pros →

Cons
"Supports become difficult when it's for a big organization. For a small organization, medium organization, it still makes sense, however, for a big organization, it makes life difficult.""The product needs a few features like enhanced user policies and payload-level inspection to improve the offering.""Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it.""The long-term management of the security policies could be improved with some kind of automation platform, something like Chef or Puppet or Ansible, to help you manage the policies after day-one... to then manage the policies and changes to those policies, going forward, through some type of automation process is not turning out to be really easy.""Guardicore Centra should incorporate automation so that we don't require to write custom scripts and APIs. The tool also has limitations on rules where it allows only sixty thousand rules. Our clients have also commented that there are too many manual clicks and effort to do changes. I think that the incorporation of automation can help our clients make changes with confidence and without the possibility of human error.""It doesn't support a PAAC solution (Platforma as a service) in the cloud.""Customers would want to see the cost improved.""In our version, when using the terminal server, we cannot exclude user tasks for each session."

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"The multi-tenancy, redundancy, backup and restore functionalities, as well as the monitoring aspects of the solution, need improvement. The solution offers virtually no enterprise-grade possibility for monitoring.""It is not so easy to use and configure. It needs a bunch of further resources to work, which is mainly the biggest downside of it. The deployment is huge.""They should scale down the hardware a bit. The initial hardware investment is two million dollars so it's a price point problem. The issue with the price comes from the fact that you have to have it with enormous storage and enormous computes.""The product must be integrated with the cloud.""Secure Workload is a little complicated to use, and the dashboard isn't intuitive, so it takes a while to learn how to use it.""The emailed notifications are either hard to find or they are not available. Search capabilities can be improved.""There was a controversy when Cisco reduced the amount of data they kept, and the solution became quite cost-intensive, which made its adoption challenging….Although they have modified it now, I preferred the previous version, and I wish all the functionality were back under the same product.""The integration could be better, especially with different types of solutions."

More Cisco Secure Workload Cons →

Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "GuardiCore has made some new changes to the license now. We've seen monthly and annual licenses based on a subscription. We have a few clients that pay anywhere from $25,000 a year."
  • "Compared to the pricing we were seeing from both Illumio and Edgewise, Guardicore was very competitive."
  • "Guardicore Centra provides better value for money than NSX, was the other solution that we looked at, which was too expensive for what it does."
  • "This is not a cheap solution but you have to consider the bigger picture, which is what it is giving you."
  • "The customer would complain about the cost."
  • "The solution is reasonably priced and I would rate it a six out of ten. The tool's licensing costs are yearly."
  • "The price is the same as other products in the market. There's no price argument to choose one or the other product, it will cost the customer approximately the same."
  • "Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is expensive."
  • More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "The pricing is a bit higher than we anticipated."
  • "The price is outrageous. If you have money to throw at the product, then do it."
  • "Pricing depends on the scope of the application and the features. Larger installations save more."
  • "It is not cheap and pricing may limit scalability."
  • "The price is based on how many computers you're going to install it on."
  • "The cost for the hardware is around 300k."
  • More Cisco Secure Workload Pricing and Cost Advice →

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    Questions from the Community
    Top Answer:Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems.
    Top Answer:The pricing is too high. Based on market standards, I'd recommend lowering the price. I would rate the pricing a five out of ten, with ten being affordable. The DQE feature increases the license cost… more »
    Top Answer:Customers would want to see the cost improved.
    Top Answer:The product provides multiple-device integration.
    Top Answer:The product must be integrated with the cloud.
    Ranking
    Views
    6,464
    Comparisons
    3,508
    Reviews
    5
    Average Words per Review
    442
    Rating
    7.5
    Views
    3,396
    Comparisons
    2,251
    Reviews
    1
    Average Words per Review
    235
    Rating
    7.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore
    Cisco Tetration
    Learn More
    Akamai
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    Overview

    Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is a software-based microsegmentation solution that provides the simplest, fastest, and most intuitive way to enforce Zero Trust principles. It enables you to prevent malicious lateral movement in your network through precise segmentation policies, visuals of activity within your IT environment, and network security alerts. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation works across your data centers, multicloud environments, and endpoints. It is faster to deploy than infrastructure segmentation approaches and provides you with unparalleled visibility and control of your network.

    Cisco Secure Workload is a cloud and data security solution that offers a zero-trust policy of keeping an organization’s application workloads safe and secure throughout the entire on-premise and cloud data center ecosystems.

    Cisco Secure Workload will consistently provide protection by discovering workload process anomalies, stopping threats immediately, minimizing the risk threat surface, and aborting any lateral movement.

    Today’s ecosystems are very elastic, and in the application-focused dynamic of today’s aggressive marketplace, Cisco Secure Workload delivers a robust security solution that works effectively with today’s most popular applications. The solution uniquely surrounds each and every workload to ensure organizations are able to keep their data, network, and applications safe and secure at all times. Cisco Secure Workload ensures that enterprise organizations can maintain secure applications by consistently building firewalls around every workload level throughout the entire ecosystem. The solution can manage applications that are deployed on containers, virtual machines, or bare-metal servers.

    Cisco Secure workload is able to meet an organization's busy needs and offers flexible options such as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and on-premises options. Using the Secure Workload SaaS options, users receive all the benefits of Cisco Secure Workload protection without the hassle of having to deploy and maintain the platform on premises. Users are responsible for acquiring the necessary software licensing and deploying software agents. Using SaaS, Secure Workload runs in the cloud and is operated and maintained by Cisco. This option offers the ability to scale easily and is a popular choice for SaaS-first and SaaS-only clients. Many organizations find they get the best TCO and achieve the best productivity and profitability using the SaaS options.

    When choosing on-premises options, organizations choose between hardware-based appliance models (large or small form factors). Platform selection is dependent on scalability goals, the desired fidelity level of flow telemetry, and the actual number of workloads. When a user chooses to configure Cisco Secure Workload for a conversation-only flow telemetry for all workloads, each platform has the capability to scale up vertically twice the default platform scale. Additionally, with Secure Workload, it is possible for the platform to be scaled horizontally in order to satisfy the demands of extra large widely distributed enterprise environments using federation capabilities.

    Cisco Secure Workload also provides a robust disaster recovery (DR) tool, which helps to make it a complete, comprehensive solution. The DR allows for continuous restore and backup capabilities that enable users to quickly remediate operations and data to a standby cluster in the event of a drastic failure or disaster.

    Reviews from Real Users

    The solution offers 100% telemetry coverage. The telemetry you collect is not sampled, it's not intermittent. It's complete. You see everything in it, including full visibility of all activities on your endpoints and in your network. Other valuable features include vast support for annotations, flexible user applications, machine learning, automatic classification, and hierarchical policies.” - CTO at a tech vendor

    Sample Customers
    Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE
    ADP, University of North Carolina Charlotte (UNCC)
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    University20%
    Retailer10%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Educational Organization10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Government5%
    REVIEWERS
    Comms Service Provider44%
    Media Company11%
    Energy/Utilities Company11%
    Computer Software Company11%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company29%
    Financial Services Firm13%
    Government6%
    Insurance Company5%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise71%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business33%
    Midsize Enterprise20%
    Large Enterprise47%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business17%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise69%
    Buyer's Guide
    Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    768,578 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is ranked 3rd in Cloud and Data Center Security with 17 reviews while Cisco Secure Workload is ranked 9th in Cloud and Data Center Security with 13 reviews. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is rated 8.2, while Cisco Secure Workload is rated 8.4. The top reviewer of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation writes "Allowed us to build out a data center topology without worrying about placement of physical or virtual firewalls that can create bottlenecks". On the other hand, the top reviewer of Cisco Secure Workload writes "A solution that provides good technical support but its high cost makes it challenging for users to adopt it". Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is most compared with Illumio, VMware NSX, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security and Microsoft Defender for Cloud, whereas Cisco Secure Workload is most compared with Illumio, VMware NSX, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, Cisco ACI and Cisco ISE (Identity Services Engine). See our Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. Cisco Secure Workload report.

    See our list of best Cloud and Data Center Security vendors, best Cloud Workload Protection Platforms (CWPP) vendors, and best Microsegmentation Software vendors.

    We monitor all Cloud and Data Center Security reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.