Our main use case for Cisco Secure Firewall is to protect our RTU traffic, specifically on the operational technology side, for SCADA systems. For our side, we don't have encrypted traffic; for the most part, we have the firewall to protect everything behind it when it comes to RTU traffic, which is remote terminal units.

The visibility and control capabilities of Cisco Secure Firewall benefit our company by making it easier for us to parse through traffic that is denied or allowed through, and that helps us with troubleshooting, so it does help cut down on troubleshooting.

The feature of Cisco Secure Firewall that I prefer the most is the use of ASDM where we visually are able to see all of our traffic when it comes through the firewall. 

Cisco Secure Firewall does a good job unifying policies across our environments because we have many firewalls that have the same rules, so when Cisco Secure Firewalls are able to do that, that's very beneficial.

The fact that unifying policies will help us save time, costs, and be more efficient in general is very important for our company. Unfortunately, the impact of the cloud-delivered firewall on our company's security posture is negligible since we are an air-gapped system, and we do not deal with the cloud infrastructure.

Cisco Secure Firewall does a good job in helping our company implement a zero-trust security model, and it deserves an eight out of ten.

Cisco Secure Firewall could be improved in terms of the GUI and management. It could be more intuitive, as sometimes there might be too many features and buttons that make it harder when we're trying to parse through information. 

To make Cisco Secure Firewall a ten out of ten, improving the documentation of all the features would help significantly. I sometimes feel I'm just searching around on Google for specific configurations compared to Palo Alto, which has more detailed steps.

We've been using Cisco Secure Firewall for about 20 years. We've had it since the whole creation of our RT team.

In terms of stability and reliability, Cisco Secure Firewall is reliable. We haven't had real issues where these firewalls have gone down or anything of that nature, so we're happy with the consistency.

When it comes to the scalability of Cisco Secure Firewall, it scales very efficiently and is easy to implement with the growing needs of our company.

Our experience with customer service or technical support through TAC for Cisco Secure Firewall could be more in-depth instead of going through the first levels. 

We often find ourselves trying to escalate faster because we need timely responses. I would rate the customer service and technical support from Cisco Secure Firewall a six out of ten. They're good and know what they're doing in general. That said, it's not where we want it to be.

Neutral

We considered Palo Alto before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall, and we do have some Palo Altos on the network to compare. We're mostly using Cisco products in general. I'm aware Palo Alto is a strong competitor when it comes to firewalls.

The deployment is pretty seamless. Sometimes we do have some issues with Palo Alto Fireworks, where when it comes to deploying, it's not as intuitive. It doesn't work correctly, and there are some bugs that come up. So we have to troubleshoot that aspect. Cisco Secure Firewalls is pretty pretty seamless. 

The biggest return on investment when using Cisco Secure Firewall comes from how intuitive it is. The more it's able to identify issues during troubleshooting, the better the ROI we achieve.

I'm not too concerned about the pricing of Cisco Secure Firewall. The pricing is fixed, and we're comfortable with it since pricing doesn't matter as much since we have to purchase it if there's a need for it.

The main differences between Cisco Secure Firewall and Palo Alto come down to the GUI. They are on par when comparing unified policy and how to make things more intuitive for monitoring traffic and creating rules based on that traffic.

We haven't used any new features or functionalities in Cisco Secure Firewall recently. The features work efficiently, and I can't think of anything new that I would want right now.

I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall overall an eight out of ten; it's reliable, and we have no real issues.

On-premises

My main use cases for Cisco Secure Firewall include certain requirements from the energy sector, NERC CIP compliance, acting as a perimeter security device, doing layer three routing for us, and VLAN segmentation, as well as creating DMZs.

These features benefit my company by reducing my troubleshooting time, and in the energy sector, time is money, so it does help. The time reduction depends on how quickly someone gets used to it.

The feature of Cisco Secure Firewall I prefer most is troubleshooting, packet capture, and packet tracer; I love those features.  

You can quickly run certain commands on CLI or on FMC CLI to find out what could be the root cause, and it varies from person to person, but it's very useful.

I prefer Cisco since it has been here for a very long time, we have a good relationship with the sales team and Cisco representatives, and the support is pretty good, providing us with 24/7 support, which makes me pretty happy.

Cisco Secure Firewall in helping my company implement a zero-trust security model. I've yet to try it, however, I'm very excited to work on it. My impression of the visibility and control capabilities of Cisco Secure Firewall in managing encrypted traffic is pretty good. We can build site-to-site tunnels and various ways of site-to-route based or policy-based, allowing us to see the packets and cap decaps, and Cisco CLI provides a way to see the packets inside, which is very helpful.

Cisco Secure Firewall's licensing model can be improved, as I struggle with it in an air-gapped environment. To make it a ten, a couple of challenges need to be addressed, particularly with the licensing model, as I'm looking for a permanent license solution for air-gapped environments. 

The second issue is the ROMmon mode, where during power outages the firewalls go into ROMmon mode, causing outages and financial loss until we can send someone on-site.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for almost six years.

The stability and reliability of the platform are pretty stable. 

The only challenge I see is with the substation, where when it loses power and there's no manual reboot, it ends up in ROMmon mode and requires a physical reboot, which means we have to send somebody on-site. It does not pick it up when the power goes out and comes back up, going into ROMmon mode, so I need better answers from Cisco about that.

I'm not sure how Cisco Secure Firewall scales with the growing needs of my company.

My experience with customer service and technical support has been good. If I were to rate customer service and technical support on a scale of one to ten, I would give them an eight.

Positive

In the past, we have used other solutions such as Palo Alto and other vendors. I am more of a Cisco person and prefer Cisco.

My experience with the deployment of Cisco Secure Firewall is that it's pretty straightforward.

The biggest return on investment for me when using Cisco Secure Firewall is reliability and robust network design.

Regarding pricing and setup costs, apart from the licensing issue, Cisco products are on the pricier side. That said, they're worth it. We have over 500 substations plus our data center just on OT, and everything is Cisco, so we are a core Cisco customer, and as long as the product is reliable, it's worth every penny.

We did consider other solutions before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall.

I'm not sure how Cisco Secure Firewall's ability to unify policies across my environment is, as I haven't tried that. 

I am not using Cisco SecureX with Secure Firewall; I'm using FMC for centralized management for the firewalls.

The impact of the cloud-delivered firewall on my company's security posture is tricky. For compliance, we are not supposed to have anything cloud-based, so it must be on-prem. We're a big company and we can use it in some other parts of the network, just not for my team.

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

My main use cases for Cisco Secure Firewall are to help secure the network and control what we allow in and out of the network.

The benefits of Cisco Secure Firewall's features for my company include giving us more visibility into what's going on when there's either an attack or just normal traffic, allowing us to see what's going through it.

The feature of Cisco Secure Firewall that I appreciate the most is the central management. The central management feature makes it easier to configure once, push out, and replace firewalls when they go bad. It's nice to have one pane of view, one pane of glass. 

I assess Cisco Secure Firewall's ability to unify policies across my environment as definitely easy. We just do it through the one central management and then push it out from there. It is important for our organization to have such a feature. The importance of this feature lies in that it just helps standardize our configuration approach, allowing us to ensure that our ideas get pushed out to everything.

Cisco Secure Firewall could be improved by providing more visibility, especially regarding encryption, to be able to see what's in those traffic flows. More application visibility would also help; it knows about certain types of traffic yet not everything. It would be awesome if it knew everything. 

To make Cisco Secure Firewall a better product or a perfect product, visibility is a good improvement area. You sort of have to know the product to use it, so user and technical improvements should aim for simplicity. There's so much it does that I don't know how much more simple it could go, so I'm not sure what really could be improved.

My impression of Cisco Secure Firewall's visibility and control capabilities in managing encrypted traffic is that somewhat limited. Most tools seem to be limited on encrypted traffic, so we don't get too much visibility into it—just the general type of traffic, not too much more than that.

We've been using the solution for at least 15 years.

The stability and reliability of the Cisco Secure Firewall platform are very good; it's rock solid and has always just done its work.

Cisco Secure Firewall is growing and handling everything we ask it to do, so it's performing that part effectively.

I evaluate customer service and technical support of Cisco overall as good; it's definitely one of the better companies to work with.

Positive

While using Cisco Secure Firewall, we did consider other solutions. We recently upgraded all of them to the latest edition of Cisco, and we looked at Palo Alto and other tools at that time, but those firewalls have been in place for about 15 years. I don't know what happened when we initially put them in, but we did do an evaluation three years ago and decided to stay with Cisco.

The deployment seems to go well. I'm not the one personally doing it. That said, the guys I tell to do it get it done when we need it done.

I don't see a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall; it's more of a needed tool, just something we need to do to get business done, so I'm not really looking at it as a tool that would give us an ROI.

My experience with the pricing, the setup cost, and the licensing of Cisco Secure Firewall has been what I expect; I'd always prefer it cheaper, but nothing too exorbitant.

Familiarity was the biggest reason for staying with Cisco; everybody knows how to use the Cisco CLI, so it wasn't worth the effort to swap out, as there were no big benefits from other solutions.

I'm not sure if there are any new features or functionalities that I have tried recently in Cisco Secure Firewall; it's just been doing its work for a while now. 

I don't really use a cloud-delivered firewall as of today, so the only effect of not looking at it is speed. We're looking for the best performance we can get, and cloud usually isn't that. Cisco Secure Firewall helps us along the path to implementing a zero-trust security model, but there are a lot of tools and different paths to cover, so it's just really one tool in the arsenal.

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

On-premises

My main use cases for Cisco Secure Firewall are to safeguard our network, including the IPS and all the traffic, and to control the traffic.

The visibility and control capabilities of Cisco Secure Firewall in managing encrypted traffic are very good. I can implement all my certificates, so I can open the traffic and see everything.

Cisco Secure Firewall’s ability to unify policies across our environment is at a high level. This unification of policies into one system is important for my company. We are able to consolidate all the policies instead of spreading them across many security systems.

What I appreciate the most about Cisco Secure Firewall is that it can be very elastic, as it can be configured with all the flexibility of my network needs and complexity. The service I receive from the Cisco engineer helps me implement all my needs. 

Cisco Secure Firewall allows me to safeguard Layer 7 or Layer 3 and manage the security rules with the business needs of my organization. The firewall has benefited my company overall because it safeguards and finds and stops all the malicious traffic.

Cisco Secure Firewall can be improved by simplifying the GUI, as it shouldn't be so complex.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for ten years.

It's very robust. We don't have any downtime or anything. We work with a cluster with high availability, so if something goes wrong, we have it functioning.

Cisco Secure Firewall helps with the growing needs of our company as it's scalable.

Customer service and technical support for Cisco Secure Firewall are very good. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

Positive

It was a little bit difficult.

We needed a good integrator to help us, and we contacted Cisco for some help with technical issues.

We are able to safeguard our assets.

It's acceptable and comparable to other products.

We did consider other solutions before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall. We considered all the big vendors such as Palo Alto, Check Point, Fortinet, and others. Cisco won because it has the best IPS model on it, and that's the reason why we chose this firewall.

I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten. To make it a ten, the complexity of the configuration compared to other vendors needs to be addressed. Overall, we're very happy with the product.

On-premises

My main use case for Cisco Secure Firewall is to secure a data center.

They help keep our environment more secure. 

The features I appreciate the most about Cisco Secure Firewall are the policies, ACLs, and traffic behavior analytics. These features have benefited my organization by keeping the environment more secure within the organization.

If I assess Cisco Secure Firewall's ability to unify policies across my environment on a scale of one to ten, it would be an eight. This is very important to my organization, as we work extensively with security because we are a bank, so we can keep the data safe.

I have not recently used any new features or functionalities in Cisco Secure Firewall, however, I would want to try more visibility and observability. My impression of the visibility and control capabilities of Cisco Secure Firewall in managing encrypted traffic is that it can improve. There is some traffic that is encrypted that needs to be decrypted to catch something and analyze and give some analytics, so that part needs to work more.

The dashboard needs to be more intuitive and easier to navigate. What stood out to me about Cisco Secure Firewall that made me choose to use it is that it is intuitive, but I feel it could be improved further in terms of intuitiveness. It could be improved to achieve easier configuration and more efficiency.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for eight years.

I would evaluate the customer service and technical support on a scale of one to ten as a ten, as they have expertise and provide solutions for the most difficult problems, so we have had a very good experience.

Positive

We did have Fortinet previously. That had a more intuitive dashboard. 

We did consider other options, including Juniper.

I did not purchase via AWS Marketplace. 

At the moment, we are not using the cloud-delivered firewall. It could be better regarding encryption and encrypting traffic. I have not seen that part and we do not use it since we use it on Fortinet, however, that would be something that helps to keep the network more secure.

I would advise other organizations considering Cisco Secure Firewall that they can trust Cisco Secure Firewall and that they should provide training for their staff to achieve better and more efficient work.

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

On-premises

We bundle Cisco Secure Firewall with our telco offerings as a service provider. We bundle it basically with Meraki.

We have received good feedback from our engineers. It helps them with their day-to-day operations. I need to get some more input on specific items they need to gather more information about, but so far, there are no issues.

Regarding Cisco Secure Firewall's ability to unify policies across our environment, I haven't heard any particular issues from our engineers.

The feature of Cisco Secure Firewall that I appreciate the most is its ability to be used via the cloud, so we don't have to deploy service engineers on-site at any time. 

Since telcos just provide basic connectivity, bundling Cisco Secure Firewall has actually allowed us to gain more value for our customers and level up versus our competitors. It helps our customers even more because they don't have to worry about cybersecurity issues, as we put it out of the box.

We found something that prevented us from using it and integrating it a few years back, so they should really have a discussion about improving those aspects. More specifically, it's related to cybersecurity technical details. Implementing a zero-trust security model is what we need help with. We're making progress. We have different types of security for our native applications, but we're slowly looking into what Cisco can deliver. We tried to look into Z3 models before, but our cybersecurity team found some issues where it was lacking. They found some bugs or loopholes, so we wanted Cisco to address these before we fully roll out the solution. We're trying again, and hopefully, with Cisco's updates, it will be acceptable to us in the near future.

We've been using Cisco Secure Firewall since 2016.

Cisco Secure Firewall covers roughly our 2,000 employees really effectively. It's just a matter of expanding the requirements and infrastructure requirements with AWS, and I believe Cisco has some integrations that allow us to use that scale to our advantage.

My opinion is somewhat biased because we have access to Cisco's TAC, and we are very much managed by our Cisco Philippines company team. I'd give them a nine out of ten.

Positive

The biggest return on investment when using Cisco Secure Firewall is that there's no waste in any infrastructure cost and licensing costs for us. If we have to repurpose a specific box per year, we could save on cost by just transferring it to another person or project rather than pay another one-year license for it.

The pricing is very good for us, especially since we have a partnership with Cisco. The challenge is the licensing. There are competitors that offer more flexible licensing, such as daily licensing, some offer hourly, but Cisco is locked in for one, three, and five years. We don't have much flexibility, especially if we want to shift applications or shift users at any time. Hopefully, licensing becomes more flexible.

There were solutions from Fortinet. The main difference between Cisco and Fortinet is that Cisco will have more flexibility. It's just a matter of being able to put together the flexibility that we require versus what Cisco can provide at this time.

The impact of the cloud-delivered Cisco Secure Firewall on my company's security posture involves some hesitation because it's on the cloud, but we're slowly adopting certain parts of it for our cybersecurity team. We're undergoing that transition and don't have full visibility yet on how they see that as a future mode of operations versus what other companies are doing globally. 

I would rate Cisco Secure Firewall an eight out of ten. 

Public Cloud

Until a couple of years ago, everything was fine regarding my main use cases for Cisco Secure Firewall. I didn't have any problems with the equipment, quality, or support. However, in the last couple of years, they started making our lives difficult. Trying to renew the partnership with them became challenging as they were requesting numerous things on our side, and since we are a very small business, it wasn't possible to get through that verification.

Until a couple of years ago, everything was fine regarding my main use cases for Cisco Secure Firewall.

They are definitely reliable, and regarding positive features, once you get through with the purchasing of this equipment they offer their special support schemes, SmartNet support schemes, which are quite useful.

They offer their own software, and regarding integration capabilities, it's not wise to have only one vendor. One might get Cisco Secure Firewall for the outside drone and then get some other software from other companies such as ESET or Panda for the PCs and the servers, and that's how it's typically done.

Regarding policies about partnership, they are losing, not us. There are other equipment options out there that don't require such strict requirements.

With the new systems that Cisco Secure Firewall is deploying right now, I don't have experience with downtimes. With older systems, it happened once with a big customer that they went through the repair and they actually hacked the whole thing. It wasn't actually the equipment's fault. It was a customer's fault because we were begging them to implement two-factor authentication mechanisms, and they never did it, and in the end something happened. That's understandable. You can't blame the equipment for that.

The technical support for Cisco Secure Firewall once you have the SmartNet is very good. The people are always willing to help, they can even log on remotely on the devices and check things. They're very good with that.

Positive

It depends on the customer, and regarding the deployment time of Cisco Secure Firewall, it depends on what you want to implement. To set it up just for getting out to the internet may take a couple of hours. However, to prepare a skilled network with site to site VPNs, it's going to take days.

There are other equipment options out there that don't require such strict requirements.

They say that their new software for Cisco Secure Firewall is AI compliant, whatever that means. They have some kind of databases on the cloud, the system communicates with them in order to monitor the traffic getting through and clearing things and stopping attacks or whatever. Everybody does this, but at what level they do it, nobody really knows.

The security policies that an organization has are also upon the IT people and the management to properly identify and implement. If they don't do these things, and they don't update the software of the servers, they leave all the usernames and passwords vulnerabilities there and they don't do something about that, you can't blame the equipment. It's the perimeter kind of firewalling you have with the equipment. But after that you have to do something on your own to help yourself.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Cisco Secure Firewall an eight.

Our primary use case for Cisco Secure Firewall is for enterprise customers. We primarily work on Cisco Meraki switching and wireless. We also engage with Cisco Secure Firewall for threat prevention and information security.

The Cisco Secure Firewall appliances are primarily ASIC-based, which makes them fast and purpose-built. They stand out because they are not Intel-based systems, and in terms of performance and stability, they are among the best. Scalability is another strong point, as I have not encountered any issues in terms of scalability. Everything is in a cluster and can operate in active standby, active-active, or active-passive mode. Additionally, Cisco's support is excellent, which adds further value to their solutions.

The configuration might be slightly difficult compared to other players in the market like Fortinet or WatchGuard. It can be challenging for someone who is not used to using an application to configure the firewall, but with experience, it becomes manageable.

I have been working with Cisco Secure Firewall for four, five, six years or more.

There have been no issues with deployment.

Cisco Secure Firewall offers exceptional performance and stability. They are among the best in terms of stability.

I have not come across any issues with scalability. Everything scales very well.

Customer service and support are excellent. I would rate their support 10 out of 10. I have been working with them on firewalls, wireless, switching, and routing, and the support is the best.

Positive

For someone like me who has been working on firewalls for quite some time, I do not see any problems with the initial setup. However, for someone trying to configure it for the first time with little experience, it may present a challenge.

Return on investment depends on the customer. While some may see it as an expense, others view it as an investment based on their understanding of Cisco.

The pricing is slightly more expensive than other products in the market. It's considered a premium, but people pay that price for Cisco.

I have been working with Palo Alto, Fortinet, SonicWALL, and WatchGuard.

I would definitely recommend Cisco Secure Firewall for its architecture, performance, stability, and exceptional support. When choosing a product, consider features delivery, stability, scalability, and customer support. On a scale of one to ten, I rate their firewalls eight to eight and a half.

On-premises

I am a system engineer, and I've been looking for some details and competitive information regarding the standards of this firewall and similar technologies.

There is a good relationship between real throughput, meaning the root performance, and the data sheet performance. When comparing it to other vendors, the data sheet performance is often more than expected and more than the real performance. It includes features like IPS, malware protection, and other security features.

The management usability and security of Cisco Firewall are based on Firepower Management Center, which is quite out of date compared to other vendors.

I have used this solution for more than ten years.

The SLA is great, and the escalation process is also great. For example, if I have a priority one case, I am able to call the manager to raise the severity, etc. So the SLA is very good.

Neutral

When compared with other competitors like Palo Alto or Fortinet, Cisco stands in a good position regarding the firewall environment. Compared to Fortinet, Cisco is a bit higher. When comparing with Palata and Juniper, Cisco has the same price level.

I am well prepared, and it is quite easy. Cisco has really great documentation, like a deployment guide and a quick start guide, etc.

If engineers are well prepared, it is good to note that Cisco has really great documentation. I have been working with AI features in the Cisco environment with Cisco Firewall, etc. I have been hearing and reading a lot about the integration of AI capabilities into Cisco devices, but I have not worked with that yet.

Overall, I would rate this an eight out of ten.

Cisco Secure Firewall has impacted our cybersecurity cost efficiency.

The important features are IPS intrusion prevention, anti-malware, and anti-spam.

Cisco firewall needs experience with hardware. They should also enhance security antivirus, application detection, user detection, and ID detection. 

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for three years.

300 users are using this solution.

The support is good.

Positive

The initial setup is easy, but it takes some time to push the configurations. Also, it's a little complicated and not friendly to use. It is good only for IT and experienced people. 

The deployment took two months and a team of two to three people.

The pricing is average.

I recommend the solution to medium and enterprise customers since it is expensive. 

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