I deployed the Cisco Secure Firewall at the Internet Edge for the most part.

We use the solution for deep packet inspection, Internet Edge functionality, IDS, and IDP.

The solution’s GUI could be better.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for six years.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a scalable solution that allows you to add capacity.

The solution’s initial setup is straightforward.

The solution’s pricing is competitive.

I rate the solution's ease of management and configuration an eight out of ten. I would recommend Cisco Secure Firewall to other users based on what they want it for and a combination of price point and supportability.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

Our use for Cisco Secure is for the firewall. 

Network segmentation is the most valuable feature.

The dashboard can be improved. 

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for seven years. 

It is stable.

It is scalable. A thousand-plus users are using the solution in my company. 

The initial setup is straightforward. 

Pricing is high.

Overall, I rate the product an eight out of ten. 

I use the solution in my company for some internal testing purposes, so I don't use it in a real environment. I use it in my dummy lab environment.

The product's user interface is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required.

From an improvement perspective, the product's price needs to be lowered.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for three years. I am a customer of Cisco.

I have faced no issues with the stability of the product. Stability-wise, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The product offers good scalability.

I rate the technical support a nine out of ten.

Positive

I have experience with Sophos.

The product's initial setup phase is a little difficult.

The product's deployment phase is a good and easy process.

The solution is deployed on the cloud.

The product is expensive.

I can't describe a particular scenario where the product has improved security, but I can say that the devices from Cisco are much more trustworthy and reliable compared to other devices in the market.

The most effective feature of the product for threat prevention stems from the granularity of the control that the devices from Cisco provide to its users.

The product offers great integration capabilities.

For our company's daily operations, the user interface provided by Sophos is much better and interactive compared to the one offered by Cisco.

You can choose Sophos if you want a low-budget or budget-friendly product. You can choose Cisco if you want a high-end and highly scalable tool with great integration capabilities, especially if budget is not an issue.

I rate the overall tool an eight out of ten.

We had implemented our Cisco API and Cisco Stealthwatch. We use the Cisco Secure Firewall for easy integration that can collaborate with all these Cisco solutions. My operations will also have less maintenance and the same existing team.

Cisco Secure Firewall's security solutions, advanced malware protection, and DDoS communication are very good. With Cisco Secure Firewall, the security is very much manageable because it protects all the incoming and outgoing traffic of our several telecom IT rooms.

The solution's deployment is time-consuming, which should be minimized and made more user-friendly for us.

The solution's graphical user interface could be made more user-friendly, and the configuration can be simple.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for five years.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a stable solution.

I rate Cisco Secure Firewall ten out of ten for stability.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a scalable solution. Around 400 users are using the solution in our organization.

I rate Cisco Secure Firewall a nine out of ten for scalability.

The solution’s technical support is good.

Positive

The solution’s initial setup is complex and requires Cisco-certified people.

Two engineers were involved in the solution's deployment, which took one week.

We have seen a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall because it provides advanced malware protection and seamless integration with my existing solutions.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a moderately priced solution. We have to pay a yearly licensing fee for the solution.

The solution’s maintenance is very easy, and one person can do it.

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

For companies prioritizing security, the optimal choice is one that offers a range of feeds to cater to diverse needs. This is particularly crucial for organizations implementing DDoS mitigation. The preferred solutions typically align with the top server vendors, with Cisco, Forti, and Barracuda consistently ranking among the top three vendors we collaborate with.

It's not unexpected, but it's a common scenario where customers request dual layers of security. For instance, when dealing with regulatory compliance, especially in financial sectors regulated by entities like the Central Bank, having two distinct units is often mandated. If a client predominantly uses a solution like Palo Alto, they may need to incorporate another vendor such as Cisco or Forti. Importantly, there's a significant disparity in interfaces and management platforms between these vendors, necessitating careful consideration when integrating them into the overall security architecture.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for the past ten years. 

The solution is extremely scalable and based on my experience, I would rate it 7 out of 10.

Cisco is a well-established company, and it offers accessible support, both locally and through online resources. The abundance of information makes it easy to find the necessary details and assistance.

Positive

The implementation timeline for our firewall is contingent on the readiness of the policy. If the policy is prepared, the deployment can occur within a day. However, if the policy is not finalized, a brief meeting is convened to gather the necessary data for rule establishment. Once the information is ready, the implementation on VMware proceeds. Notably, there is a requisite waiting period, such as fine-tuning for optimal rule configuration, as each customer has unique requirements. It's crucial to tailor the rules to fit the specific needs of each customer, as there is no one-size-fits-all best practice in this context.

It is extremely expensive compared to its competitors and I would rate it 2 out of 10. 

I would recommend this solution and rate it 8 out of 10.

I'm a Cybersecurity Designer working for a financial services company in London, England with about 4,500 employees. We've been using Cisco Secure Firewall for about a decade now.

Currently, our deployment is entirely on-premise. We do use a hybrid cloud, although we don't have any appliances in the cloud just yet, that is something that we're looking to do over the next five years. 

The primary use case is to provide the ability to silo components of our internal network. In the nature of our business, that means that we have secure enclaves within the network and we use Cisco Secure Firewall to protect those from other aspects of the network and to control access into those parts of the network. 

The greatest benefit that this has provided to our organization is that we've been able to adjust the time that it takes to implement firewall changes. It's gone from a week to less than half a day to implement a change, which means that our DevOps team can be much more agile, and there is much less overhead on the firewall team. 

I would say that the Cisco firewall has helped us to improve cyber resilience, particularly with node clustering. We're now much more confident that a firewall going offline or being subject to an attack won't impact a larger amount of the network anymore, it will be isolated to one particular element of the network. 

We use Cisco Talos to a limited extent. We are keen to explore ways that we could use more of the services that they offer. At the moment, the services that we do consume are mostly signatures for our Firepower systems, and that's proven invaluable. 

It sometimes gives us a heads-up of attacks that we might not have considered and would have written our own use cases for. But also the virtual patching function has been very helpful. When we look at Log4j, for example, it was very difficult to patch systems quickly, whereas having that intelligence built into our IDS and IPS meant that we could be confident that systems weren't being targeted. 

I would say the most valuable aspect of Cisco Secure Firewall is how scalable the solution is. If we need to spin up a new environment, we can very easily and quickly scale the number of firewall instances that are available for that environment. Using clustering, we just add a few nodes and away we go. 

In terms of time-saving or cost of ownership, the types of information that we can get out of the Cisco Secure Firewall suite of products means that our security responders and our security operations center are able to detect threats much faster and are able to respond to them in a much more comprehensive and speedy manner. 

In terms of application visibility, it's very good. There is still room for improvement, and we tend to complement the Cisco Secure Firewall with another tool link to help us do some application discovery. That said, with Firepower, we are able to do the introductory part of the discovery part natively. 

In terms of detecting and remediating threats, I would say on the whole, it is excellent. When we made the decision to go with the Cisco Secure Firewall compared to some other vendors, the integration with other third-party tools, and vulnerability management, for example, was a real benefit. It meant that we could have a single view of where those three threats were coming from and what type of threats would be realized on our network.

In recent years through the integration of Firepower threat defense to manage some of the firewalls. We were able to do away with some of our existing firewall management suite. We do still need to use some third-party tools, but that list is decreasing over time. 

In terms of ways that the firewall could be improved, third-party integration is already reasonable. We were able to integrate with our vulnerability management software, for example. 

However, I would say that when we're looking at full-stack visibility, it can be difficult to get the right information out of Firepower. For example, you may need to get a subset of it into your single pane of glass system and then refer back to Firepower, which can add time for an analyst to look at a threat or resolve a security incident. It would be nice if that integration was a little bit tighter. 

The stability of Cisco Secure Firewall was one of the primary reasons that we looked to Cisco when we were replacing our existing firewall estate. I would rate it very highly. We have not had any significant problems with outages. The systems are stable and very good. 

The scalability of the firewall is one of the main reasons why we looked to Cisco. The ability to add nodes and remove nodes from clusters has been hugely important, particularly in some of our more dynamic environments where we may need to speed up a few hundred machines just for a few days to test something and then tear it all back down again. 

Within our data centers, we have around 6,000 endpoints, and then our user estate is around 4,500 endpoints and all of that connectivity is controlled by Cisco Secure Firewall.

Tech support has been very good. There are occasions where it would be nice to be able to have a consistent engineer applied to our tickets, but on the whole, the service has been very good. We haven't had any real problems with the service. I would rate them an eight out of ten.

The areas that could be improved would be if we could have dedicated support, that would bring them up from an eight. 

Positive

Prior to using the Cisco Secure Firewall, we were using another vendor. The Secure Firewall was a big change for us. The legacy firewalls were very old and not particularly usable. We do still use another vendor's products as well. We believe in in-depth defense. 

Our perimeter firewall controls are a different vendor, and then our internal networks are the Cisco Secure Firewall. 

Comparing Cisco Secure Firewall to some other vendors, I would say that because we use a lot of other Cisco technologies, the integration piece is very good. We can get end-to-end visibility in terms of security. In terms of the cons, it can be quite difficult to manage firewall changes using the Cisco standard tools. So we do rely on third-party tools to manage that process for us. 

The firewall platform itself was not at all difficult to deploy in our environment. I would say that we do have a very complex set of requirements. So migrating the policy from our existing firewall estate to the new estate was quite difficult. The third parties helped us to achieve that. 

We've seen a good return on investment. The primary return that we have seen is fewer outages due to firewall issues, and also the time to detect and respond to security incidents has come down massively. That's been hugely useful to us. 

On a scale of one to ten, I would say Cisco Secure Firewall rates very highly. I'd give it an eight. There are still some places to improve. 

If we look at what some of the other vendors are doing, like Fortinet, for example, there are some next-gen features that it would be interesting to see introduced into the product suite. That said, there are other capabilities that other vendors do not have such as the Firepower IPS systems, which are very useful to us. On the whole, Cisco Secure Firewall is a great fit for us. 

If you were considering Cisco Secure Firewall, I would say your main considerations should be the size of your environment and how frequently it changes. If you're quite a dynamic environment that changes very frequently, then Cisco Secure Firewall is good, but you might want to consider complimenting it with some third-party tools to automate the policy distribution. 

Your other consideration should be around clustering and adding nodes quickly. If you have a dynamic environment, then it is quite hard to find a better product that can scale as quickly as the Cisco firewalls.

I'm in network security, so I care more about security than the network architecture. I mostly just pull all the data out and throw it into Splunk. I use threat intelligence and some of the integrations like Talos. My company uses the product for east-west traffic, data center, and Edge.

The product is easy to manage and simple. It works with the rest of our Cisco products. You can drop in new ones if you need more performance. The training and documentation provided are good.

There's a little bit of a disconnect between Firepower’s management and the rest of the products, like DNA and Prime. The solution should have fewer admin portals for network, security, and firewalls.

I have been using the solution for a year and a half. My company has been using it for at least five years.

I haven’t had a product die. The products failover really fast, and we can cluster them. The product is definitely many nines of reliability.

I have contacted support in my previous jobs for things beyond firewalls, like servers, switches, and call centers. It's always been pretty good. They know their stuff. Sometimes we have to have a few calls to get really deep down into the issue. Eventually, we’ll get an engineer who's a senior and knows how to fix it. They do a pretty good job finding a resource that can be helpful.

In my previous jobs, I used Palo Alto and Fortinet. My current organization chose Cisco Secure Firewall because we use Cisco for the rest of our network, and it just made sense.

We have definitely seen a return on investment. It works pretty well. It is important to have everything work together. Our time is probably more valuable than our money. We're not going to go out and grab ten other network engineers to set up another complicated platform when we can just save the hassle.

The solution has improved our organization. I think my company was using Check Point back in the day. My company has 12 Cisco products. We used Palo Alto in my old organization. It’s what I'm most familiar with.

The application visibility and control with Secure Firewall are not bad. The product’s alerting is pretty good. There were a couple of things that surprised me about the solution. It works really well because we use it with Secure Client and Secure Endpoint. Sometimes the solutions can cross-enrich each other, which we wouldn’t get with a dedicated, standalone firewall.

The solution has helped free up our IT staff for other projects. We don't even have a dedicated firewall person. I sometimes do some stuff. Mostly the dedicated network admins run it, and they have time to do the rest of their job. Our whole network infrastructure team's only five to six people, and they can manage multiple sites across all different firewalls. It's not unreasonable to demand at all.

The product has helped us consolidate tools and applications. If we were using another solution, we would have had their firewall, management plane, and other appliances to back that up. Having a product in the Cisco universe definitely does help. It's all right there when we're using Secure Client and Umbrella. I want more of what Cisco Identity Services Engine and DNA do. I don't like switching tabs in my browser.

We use a relatively basic subset of Cisco Talos for general threat intel. It's definitely helpful. It's mostly about just getting the Talos definitions into the firewall so it can do all the heavy lifting so we don't have to. Now that Cisco has the XDR product, it will probably make it even more useful because then we can combine the network side, the security operations, and the threat intelligence into one thing to work harder for us.

Cisco Secure Firewall has definitely helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience. I like the IDS a lot. The definitions work really well. Making custom ones is pretty trivial. We don't have to do complicated packet captures or anything of that kind.

My advice would be to lean really hard on your sales engineer to explain the stack to you. There's definitely a learning curve to it. Cisco does things in a very particular way that's maybe a little bit different than other firewall vendors. Generally, it's pretty helpful talking to post-sales about what you need because you're probably not going to be able to figure it out. It's definitely a pretty top-shelf tool. If an organization already uses Cisco, they probably want to invest in the solution.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use Cisco Secure Firewalls to secure our business.

Cisco Secure Firewall is a Layer 7 next-generation firewall, providing us with a significant amount of visibility into our traffic patterns and the traffic passing through the firewall. It informs us about the zones that facilitate a smooth data flow, where the data is being directed, and covers ingress and egress all the way up to layer seven. Therefore, I believe the visibility it offers is excellent.

Cisco Secure Firewall is effective in securing our infrastructure from end to end, enabling us to detect and remediate threats. However, the way we currently utilize it may not be the most optimal approach to fully leverage its end-to-end capabilities. Nonetheless, considering its purpose within our usage, it effectively fulfills its intended role.

The ability of Cisco Secure Firewall to enhance our organization's cybersecurity posture and resilience is commendable. Cisco Secure Firewall serves as our primary line of defense, deployed at the Internet edge of every site across the globe.

The most valuable feature is zone segmentation, which we utilize through the Firepower management console. This allows for centralized management, which proves highly useful. In the past, when using Cisco Firewalls, we had to manage them independently. However, now we have a single unified interface to manage all our Cisco Firewalls worldwide.

The Cisco Firewall UI could be improved. While having a centralized management console is a significant improvement, I believe there are several enhancements that could be made to the UI to enhance its user-friendliness and improve the overall flow. This is particularly important during troubleshooting, as we want to avoid wasting time navigating through different sections and excessive clicking. It would be beneficial to have everything readily accessible and a smoother flow to quickly reach the desired locations.

I believe Cisco needs to make the appliance more automated in order to provide us with additional time. This would eliminate the need for us to manually go through the firewall, search, find, and troubleshoot everything. It would be beneficial if the appliance had some form of AI integrated to generate such information, enabling us to quickly identify the problem. If necessary, we could then delve deeper into the issue.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for 19 years.

Cisco Secure Firewall is stable.

The scalability of Cisco Secure Firewall depends on the different models available, as each model may have a fixed scalability level. Therefore, the scalability we obtain will vary depending on the specific model we utilize.

The quality of technical support varies. We occasionally receive excellent technicians, while other times we do not. Consequently, I believe it is preferable to rely more on the competent ones rather than the subpar ones.

Neutral

We had previously used Check Point but decided to switch to Cisco Secure Firewall. The reason for this switch was the lower cost and our company's desire to remove Check Point from our environment. It was an excellent deal, and the technology was on par. We did not lose any functionality or experience any drawbacks by choosing Cisco over Check Point. In fact, I believe we gained additional features, and Cisco is more widely adopted and supported compared to Check Point. Therefore, I am confident that we made the right decision.

The initial setup was complex. Firstly, we were migrating from a completely different platform and vendor to Cisco. Therefore, the ruleset migration was not only complex but also tedious because there was no suitable migration tool available for transitioning from Check Point to Cisco Firepower. The second part involved a complete change in our design, as we opted for a more zone-based approach where our checkpoints are more streamlined. This complexity was a result of our own decision-making.

We utilized our partner, ConvergeOne, for the integration, and they were exceptional. They demonstrated sharp skills, and together we successfully completed the job. The entire process took us a year during which we managed to cover every site within our company.

We have witnessed a return on investment through the capabilities of Cisco Secure Firewall itself, along with its numerous threat defense technologies. As a result, we do not need to purchase additional tools to enhance the firewall; everything is already integrated. Therefore, I believe this was a significant victory for us.

The pricing structure for Cisco Secure Firewall can be challenging to manage. It involves separate line items that need to be carefully tracked, such as SmartNet, FCD licenses, and other license features. This complexity adds to the difficulty of dealing with the pricing.

I rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten.

Cisco Secure Firewall has not helped consolidate any of our applications or tools.

We use Cisco Talos to pull the signatures for everything we download. However, we don't rely on Cisco Talos for our day-to-day operations. 

Cisco Secure Firewall is a commendable product and holds a leadership position in the industry. While there are other competitors available, it is certainly worth considering, particularly for organizations that already utilize Cisco switching, routing, and related infrastructure. Cisco Secure Firewall can seamlessly integrate into the existing ecosystem, making it an appealing option to explore.

Having in-house expertise in Cisco and its products is indeed valuable when making a decision to go with Cisco Secure Firewall. The fact that our team already had a lot of expertise and experience with Cisco products played a significant role in the decision-making process.

We are a Cisco partner and we are currently using Cisco Firepower for our internet edge, intrusion prevention systems, and filtering.

We use virtual appliances in the cloud and hardware appliances on-premises.

Cisco Secure Firewall has improved usability in our environment.

The application visibility and control are great. Cisco Secure Firewall provides us with visibility into the users and the applications that are being used.

We are capable of securing our infrastructure from end to end, enabling us to detect and address threats. We have excellent visibility into the traffic flows, including those within the DMZs.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped save our IT staff a couple of hours per month of their time because it is much easier to use the GUI instead of attempting to manage things through the CLI, which we have to access from the CRM.

We have several clients who had larger security stacks that they were able to consolidate because they were using separate products for IPS or URL filtering. With Firepower, we were able to consolidate all of those into a single solution.

The ability of Cisco Secure Firewalls to consolidate tools or applications has had a significant impact on our security infrastructure by enabling us to eliminate all the additional tools and utilize a single product.

Cisco Talos helps us keep on top of our security operations.

Cisco Secure Firewall has helped our organization enhance its cybersecurity resilience. We can generate periodic reports that are shared with the security teams to keep them informed.

The ASA has seen significant improvement due to the IPS. 

The ability to troubleshoot more easily through the gate is valuable.

The integration with all the necessary products needs improvement. Managing various product integrations, such as Umbrella, is challenging.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for four years. My organization has been using Cisco Secure Firewall for a much longer period of time. 

We experienced stability issues when transitioning to version 7.2, particularly related to operating Snort from Snort Two to Snort Three. In some cases, the firewalls necessitated a reboot, but we ultimately reverted back to using Snort Two.

The technical support is responsive. In most cases where I've opened a ticket, they have promptly worked on figuring out the actual problem and assisting me in resolving it.

Positive

We have had clients who switched to Cisco Secure Firewall from Check Point, Palo Alto, and WatchGuard due to the features and support that Cisco offers.

The initial setup is straightforward. Since we were transitioning from ASA to Firepower, a significant portion of our work involved transferring the access control lists to the power values in the GUI. After that, we began adding additional features, such as IPS.

The pricing and licensing structure of the firewall is fair and reasonable.

The closest competitor that matches Cisco Firepower is Palo Alto, and the feature sets are quite comparable for both of them. One issue I have noticed with Cisco's product is the SSL decryption when used by clients connecting from inside to outside the Internet. 

Cisco lacks the ability to check CRLs or OCSP certificate status unless we manually upload them, which is impractical for a large number of items like emails. On the other hand, Palo Alto lacks the ability to inspect the traffic within the firewall tunnel, which is a useful feature to have. 

I rate Cisco Secure Firewall eight out of ten.

I recommend taking advantage of the trial by downloading virtual next-gen firewalls provided by OBA, deploying them in a virtual environment, and testing their performance to evaluate their effectiveness. This is a crucial step.