Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual - PAYG

I primarily use Cisco Secure Firewall  for two main purposes. The first is perimeter security, particularly for all locations, especially data centers where we determined that SASE  would be overkill. I secure all traffic from the firewalls for servers hosted in data centers, with a small group of users working and having their internet egress out of data centers. Perimeter security for secure internet access is the predominant use case.

The second purpose is segmentation. We have different zones depending upon the criticality of applications. We have a DMZ, an internal DMZ, and other zones. The primary task is to ensure that whenever there is a difference in the trust level from one zone to another, we have a firewall in between. These firewalls provide next-generation advanced threat prevention, firewall rules, stateful firewall rules, and we use Snort 3 for IPS/IDS detections. We are using all the features that Cisco Secure Firewall  has to offer.

For all inline traffic, Cisco Secure Firewall definitely delivers. The IPS engine is based upon a Snort 3 license and uses signature-based scanning. Behavioral detection exists to an extent, but it is not an ideal replacement for a traditional NDR (Network Detect and Response). It does not do AI-based modeling at the same level as traditional NDRs, but it is definitely decent. All signature scanning looks at the traffic, and if decryption is applied, post-decryption scanning examines the payload and matches signatures. If a signature is found, an alert is generated. It is a good solution, though not Suricata, but Snort 3 works differently and gets the job done.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a next-generation firewall, and you must leverage all that can be leveraged for preventing lateral movement attacks and all these things that traditional security rules and firewall rules cannot address. Snort 3 and adaptive security bring behavioral and anomaly-based detections. Again, this is not as elaborate as NDR, but it is designed as a firewall and does the job effectively.

Cisco Secure Firewall provides deep packet inspection, so I get deep visibility into every single packet. If attackers or insiders are smart enough to change the protocol behavior or tunnel the traffic through DNS tunneling or similar methods, the firewall can easily detect them. Deep packet visibility and deep packet inspection are crucial, as that is where it all starts. Additional features include DNS security and advanced IPS (NGIPS), which perform signature-based scanning. These feeds are updated in real time by Cisco Talos  and integrated across all firewalls. While I would not say this protects against zero-day attacks, it is very close. It helps with lateral movement-based attacks because of the segmentation these firewalls enforce. It definitely cannot help with TLS 1.3, as no firewall can. There are many nuances involved. The key valuable features are deep packet visibility and inspection, the ability to enforce at all layers of the server model, and the ease of applying signature-based scanning along with behavioral-based detection, though not extensive.

Regarding integration options with user IDs, with the emergence of zero-trust network access and new paradigms, you must configure policies based upon who the user is and not IP addresses. Cisco Secure Firewall does support this and can integrate with Active Directory and Entra ID. However, based on my comparisons with Palo Alto next-generation firewalls, which I work with extensively, the number of options available with Palo Alto is quite extensive. You can integrate with any identity provider, but with Palo Alto it is not just traditional LDAP server and user ID and IP mapping constructs. There is room for improvement in this area.

Based on my experience with Palo Alto and a couple of its competitors, there is room for improvement with the integrations with identity providers. The number of options and integration partners available with Palo Alto is more extensive compared to Cisco Secure Firewall. This is not because Cisco lacks these capabilities, but rather because other vendors are doing better things in this area. However, this is on Cisco's roadmap. I had contact with their sales teams and alliance teams, and they have these improvements carved out in their roadmap.

Cisco Secure Firewall evolved from Cisco ASA , and then Cisco purchased Sourcefire. They integrated ASA  with Sourcefire, and now they have Firepower. The current form of Cisco Secure Firewall represents this evolution. I have worked with Cisco Firewalls  since 2013 or 2014.

When Cisco acquired Sourcefire and turned it into Firepower, it was a very problematic device. We had challenges every single day, with connectivity issues between the firewall and FMC (the management plane). The connection used to break, and we had to perform upgrades. Feature releases used to cause issues. Lately, this has not been the case.

It was really problematic back then. Lately, we have not had significant service outages. The firewall is stable now. There are multiple firewall clusters that we have not rebooted in more than a year, which speaks volumes about stability. We receive regular feature releases and upgrades, and we get security advisories. Cisco has definitely done an excellent job in the last two to three years. Before that, it was not a very good product, and many places were moving away from Cisco Firewalls  to Palo Alto or Fortinet due to stability issues. Currently, if I were purchasing Cisco Secure Firewall because I already have a Cisco footprint, I would not hesitate based upon stability alone.

Given the business we run, I do not think we have hit the bottleneck yet. Every time we detect a potential issue, we proactively monitor performance and have thresholds clearly demarcated. If traffic crosses a particular threshold, we provision a new instance. Until now, we have not hit those hard limits where we are helpless and unable to scale out. It still works for us. However, if we were handling several hundred gigabits of outbound or east-west traffic, I would think harder and look for better designs and a more distributed approach rather than using a single cluster and forcing it to scale out indefinitely. That is more of a design consideration. In our current context, we have not hit those thresholds. There are a couple of on-premise locations where we did hit limits, but that was because we sent out more traffic than we planned for, and we simply had to replace those devices. That is not a product problem.

Cisco Secure Firewall offers many deployment options depending on the architecture and functionality required. If it is a cloud deployment, you can achieve native load balancing with active-standby, active-active, and active-active configurations with cloud-native load balancers such as AWS  Gateway Load Balancer or Network Load Balancer. The same deployment options apply to Azure  and GCP . Cisco offers cloud firewall functions where they provide templates and onboarding options to spin up firewalls and scale them out as part of auto-scaling instances. These capabilities are on par with what competitors are offering. On-premise deployments, of course, are hardware-based, and you can achieve active-active and active-standby configurations. This depends on latency requirements, security requirements, and the capabilities you want to leverage. Proper sizing is essential. Cisco Secure Firewall is highly scalable in cloud environments. On-premise deployments are bound by the restrictions inherent to all hardware firewalls, but with proper sizing, they perform fairly.

One of my clients did deploy cloud firewalls on AWS , and I believe they did the same for Azure Marketplace . I am not certain about the specific pricing, but it is clearly outlined. You can choose between BYOL (bring your own license) or pay-as-you-go models. During unit testing and the initial PoC, we selected pay-as-you-go. Later, the client teams purchased from AWS Marketplace  and leveraged committed spend with AWS to acquire the cloud firewall clusters. This option is available.

Based on my experience with Palo Alto and a couple of its competitors, there is room for improvement with the integrations with identity providers. The number of options and integration partners available with Palo Alto is more extensive compared to Cisco Secure Firewall. This is not because Cisco Secure Firewall lacks these capabilities, but rather because other vendors are doing better things in this area. However, this is on Cisco's roadmap.

I manage a few dozen firewalls, close to 100 in total. You cannot manage each firewall manually, especially if you have local IT teams scattered across locations. It would be too much work. Centralized management attempts to align with what Gartner describes as a hybrid mesh. You hook the firewalls to the centralized management and integrate them with the device management platform. All you have to do is manage your security policies, rules, IPS signatures, and configurations from that central console. You can also take backups, restore them, and if you want to replace a device, you do it from this same console. This definitely reduces administrative overhead, costs, and the number of people you must employ to manage your firewall infrastructure.

The time we need to spend to triage any incidents or potential events is significantly reduced. Before events become incidents, we already have complete insights into who or which IP or source was attempting to reach what, whether it was crypto mining, and we receive all details about the category of URLs or endpoints on the internet the user was trying to access, including whether they were suspicious or potentially benign. The ability to classify these is crucial, and nothing can be done without Talos. However, you must size your firewall properly, because you are ingesting all these feeds from Cisco Talos , and if your firewall is a small model or not sized perfectly, performance can become unstable. You must perform capacity planning well. All third-party threat intelligence feeds vary in quality, but Cisco Talos is definitely one of the most mature threat intelligence feeds that has been around for quite some time and has a decent reputation.

Based on quotes I have seen in the last couple of months, Cisco Secure Firewall is fairly priced. I sometimes find Palo Alto is more expensive than Cisco. Of course, the money you pay is for the capabilities you get. If it is an apple-to-apple comparison, Cisco Secure Firewall is fairly priced. I have no concerns about the pricing. My overall rating for Cisco Secure Firewall is 7.5 out of 10.

My main use case for Cisco Secure Firewall  is to protect corporate internet access from malicious people.

I can provide a specific example of how I use Cisco Secure Firewall  to protect my corporate internet system from malicious activity: I block malicious sites and create rules to detect them.

I also use it to provide remote access for vendors and IT support people.

The best features Cisco Secure Firewall offers in my experience are its GUI, clear definition, and process to create rules.

The GUI is clear and I am able to follow the description of processes such as backup, creation of rules, and other management processes.

This has helped my team feel more confident that we are protected from malicious intruders, and I have noticed specific positive outcomes and changes since using Cisco Secure Firewall.

I believe Cisco Secure Firewall can be improved, particularly regarding the specifications such as the memory that is used on entry-level firewalls, because sometimes when doing an upgrade or changing configuration, issues arise.

On the performance side, I notice that the upgrade to a different version is slow, so hopefully improved CPU and RAM will help performance.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for three years.

Cisco Secure Firewall is stable in my experience.

The hardware is working and we have not encountered the firewall failing because of a firmware upgrade.

We have not needed the scalability feature of Cisco Secure Firewall as of now.

I have not needed to reach out to Cisco support for any issues.

I have not switched from another vendor or used another firewall vendor prior to Cisco.

Before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall, we did not evaluate other options.

I would advise others looking into using Cisco Secure Firewall that it is easy to use and manage, easy to create rules, and upgrade the firmware, and it is reliable; I have not encountered any failure on my Cisco firewall so far. I rate this product an 8 out of 10.

I have mainly worked with Cisco Firewall, specifically FTD and FMC, controlling the Firewall Threat Defenses from FMC, using Talos and Cisco ISE  for approximately two and a half to three years. I completed a comprehensive re-architecture and added different vendors for a company called Gaming Laboratories International, where I extensively used their products.

For a span of two years, I extensively used Cisco products, ranging from switching and routers to firewall solutions for Gaming Laboratories International. For the last year, I have mainly worked with Palo Alto and Cato products, transitioning toward SD-WAN and SASE  solutions.

At Gaming Laboratories International, I inherited a poorly designed network architecture and completely re-architected the network using Cisco Secure Firewall  FTD and FMC across 45 different offices around the globe, spanning 435 jurisdictions at that time. My team and I used Cisco Secure Firewall  as our internal firewall, securing the internal perimeter and protecting our DMZ from the inside. On the outside, we implemented Palo Alto because Cisco Secure Firewall could not handle the capabilities we required, such as application identification, which Palo Alto truly excels at.

Cisco Secure Firewall is quite scalable, and I have found it relatively easy to set up high availability. I have truly enjoyed the flexibility, without the need to use StackWise cables but simple Ethernet cables.

The benefit of Cisco Secure Firewall lies in keeping it to the basics through hardware, which costs a bit more, but the real problem emerges when integrating other platforms and their licensing, which is quite expensive. When calculating the total costs, including ISE, DNA Center , and hardware maintenance, it becomes exorbitant for medium-sized enterprises. It may work for large enterprises already entrenched in Cisco products.

The biggest inefficiency with Cisco Secure Firewall, to be honest, is the licensing—too many licenses for too many different products. There is not a single platform, which is essential nowadays. Cisco Secure Firewall is a bit of a colossus where they add weight on top of it, and I believe it amounts to simply placing products next to each other, which is not a very good solution from the perspective of a network security engineer.

There are many features I would personally remove, amend, or create differently from an engineering perspective. The Frankenstein architecture needs to stop and focus on AI. Nowadays, with different products, it is essential to have a single platform for better data and line application control. Everything about AI is to control application usage and how users interact with your systems.

The process with FMC is quite a hurdle, and attempting to integrate it with DNA Center  or ISE turns into a nightmare. There is a stark contrast with Palo Alto and Prisma—everything just flows.

When setting up Cisco Secure Firewall, I encounter significant challenges, especially with on-premise Next-Generation Firewalls . There is lacking clarity in documentation, particularly when changing internet service providers or external IP addresses. This lack of guidance often leads to being locked out or corrupting files within the Next-Generation Firewall, resulting in wasted time troubleshooting.

I worked with Cisco Secure Firewall more than a year ago, exactly eleven months, to be precise.

I am really happy with the performance and capabilities of Cisco Secure Firewall to manage heavy workloads. Although it performs well, integrating the software with existing systems often creates complications.

Cisco Secure Firewall is quite scalable, and I have found it relatively easy to set up high availability.

Cisco's customer service and technical support respond in a timely manner, which is good. However, they do not always come up with effective solutions. Many times, I need to dig deep to find solutions due to the complexity of the environments where I work, especially in game development.

I would rate Cisco technical support as a seven. They deserve a six or seven for their efforts, but I feel sympathy for them given the challenging circumstances they work under.

At the moment, I do not use Cisco Secure Firewall at all. For the last eleven months, I have been working solely with Palo Alto Next-Generation Firewall, Prisma Access , and Cato. I am primarily integrating Cato for companies, and I have witnessed its rise over Cisco Secure Firewall because of its simplicity, ease of management, and deployment cost and time efficiency.

When setting up Cisco Secure Firewall, I encounter significant challenges, especially with on-premise Next-Generation Firewalls . There is lacking clarity in documentation, particularly when changing internet service providers or external IP addresses.

For high traffic rates and heavy CPU consumption, Cisco Secure Firewall could fit well. However, security can lead to lock-out situations, so those considering Cisco Secure Firewall should thoroughly assess their needs. SASE  solutions are dominating the market; I primarily work with Cato, which finds traction in eight out of ten meetings I have with customers, with Palo Alto depending on the desired security posture.

I suggested in the design, and that was approved to be moved internally because Palo Alto had better capabilities to handle security concerns. Cisco Secure Firewall overly relies on administrators to do the heavy lifting to connect those platforms with open-source or third-party solutions. Licensing is a recurring issue—it would be much easier if there were a package, but that is not the case.

When we do not talk about money, time has become the critical factor where Cato massively outperforms Cisco Secure Firewall. I would rate this review a five point five overall.

We have two deployment models for the use case: one is a perimeter firewall and one is a data center firewall. If you have a perimeter, you will position Cisco Secure Firewall  as a perimeter firewall; it fits more in data as a data center firewall because in a data center firewall, you are inspecting incoming traffic and you need a very good IPS, so Cisco Secure Firewall  is very effective as a data center firewall.

The best feature in Cisco Secure Firewall is the stability; we have a stable product with no lagging or crashing, unlike others. Additionally, the IPS is the next-generation IPS from Cisco, which has many features and many signatures with updated signatures for my IPS.

I switched to Cisco Secure Firewall to get very good IPS signatures and next-generation IPS; that is a market leader from Cisco.

The stability is very good. I do not experience any downtime, crashes, or performance issues; that is the best feature from Cisco Secure Firewall.

Most of the time, Cisco provides features on some versions and the updated versions will move them; for example, we can do firewall policies based on users, which is from Active Directory. It should be from Cisco ISE , so it is a very bad drawback from Cisco Secure Firewall. Not all customers have Cisco ISE , and we need to integrate to make a policy on users, not just by IP, but with users also. We had integration before with LDAP and Active Directory, but on some versions, Cisco requires us to do it through Cisco ISE.

I have five years of experience with Cisco Secure Firewall overall.

The stability is very good. I do not experience any downtime, crashes, or performance issues; that is the best feature from Cisco Secure Firewall.

Cisco Secure Firewall is providing scalability. I rate the scalability as a number 10.

I rate the technical support a number 10.

Compared to Fortinet, we have a complex configuration, but we still have a stable product rather than Fortinet's product.

Cisco Secure Firewall requires maintenance. Maintaining it is slightly complex; it is not easy or very easy.

I am a customer. It was purchased through a partner. I was satisfied with my experience with the partner.

I have seen a return on investment of 50.

The pricing for Cisco Secure Firewall is very good, and we got many discounts from them.

Cisco Secure Firewall is deployed on-premises. We have a team of four users using the solution. I rate this review a 10.

I use Cisco Secure Firewall  essentially as a firewall and for a secure access VPN solution. I need Cisco Secure Firewall  to fulfill that role; I need it for secure access, and it performs the firewalling I need it to do in the network segment where it is located.

I have seen a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall. Generally, where it sits in my network, there are other vendors as well, but Cisco Secure Firewall is a better product and easier to manage than those alternatives. It does more of the features that I want it to do to be more secure, and I will move the other vendors into Cisco Secure Firewall.

The biggest challenge I have with Cisco Secure Firewall is that I often need to look in a few places to find what I want to do or I find myself searching for where a particular feature is located. I know what I want to accomplish, but I cannot always find it easily; it takes some time looking around. Because I do not use Cisco Secure Firewall as heavily as other vendors, I find it a little harder to navigate, though I would caveat that with the possibility that with more use, it would become easier for me to navigate and accomplish what I want to do. I am not sure how I would specifically improve that aspect, but it is probably the biggest day-to-day challenge I have with it.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for about a year, maybe just over.

Stability of Cisco Secure Firewall is generally very good.

In terms of scalability, because it is there for the secure access solution as well, it was right-sized when it was put in, so I have not had any scalability challenges for what I do. My organization is fairly static in terms of scale, so users and that type of thing do not scale up and down quickly; it is more slow-moving in that regard.

I have not done a whole lot of customer support with Cisco Secure Firewall.

Before Cisco Secure Firewall, I used Juniper as a vendor; I have used them with other vendors as well, but where I am using Cisco Secure Firewall, they are sort of a direct competitor with Juniper.

It took a couple of months to deploy Cisco Secure Firewall; that was the same for secure access, as it was all part of the same rollout. What took those months to deploy was probably more internal change controls; it is just slower moving, as I have done a lot of testing deployments in lab environments, so it is less of a technology issue and more of the constraints of where I work that slow it down.

I did not implement Cisco Secure Firewall personally, but I was there for the implementation.

I have seen a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall. Generally, where it sits in my network, there are other vendors as well, but Cisco Secure Firewall is a better product and easier to manage than those alternatives. It does more of the features that I want it to do to be more secure, and I will move the other vendors into Cisco Secure Firewall.

Integration with other systems is fairly slow-moving and static in that way. I would rate this review an 8.