Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs VMware NSX comparison

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Comparison Buyer's Guide
Executive Summary
Updated on Jul 26, 2023

We compared VMware NSX and Akamai Guardicore Segmentation based on our users' reviews in six categories. After reading the collected data, you can find our conclusion below:

  • Ease of Deployment: The reviews suggest that setting up VMware NSX can be difficult and time-consuming. The documentation also needs improvement. On the other hand, the initial setup for Akamai Guardicore Segmentation was described as straightforward, requiring a solid plan and design, with labeling systems being the most time-consuming aspect.
  • Features: The valuable features of VMware NSX include the ability to control virtual switches, VLANs, and micro-segmentations. It also provides top-notch security through its distributed firewall. In contrast, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation offers flexibility in creating network security zones and has an easy initial setup process.
  • Room for Improvement: In terms of room for improvement, VMware NSX has a wide range of areas that need attention. These areas include licensing clarity, integration with open-source products, migration tools, user-friendliness and stability, integration with other brands, AI capabilities, and visual interface enhancement. Conversely, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation faces challenges in supporting large organizations and needs better support for all types of Kubernetes and service mesh. Furthermore, customers are looking for improved costs.
  • Pricing: The cost of setting up VMware NSX is deemed high in comparison to alternative options available, whereas the pricing, setup cost, and licensing details for Akamai Guardicore Segmentation are not addressed in the given feedback.
  • ROI: Users have reported a generally positive ROI for VMware NSX, with a return on investment typically achieved within one to two years. However, some users have expressed concerns about the lack of significant security enhancements. In contrast, there is no specific data available regarding the ROI of Akamai Guardicore Segmentation.
  • Service and Support: The opinions regarding customer service for VMware NSX vary, with some users satisfied and appreciative of its responsiveness, while others believe there is room for improvement. On the other hand, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation's customer service is highly regarded for its attentiveness, understanding, and expertise.

Comparison Results: After comparing VMware NSX and Akamai Guardicore Segmentation, it is evident that VMware NSX offers comprehensive and superior virtualized network software with advanced features such as virtual switch control, micro-segmentation, and distributed firewall. Conversely, Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is praised for its simplicity in setup, flexibility in creating network security zones, and strong customer support.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. VMware NSX Report (Updated: March 2024).
765,234 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
"Initially, I liked the telemetry part. But later, we used the microsegmentation features that we were able to deploy and found that they really stood out from other vendors. It allows us to see microsegmentation as distributed services.""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.""The most valuable feature is the visibility of processes and connections.""Guardicore Centra offers the best coverage specifically in backward compatibility with legacy operating systems.""From day one, you get threat intelligence. It will immediately block active threats, which has been useful.""We like the centralized management of the firewalls. Until we installed Guardicore Centra, we managed all our firewalls individually, so making changes was complicated, difficult, and time-consuming.""The tool's most valuable feature is its visibility.""The tool is a complete package that offers many features like visibility. You can get a graph with real-time workflows and visibility into server-to-server communication. We get visibility into many things happening within our environment."

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"I am impressed with the tool's protection.""This solution comes with an API that can easily integrate with other solutions.""From a distributed firewall perspective, it's a solid solution.""To be able to do the DR and SRM migrations from datacenter to datacenter, we're able to do them with SRM with VXLAN, with the NSX product.""Over the last two years, they've enhanced a lot, especially in regard to integration with OpenStack.""The migration methods are the most valuable aspect of this solution.""It's a beneficial tool.""The stability is great. That's one of the things that we can quantify and leverage through NSX, because it's less complex. We have the availability to manage multiple things at the same time. You can identify problems before they manifest."

More VMware NSX Pros →

Cons
"The maps could go a bit faster. They are useful but slightly slow.""They can maybe improve their customer service just because they are kind of a small organization, and customer service isn't as big as others such as VMware.""Kubernetes is not installed in the way we need it.""Incident tagging could be improved. Other vendors offer semi-automatic tagging, which Guardicore doesn't yet have.""Clients would like to see that the security policies of GuardiCore can continue to be comparable to all the major firewall players out there.""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.""It would be very helpful for beginners if the solution had more windows to help with the terms inside instead of going to the documentation.""In our version, when using the terminal server, we cannot exclude user tasks for each session."

More Akamai Guardicore Segmentation Cons →

"I think that one of the more important things to see better integrated into the NSX product would be an IDS/IPS type solution.""I would like them to make integration with other vendors easier.""Quite a complex solution.""There are always issues integrating with Cisco.""They have some limitations in the firewall features as compared to the on-prem or dedicated hardware appliance. They can add more features, such as IPS and IDS, to the cloud firewall.""The technical support could use some improvement.""There could be an improvement in regards to security.""Their licensing model should make it easier to purchase licenses."

More VMware NSX 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 →

  • "Pricing and licensing could be improved as we are a government entity. Lower pricing could always help."
  • "We haven't had to hire a dedicated network engineer because NSX handles 90 percent of it. The reduced overhead in terms of managing networks has been the biggest plus."
  • "We have saved man-hours and decreased our security exposure."
  • "We can't go without NSX, so it's invaluable from this perspective."
  • "The solution is very expensive."
  • "The licensing fees are expensive and we pay on a yearly basis."
  • "It is an expensive product, but cheaper than some competing solutions."
  • "The price of this product is too high."
  • More VMware NSX 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:There are some very major differences between both the Products and to name a few -Cisco ACI have physical network gear (9K Switches) where the Code runs in ACI Policy Mode & the UCS server where… more »
    Top Answer:Once you know your way around the Cisco ecosystem, using Cisco ACI is not so difficult. It is a global product, so when you change one interface, changes are automatically reflected on every switch… more »
    Top Answer:The product has valuable features for security and network extension.
    Ranking
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    5
    Average Words per Review
    442
    Rating
    7.5
    Views
    6,564
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    34
    Average Words per Review
    416
    Rating
    8.0
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    Guardicore Centra, GuardiCore
    VMware Nicira
    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.

    VMware NSX is a full-stack network and security virtualization platform that enables the virtual cloud network. NSX provides a software-defined process for networking that expands throughout cloud frameworks, data centers, and application structures. Users can join and secure applications within their container and multi-cloud infrastructure and their data center. With robust automated provisioning, the platform offers dynamic flexibility and scalability without compromising on network speed or agility.

    VMware NSX recreates the whole software network model so that users can create and deliver apps quickly and securely. Users can customize security policies and leverage IDS/IPS to block against lateral threats. These security policies can be managed throughout private and public clouds from one pane of glass, no matter where your applications run. By consolidating networking and security tasks into a unified platform, users can save up to one-third of their budget.

    VMware NSX Use Cases

    VMware NSX brings the operational model of a virtual machine to users’ data center networks and revolutionizes the foundations of network and security operations. There are a number of use cases, including:

    • Containers - Similar to VMs, users can offer unified, full-stack networking and security for microservices and containerized apps. This includes the ability to micro-segment, use container networking for Kubernetes, and offers complete visibility for microservices.
    • App Delivery - Users can deliver infrastructure as code while also accelerating app delivery with blueprints that can automate the management of security and networking resources.
    • Security - With zero-trust security in public and private cloud environments, users can reduce attacks, lock down critical apps, and design a logical DMZ in software.
    • Load Balancing - Users can update their data centers from legacy load balancers to software load balancers and SDN automation, creating savings of over 50%.
    • Multi-Cloud - Expand networking across clouds and streamline multi-cloud operations with multi-cloud use cases, including rapid workload mobility, seamless data center extension, and multi-DC pooling.

    Reviews from Real Users

    Through a policy-driven approach, VMware NSX provides VMware technologies to assist with network and security visualization in a unified solution. Users particularly like the distributed firewall and the management dashboard.

    Kolawole O., a systems engineer at a tech services company, writes, "NSX's stand-out function is the distributed firewall. The firewall system is just top-notch, and I haven't seen another solution like it."

    A head of business development and partners management at a comms service provider notes, "I really like the management dashboard, the tailor-made assurance, the telemetry, and the ease of integration with all other solutions of VMware, such as vSphere."

    Sample Customers
    Santander, Frontier Airlines, OpenLink, Intermountain Healthcare, Cellcom, BancoBASE
    City of Avondale, Lumeta, Kroll Ontrack, Heartland Payment Systems, Baystate Heallth, Exostar, Tribune Media, iGATE, NTT Communications, Synergent, California Natural Resources Agency, Bloomington Public Schools, Columbia Sportswear, Join Experience S.A, Schuberg Philis
    Top Industries
    REVIEWERS
    University20%
    Retailer10%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Educational Organization10%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Manufacturing Company6%
    Government5%
    REVIEWERS
    Computer Software Company24%
    Financial Services Firm18%
    Retailer10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Government10%
    Manufacturing Company8%
    Company Size
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business29%
    Midsize Enterprise18%
    Large Enterprise53%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business16%
    Midsize Enterprise13%
    Large Enterprise71%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business26%
    Midsize Enterprise19%
    Large Enterprise55%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise14%
    Large Enterprise65%
    Buyer's Guide
    Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. VMware NSX
    March 2024
    Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. VMware NSX and other solutions. Updated: March 2024.
    765,234 professionals have used our research since 2012.

    Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is ranked 3rd in Cloud and Data Center Security with 17 reviews while VMware NSX is ranked 1st in Cloud and Data Center Security with 93 reviews. Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is rated 8.2, while VMware NSX is rated 8.0. 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 VMware NSX writes "Works well and allows us to do micro-segmentation and create policy rules". Akamai Guardicore Segmentation is most compared with Illumio, Cisco Secure Workload, Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike Falcon Cloud Security and Trend Micro Deep Security, whereas VMware NSX is most compared with Nutanix Flow Network Security, Cisco ACI, Illumio, Cisco Secure Workload and Cisco DNA Center. See our Akamai Guardicore Segmentation vs. VMware NSX report.

    See our list of best Cloud and Data Center Security 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.