We're using the solution as a firewall, for securing our whole network for students and staff throughout the whole school.

Cisco Secure Firewall's performance benefits my company by allowing us to shape the bandwidth and internet for staff with quality of service where it works better for them rather than students, or vice versa. When students are testing, you can adjust it for that too.

The performance part of Cisco Secure Firewall is pretty good. You can control the bandwidth and features such as bandwidth shaping and quality of service, and I appreciate that part. At our school, a lot of the kids use laptops, the staff use laptops, and they have Wi-Fi. 

I just tried the chat feature in Cisco Secure Firewall, and that was pretty cool; the AI worked pretty good when I tried it at home in the evening, so that was a nice feature.

The visibility and control capabilities of Cisco Secure Firewall in managing encrypted traffic are pretty good too, as our finance department uses it, so keeping that part secure for them works out well.

For our students, we have them in certain groups, and then our staff in certain groups, so with Cisco Secure Firewall, you can push out policies for each one.

Cisco Secure Firewall is important. You can control what students are looking at, and if they're looking at something inappropriate, you can control it. You can also see which device is taking up more bandwidth.

Regarding the zero-trust security model, Cisco Secure Firewall helps our company. Our students and staff have the ability to do whatever they need to do with their research. It helps them while keeping security top of mind.

I would like to see more about the pricing of Cisco Secure Firewall or maybe see it enhanced.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for about ten years now.

The stability and reliability of the Cisco Secure Firewall have always been good; it never falls, never fails, and it's always backed up, which is always good too.

We have more kids and more staff coming in, so with Cisco Secure Firewall, just having that ability to add on more features is great. Currently, it appears we're barely using it, so we can add more with it, and we always have room for that, which is good.

Whenever I call about a problem with Cisco Secure Firewall, they're always helpful and very knowledgeable, getting me to the right solutions I need. They're always willing to help afterwards too and send me documentation, which is always good.

Positive

The deployment experience with Cisco Secure Firewall is easy, with a straightforward deployment.

From my point of view as an IT admin, the biggest return on investment when using Cisco Secure Firewall is seeing what kids are looking at, shaping what they're looking at, shaping the bandwidth, quality of service, and you can do all that with the firewall, too. It also helps in blocking kids from things and monitoring what staffers are looking at.

I work for a school, so getting licensing and getting the budget for Cisco Secure Firewall for certain products is a challenge. It's good to have them, however, it costs us a lot.

On a scale of one to ten, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall a ten.

My main use cases for Cisco Secure Firewall include revamping old networks, security, content filtering, amp protection, et cetera.

Cisco Secure Firewall is easy to configure, and you can do it all in one pane of glass. It is really simple to configure. The solution allows my junior admins to go into the dashboard and look at any issues or reconfigure any features that need to be tweaked without me physically having to be there.

I have been using the assurance feature in Cisco Secure Firewall recently, and I am starting to see that it is a lot more beneficial for me, with all the analytics and reporting that it provides. 

Cisco Secure Firewall allows us to pinpoint exactly where the packets are being delivered or dropped, and we are able to identify issues quicker than with other models or other vendors.

I assess Cisco Secure Firewall's ability to unify policies across my environment as having ease of building. We need to be able to scale and deploy without running a bunch of commands, especially when managing multiple locations acting as separate entities. It is important to my organization since our team is really small. As an engineer, it is just myself and a few juniors. I can verbally tell them to look at specific things or deploy certain features. It gives them the confidence to touch a firewall without being insecure.

The impact of the cloud-delivered firewall on my organization's security posture is very important. It allows us to place certain policies compared to the old infrastructure that is currently in there, with outdated hardware. It allows us to control the firmware and deploy the firmware. In evaluating Cisco Secure Firewall, I find that it helps us implement a zero-trust security model by allowing us to create one policy and deploy it across all of our networks versus multiple agents. Cisco Secure Firewall is very helpful and convenient for me.

I faced challenges moving away from the MS switches to the CS switches, as it is a little different. I am experiencing some small issues with IP reservations, however, I am working with the Meraki engineers to work around or configure it the next day. 

Regarding stability and reliability, I have experienced false negative alerts with the CS models, which indicate that my switch has gone down when in reality, it has not. That is a fix that is needed.

I would say I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for the past two months.

Regarding stability and reliability, I have experienced false negative alerts with the CS models, which indicate that my switch has gone down, but in reality, it has not. That is a fix that is needed.

Cisco Secure Firewall scales tremendously with the growing needs of my organization. I know in the future we are going to start deploying SD-WAN and other applications that will require all of our clinics to connect to our HQ, and deploying Meraki will make their IPsec tunnels very seamless.

I evaluate customer service and technical support based on productivity. If I can reduce ticketing by 10% to 20% by deploying these solutions, I consider or job done. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate the customer service and technical support of Cisco a ten. There is always someone on call. They are very thorough; they know the product and work with you to resolve issues. That is important for me.

Positive

Prior to adopting Cisco Secure Firewall, I was using different solutions at various locations. As we transition and take on these clinics, we have anywhere from home networks, where someone's uncle installed something, to very outdated firewalls. When we come in and present Meraki and what it can do, it becomes a done deal.

My experience with the deployment of Cisco Secure Firewall has been awesome.

I come in when they have the old network and deploy it. I install a cabinet and new drops. I configure the Meraki gear onto their old network side by side. 

Especially during downtime, I can plug the firewall into that rack to get the external IP configured. Once my ISP comes in, I apply those IP addresses to the firewall.

I have seen a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall.

I handle pricing, setup costs, and licensing with our vendors. I contact our vendors, we go over the pricing and the licensing. I make sure they get all the proper codes. As I purchase and license these firewalls, it is all in one place and easy to read and do.

Before selecting Cisco Secure Firewall, I considered Fortinet, which was probably one of the bigger competitors, and SonicWall. We thrive in the Meraki policy. What stood out to me in the evaluation process, compared to other options, was the ease of deployment, the dashboard, being able to manage everything in one place, and Meraki support.

I did not purchase the product on AWS Marketplace.

My advice to other organizations considering Cisco Secure Firewall is to make sure they plan for their organization. Plan for your growth, a three-year growth, and then scale your solutions accordingly. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall overall a solid ten.

My main use case for Cisco Secure Firewall is just control between outer boundary and inner boundaries.

The feature I appreciate the most about Cisco Secure Firewall is the FMC platform where it merges multiple firewalls into one management plane. An example of how features of Cisco Secure Firewall have benefited my organization is through easy deployment of access policies across a long array of devices. I assess Cisco Secure Firewall's ability to unify policies across my environment as a single pane of glass with the FMC. If I need to look up a policy or implement something, I just type in the name of the policy I made to see what objects apply to our policy. I appreciate that part.

Cisco Secure Firewall could be improved in several ways. I've noticed in different versions that some versions had packet caps and some didn't. The user interface could be improved, and maintaining a consistent version across the board would be beneficial. Ease-of-use is important, with the user-based interface and keeping plain language. In the next release of Cisco Secure Firewall, it should include features that utilize AI to speak plain language. For example, it could respond to, 'Hey, I want to do this thing,' and guide users accordingly. I know AI feedback is a hot topic, but I wonder how reliant that is on external connectivity. If it can work in an air-gap network, that would be significant.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for at least a few years, maybe three or four years.

I evaluate the stability and reliability of Cisco Secure Firewall as quite strong since it's probably one of the few things that hasn't crashed on us. While I haven't experienced crashes with Cisco Secure Firewall, most of our issues don't come from it unless it's something we've blocked, preventing users from accessing areas. It's never been a device problem or related to the technical implementation of things.

I think Cisco Secure Firewall scales effectively with the growing needs of my organization because we work in boundary-level areas. Most of our users connect on the inside of the boundary and then egress out, making it easy for us to scale out to support thousands of users as long as they connect to that inner part.

My evaluation of customer service and technical support for Cisco is positive. TAC cases generally serve as a good option for anything we've had problems with Cisco devices, and the process is good. On a scale of one to ten, I would rate Cisco's customer service a 10.

Positive

Prior to adopting Cisco Secure Firewall, I was using Fortinet. The factor that led me to consider changing from Fortinet was its vulnerability problems. We scrapped that solution.

My experience with the deployment of Cisco Secure Firewall is pretty good.

Before selecting Cisco Secure Firewall, I considered a couple of other platforms, including some Palo Altos, for separate requirements that Cisco doesn't meet.

My experience with Cisco Secure Firewall is positive. I appreciate it because it has always been easy for me as an individual to navigate and manage anything Cisco-related.

My impression of the visibility and control capabilities of Cisco Secure Firewall in managing encrypted traffic is somewhat mixed. I have a concern about the GRE and the Snort inspection. Sometimes Snort would break GRE traffic when trying to tunnel from the outside in. Making a policy to allow GRE always breaks. But other than that, it's been straightforward.

This unified policy management is important to my organization because different functions in a network can apply to many other users. It allows us to see that from one pane of glass, and I can easily search it up by name or IP address. I use Cisco SecureX with Cisco Secure Firewall, mainly Firepower, and we integrate them in FMC.

The integration of Cisco SecureX with Cisco Secure Firewall doesn't really affect dwell time for my team. It just gives us the ability to filter out unwanted things from the outside. We don't use much cloud functionality, so I can't comment on the impact of the cloud-delivered firewall on our organization's security posture.

My evaluation of Cisco Secure Firewall in helping my organization implement a zero-trust security model is that we don't really use it for firewalls. We work with DNA center stuff and fabric-enabled technologies. We use the zero-trust model with 802.1X, but that's more unfirewall-related.

The process of using Cisco Secure Firewall is straightforward; you install it and decide whether to block or allow protocols. It's simple and easy. The language part makes it easy since a Cisco box is a Cisco box, and opening up TAC cases on the Cisco portal is straightforward.

My advice to other organizations considering Cisco Secure Firewall is to understand how a firewall works, know your network, and what you want to block and allow. Cisco has been good with their support level, so as long as they know Cisco, they should be fine. I rate Cisco Secure Firewall 10 out of 10.

Our main use cases for Cisco Secure Firewall include firewall, IPS, and URL filtering.

The feature of Cisco Secure Firewall that I prefer the most is IPS. I appreciate the IPS feature because it's built in and I can control it using the FMC and push out the policy company-wide, making it centrally managed. The IPS benefits my company because that's one of the requirements; we used to have separate IPS. Now it's all integrated, providing ease of use for us. Cisco Secure Firewall has helped my company achieve its goals because it's a next-generation firewall. That's what we need to maintain certain compliance from the security side. Having IPS built in, firewall, URL filtering, everything is centrally managed, so we have more visibility and management.

Compared to the previous generation, the ASA, firewall rules appear differently in the ASDM and the previous generation firewall versus FTD, which I don't prefer as much. The ASA makes it easier to view those policies. There could be some improvement in the way FMC displays the policy.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall in my company for the last two years.

I haven't seen any breakdown or instability; the platform has been stable, and we haven't had any issues.

Cisco Secure Firewall scales with the growing needs of my company as we're going to implement clustering. I've used clustering in my past experience; it's very easy and straightforward. We had some minor issues with the clustering. I appreciate the clustering capability, though I haven't implemented it in my current job.

The customer service and technical support have been great; they've always been great.

Positive

I considered other solutions such as Palo Alto before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall. We were using Palo Alto, but we decided to go with Cisco because of its ease of use. We were a Cisco shop, and there's a micro facility where you can migrate all the ASA to the firewall.

The deployment process of Cisco Secure Firewall is simple enough. Out of the box, you perform the initial management configuration, specify the FMC location, join FMC, and then you can manage it from FMC. The process is straightforward and simple.

From my point of view, the biggest return on investment when using Cisco Secure Firewall is the single pane of glass, which is a huge plus for us. Having that visibility, managing all the alerts, IPS alerts, vulnerability management - everything is a huge plus.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing is that it's consistent. I don't have much visibility on the licensing side, but I assume it remains the same.

There are differences between Palo Alto and Cisco, particularly on the cloud side. Palo Alto has Prisma Cloud and additional tools. I would say Cisco has room for improvement in that area for the future. We're not heavily in the cloud, so for us, it's not a significant concern.

We haven't used any new features or functionalities in Cisco Secure Firewall recently, but we plan to try file scanning, focusing more on the malware side, AMP and everything. That's something we want to try next.

My impression of the visibility and control capabilities of Cisco Secure Firewall in managing encrypted traffic is limited as we haven't tried SSL encryption yet. That's something we might explore in the future.

Regarding Cisco Secure Firewall's ability to unify policies across my environment, managing via FMC ensures accuracy. Unifying policies is essential for my company because it provides one pane of glass. Software pushes, policy implementation, traffic monitoring, and having all alerts in one place are crucial.

The impact of the cloud-delivered firewall on my company's security posture is significant. Having the same FTD running in the cloud, managed by FMC, is our future direction. We currently implement this with Azure.

Regarding zero trust security model implementation, we are exploring options with SD-WAN, both on-premises and in the cloud with firepower. I'm meeting with a Cisco engineer next week to discuss implementation strategies.

I don't see anything that needs improvement in Cisco Secure Firewall; we've been very satisfied with it. I've been using FTD for almost five to seven years now, including with a previous company, and heavily worked on migration from ASA to FTD.

From one to ten, I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall a ten.

Regarding the use cases for the Cisco Secure Firewall, the Firepower is used in enterprise corporations, DMZ sites, perimeter security, and IPS applications.

The valuable features of the Cisco Secure Firewall include the unified console and compatibility with other solutions such as Duo Mobile with DAC and EDR. The single solution allows users to see one dashboard, and the compatibility solution provides better dashboard integration.

Areas that could be improved with the Cisco Secure Firewall include the ease of use with the product, and it needs to work better with NAC and integration.

Cisco could improve their firewall by providing better support when issues arise, such as during an attack, to help resolve problems more efficiently.

The stability of the Cisco Secure Firewall is excellent, and I find it very reliable at this moment.

Regarding the scalability of the Cisco Secure Firewall, it depends on the situation because in some cases, equipment changes are necessary when the size is very small.

Equipment changes become necessary when companies upgrade with more devices and people, as the firewall becomes insufficient for different security requirements.

The score for their support is eight.

Positive

I work only with Firepower and Palo Alto security solutions.

The initial setup for the Cisco Secure Firewall is very easy, particularly during the initial start of the equipment.

On a scale of one to ten, I would score the setup as eight.

I have experience with Cisco Secure Firewall, specifically the ASA and Firepower solutions. I work in the education and retail industry, where Palo Alto firewall is commonly used in my country. For B2B business, I use the Firepower solution as a Cisco partner.

We use Network Access Control with NAC, and we use Duo for solutions with easy integration. We also implement attack protection.

I would rate this solution as ten out of ten.

Our primary use cases lie mainly with high availability and the security features available doing Layer 3 routing that we would need on our internal network.

It has simplified the internal network, so we don't have to worry about one device failing and losing connectivity. High availability is always there.

Our top three features are the high-availability features, the VPN and the IPSec.

It has fantastic visibility. It's a 10 out of 10. 

Cisco Secure Firewall is fantastic at securing our infrastructure from end to end so we can detect and remediate threats. We have already caught things that have tried to get in. 

Cisco Secure Firewall has improved resilience by a huge margin. It has been a great help.

Cisco Secure Firewall has freed staff because we don't have IT staff worrying about a lot of the threats. We trust the device that we are going to catch the threat. We are going to get a notification and be able to act upon that. Cisco Secure Firewall has saved at least 25 hours a week

The newer versions have made it so that we do not have to worry about other appliances with feature sets that are already built into the Cisco firewall.

The solution has had a huge effect, especially from physical density when it comes to securing our infrastructure. A lot of people don't think about power availability and cooling aspects. You have a limit to how much power you can push, and every little bit helps. 

We chose Cisco because of its understanding, customer service, warranties, and the quality of the product

We would like to see dual power supplies for some Cisco Firewall products. Having to get an ATS in the Data Center application because there's an A+B power feed on such a vital device with high availability may be something that I want to put in there.

We have been using Cisco Firewall for the last 20 years.

The solution is very stable.

The solution is scalable because Cisco keeps up with new technology, the security application, bandwidth, optics, and the kind of speed that one can use.

Customer support has been very responsive, whether it is a hardware failure or calling for any kind of technical support.

Positive

We have seen a return on investment in the total cost of ownership.

The pricing is fair compared to competitors. Cisco is the Cadillac in its field. You get what you pay for. 

Cisco is amazing at upgrading, so even if we did have to upgrade a device, it is plug-and-play because of that availability option.

Cisco is doing a great job with all the improvements that are coming; they are allowing for GUI setups where many people aren't so used to CLI. Many of the younger grads coming into our field are more used to APIs and automation, so having that GUI feel is a lot better than CLI.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten.

We mostly use Cisco Secure Firewall as a VPN concentrator and for its firewall features.

Using Cisco Secure Firewall has helped grow our familiarity with people that know Cisco.

The most valuable feature of Cisco Secure Firewall is its ease of configuration and that it's scalable for firewalls and VPNs.

Changes you make in the GUI sometimes do not reflect in the command line and vice versa.

We have been using the solution since its inception, so, for many years now.

We did not have any stability issues with Cisco Secure Firewall.

We did not see any limitations with Cisco Secure Firewall’s scalability.

We also use Aruba in our organization. We never have to factor in extra development time when we go to a new major version of Cisco. With Aruba, we have a pretty drawn-out development timeline for any upgrades or software improvements. Aruba and Cisco Secure Firewall are very different in their implementation and development.

The initial setup of the Cisco Secure Firewall is very straightforward. The average time it took to deploy the solution was very short. Deploying the VM and automating our configurations took a couple of minutes.

Cisco smart licensing is a hassle for a disconnected environment. However, I haven't licensed anything in a while. There have been many changes, making it easier to license disconnected devices connected to the internet.

ASAv uses the solution as a VPN concentrator and a firewall because it could be used for both. It can be used for landing AnyConnect clients on ASAv and as a firewall.

What sets Cisco Firewall apart from other products is that when we do an update, we know we're not going to break a lot of things, and there are not a lot of bugs. The integration on the Cisco side is pretty good.

Most of our team is familiar with Cisco, and everyone knows what to expect when they log in. So it's easy in that way.

I like the application visibility and control with Cisco Secure Firewall. My only complaint is that the changes made in the GUI sometimes do not reflect in the command line.

I haven't had any problems with Cisco Secure Firewall. It's very straightforward and reliable. Also, it's trustworthy because it has the Cisco name.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped free up our IT staff for other projects. The product is quite heavy into automation. So with it being Cisco, it is very scalable in generating configs. The solution saves a week or two for implementation and integration.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience through the reliability aspect.

You know what you're getting when you use an ASAv from Cisco. Cisco Secure Firewall is a great product in terms of reliability and scalability.

Overall, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall ten out of ten.

We have some in our DMZ. We have some located in several locations throughout our state. Then we have our local Egress and VPN firewalls that we use.

The VPN is our most widely used feature for Cisco Secure Firewall. Since we were forced into a hybrid working situation by COVID a few years back, VPN is the widely used feature because everybody is working remotely for our agency. So it came in very handy.

Cisco Secure Firewall’s customer support could be improved.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for 20 years.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a very stable solution.

We bought scalable products, and we're in a good position.

With Cisco Secure Firewall's technical support, it's always hard to get somebody that knows what they're doing on the line. However, when you finally get somebody on the line, it's pretty good. Having to deal with the licensing and be able to open a TAT case based on the serial numbers was very difficult. The individuals we get support from are pretty good, but the solution's support is two out of ten because of the process of having to get to that point to get support.

Negative

I have previously used Juniper. Our company decided to go with Cisco Secure Firewall because of the cost and ease of use. Also, the people in our team knew Cisco versus other solutions.

Cisco Secure Firewall's initial setup was pretty straightforward. They have a wizard, which helped in some instances, but there's also a lot of documentation online that helps a lot.

We have a reseller that we go through, and they helped implement Cisco Secure Firewall for us.

The application visibility and control with Cisco Secure Firewall is pretty great. We have the FTD, the firewall threat defense, and FMC, the management console we use, and we have great visibility using that product.

Cisco Secure Firewall's ability to secure our infrastructure from end to end is really good. We always find things and or block things before they even happen. So it's great, especially with Talos.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped free up our IT staff for other projects to a certain degree. We still have to review logs in the firewall, and hopefully, someday, we'll have AI to help do that for us too. The solution has probably saved our organization about ten hours a week.

We use Talos, among other threat advice tools, and it's very good. Talos automatically updates us on the threats out there, and we can deploy those to our devices if we deem it fit to deploy them.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience. We've used Cisco for so long, and we've never had a data breach up to this point.

Overall, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall ten out of ten.