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AWS WAF vs. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    AWS WAF

    Score7.8 out of 10
    N/AAmazon Web Services offers AWS WAF (web application firewall) to protect web applications from malicious behavior that might impede the applications functioning and performance, with customizable rules to prevent known harmful behaviors and an API for creating and deploying web security rules.

    $0.60

    per 1 million requests

    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software

    Score9 out of 10
    N/ACisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software is the core OS for the ASA suite. It provides firewall functionality, as well as integration with context-specific Cisco security modules. It is scaled for enterprise-level traffic and connections.N/A
    Pricing
    AWS WAFCisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Editions & Modules
    Resource Type - Request
    $0.60
    per 1 million requests
    Resource Type - Rule
    $1.00
    per month (prorated hourly)
    Resource Type - Web ACL
    $5.00
    per month (prorated hourly)
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    AWS WAFCisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    AWS WAFCisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Considered Both Products
    Amazon AWS
    No answer on this topic
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    87%
    Would buy again
    40 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    42 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    83%
    Happy with the feature set
    5 Answers
    91%
    Happy with the feature set
    42 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    5 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    36 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    41 Answers
    Features
    AWS WAFCisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Firewall
    Comparison of Firewall features of AWS WAF and Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Feature
    AWS WAF
    -
    Ratings
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    8.9
    50 Ratings
    4% above category average
    Identification Technologies00 Ratings7.932 Ratings
    Visualization Tools00 Ratings7.931 Ratings
    Content Inspection00 Ratings8.433 Ratings
    Policy-based Controls00 Ratings8.446 Ratings
    Active Directory and LDAP00 Ratings8.448 Ratings
    Firewall Management Console00 Ratings9.049 Ratings
    Reporting and Logging00 Ratings8.949 Ratings
    VPN00 Ratings10.049 Ratings
    High Availability00 Ratings9.649 Ratings
    Stateful Inspection00 Ratings10.046 Ratings
    Proxy Server00 Ratings9.032 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    AWS WAFCisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
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    No answers on this topic
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    Score8.3 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
    Score9.4 out of 10
    Barracuda CloudGen Firewall
    Score9.6 out of 10
    Enterprises
    F5 Big-IP Advanced WAF
    Score9.4 out of 10
    F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
    Score8.8 out of 10
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    User Ratings
    AWS WAFCisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (9 ratings)
    9.0
    (88 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    7.1
    (4 ratings)
    Usability
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Availability
    -
    (0 ratings)
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    Support Rating
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    8.7
    (8 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    6.5
    (2 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    AWS WAFCisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Amazon AWS
    Well Suited: 1. To prevent DDOS attacks: AWS WAF has a lot of managed rules to prevent DDOS attacks based on traffic origination from a particular IP or IP reputation etc. 2. To rate-limit requests: Well it sounds familiar like preventing DDOS attacks, but it can also be used to rate-limit requests originating from the same IP address. We have used this feature so that we can test multiple failure scenarios for our application. 3. To prevent Data crawling: The BOT control feature allows us to prevent BOTs from crawling data on our websites. Not Suited: 1. To integrate applications outside of AWS Cloud: As I mentioned in my previous comments, this type of integration requires a custom implementation of another AWS resource.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    Cisco ASA's are great for internal network connected access between a firewall and the central management server. And, for complex networks where high security requirements with overly strict compliance are necessary. For networks with limited connectivity to the core or for poor network connectivity these are not the best solution. There are other more stand-alone firewall's that do this better. These firewall's are a little more complex to set up to start with so significant knowledge of these devices is required to set them up and ensure they are best practice installed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    Amazon AWS
    • Protect any application against the most common attacks.
    • Provides better visibility of web traffic.
    • It allows us to control the traffic in different ways in which it is enabled or blocked through the implementation of security rules developed personally according to our needs.
    • It is able to block common attacks such as SQL code injection.
    • It allows defining specific rules for applications, thus increasing web security as they are developed.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • ASA is our VPN concentrator. The client and server are very stable and very easy to use
    • ASA also offers Intrusion Prevention, to an extent. This is also very useful for an improved security posture for a small company
    • ASA allowed us to scale very quickly. We could onboard clients, partners, and consultants and give them a great onboarding experience as well
    • Administrative costs with ASA are low. It's very easy to administer.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Amazon AWS
    • AWS WAF is a bit costly if used for single applications.
    • they should provide attack-wise protection, like if my certain type of application is vulnerable to DDOS then I should be able to buy WAF, especially for that attack.
    • CLI tool to test in offline mode if possible.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • The ASDM software is at times a nightmare to install because of different java versions[.]
    • [The firewall] could do with a power button, just to be able to do a hard reboot when needed[.]
    • It would be nice to manage the firewall via the web on port 443[.]
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Amazon AWS
    We have been using AWS WAF for the past 3 years in front of our websites. We find it useful in preventing data crawling, DDOS attacks, etc on our websites, and hence we are going to use it in the future as well. AWS WAF is one of the best Firewalls in business.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    To be honest there has been now great products out in the market compared to Cisco ASA. I beleieve Cisco has to do a lot of improvement in this area. The other defeiniete factors is the cost when it comes to renewals which is always a premium on Cisco products
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Amazon AWS
    The product is highly scalable. It is easy to configure the rules and thereby helps us to mitigate many vulnerabilities. The interface and programming of the firewall provisions were easy to setup. Amazon clearly spent a lot of time figuring this out and perfecting it. It allows users to do customized configurations based on their needs. It provides protection against a number of security issues like XSS, SQL injection, etc. I would definitely recommend this for protecting your infra as you scale, since this basically protects and filters all requests hitting your application server.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Reliability and Availability
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    I generally have not noticed the outages, however since it's a machine it can malfunction, we need to implement the firewall infrastructure in such a way that it is highly available with device failure, region failure etc. Else any solution will be having the issues if they are not build with resiliency.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Amazon AWS
    If you're intending to use AWS WAF, I would say that you absolutely should sign up for support. AWS Support is excellent and they can help you in a really good way to solve your issues.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    The support is usually very good and gets back to you very quickly. However I had some instances of when two engineers will give me wildly different answers to what I thought was a simple question. Overall however I do rate the support highly and they are generally always very good.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Amazon AWS
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    It was quite a good one, how ever requires an expertise to deploy hence the SMB segment would be finding it difficult to implement this product. The one good reason is that there are lot of ASA certified engineers in compared to the other certified engineers. Hence this resembles positively on the deployment as you have quite a lot of experienced engineer on your deployment
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Amazon AWS
    Easy of use. Setup and configuration is fairly quick. There are the usual advantages of it being a cloud solution where you can buy into the solution, configure it and set it up and get it up and running. If you are already a subscriber to AWS, having a native service has its advantages.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    We were using [pfSense] before in our environment but we regularly facing difficulties over it due to software bugs & downtime. After implementing Cisco ASA, it resolved our availability issue & provides us a reliable solution with the best security features & easy to understand GUI.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Return on Investment
    Amazon AWS
    • Implementing this AWS service has been really favorable because when creating custom rules we give more specific protection to our applications against vulnerabilities that cause them to be consuming other resources or running with errors.
    • It allows us to control the traffic of our business applications, which is really favorable, given that in this way we can decide that you can access them and not.
    • It is extremely advantageous that we can establish rules in a centralized way since it saves time, as well as it allows us to protect several applications at the same time by reusing the rules established above.
    • It allows you to save time and money because we only pay for what is used.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • Most network engineers have worked with ASA, so there is no need for re-training when adding or turning over staff
    • Current configs from older devices plug in easily, and are operational on larger devices if an upgrade is required
    • Many support options available
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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