Barracuda CloudGen Firewall vs. Cisco Firepower 2100 Series

I would say a small business with a basic firewall and security needs would be a perfect fit for the Barracuda CloudGen firewall. I know that they soon end up leaving the NG models and are moving forward with the F series firewall. I think the F series is a much more difficult to manage device and doesn’t offer simplistic configuration or use and lacks cloud control so I don’t understand the move on Barracuda’s part to nix a great easy to manage the firewall. I do think that the NG line is maybe too simple for bigger businesses and would lack some main features that they would require.

Incentivized

The Cisco [Firepower] 2100 [Series] is an easy sell for anyone looking. You already know Cisco excels in the security department, but now that firepower lives right on the box and inline with the rest of the firewall data flow you can save yourself a lot of time and headaches. Unless you cant quite afford Cisco's 2100 line, there's not much reason to go with the competition.

Incentivized

• The management software is excellent. It make it much easier to manage the firewalls than some of the other vendors.
• Watching real-time traffic is easy to do when trying to troubleshoot a users issues getting to a particular service.
• Support from Barracuda has been excellent. We rate their phone and online remote support as being the best in the business.
• We like the QoS and Traffic shaping of the NG Firewalls. They help is manage our limited bandwidth, so that business critical resources are available over lesser critical resources.
• Integration with Active Directory makes it easy to identify users activities in logs.

Incentivized

• Advanced threat protection
• Secure VPN connectivity
• Visibility and control (if connected to FMC)
• Regulatory compliacnce with ISO 27001, NIS2, etc.

• Very complex and steep learning curve to get up to speed.
• Multiple ways to configure for the same service or feature. Takes time to determine "your" customized build.
• Interface can sometimes be clunky when trying to determine how it's organized or arranged. Again, steep learning curve.

• Career-wise very familiar with the ASAs, you know, the previous gen firewalls, Pyxis, ASAs, the CHA. As far as being intuitive, those seem to be far more intuitive to learn and figure out what the features and changes and config management, all that stuff is. With Firepower, it's a learning curve and I feel like I have quite a bit of experience with it, and so does my team, but feels like it's not as intuitive, and trying to make changes just always seems harder for some reason. We've gone to some Cisco security training and all that, but even then it's just harder to work with. The other big thing is, and this is a big gripe of mine, I suppose, that on any other firewall, when we have various different manufacturers, if you make a change, you know, a simple change object, object name gets changed or object is deleted or whatever the simplest of change is, it gets implemented instantly.
• With the Firepower system, you have to deploy the change and it'll take about six or seven minutes for the change to actually take, which is insanely different than any other platform where that change is instantaneous. So let's say if I'm making seven different changes for a troubleshooting job I don't know which one of the seven is gonna fix it, I do one by one by one. I'm like, oh, let me try one change, one second, change, third change, four changes. It's going to take seven deploys. And seven deploys mean it's gonna take an hour of just deploy time. So that is a big, big gripe

Incentivized

Easy enough to use and configure using the management UI. Reporting from the web filter is a little clunky, and not very user friendly. To be perfectly honest, once it's set up and running, there isn't a lot to do from the day-to-day side of things, which is not a bad thing.

There are three main problems with this platform: - short EoL time - it is really missery because this platform was overrated from cisco sales and after shor time they accepted on EoL - sometimes problems with upgrades paths, because of strange behaviour between FXOS and ASA image on the top of it - not good performance when comparing to newer 1k platform

I could go on and on about how good Barracuda's support really is. I have yet to have a problem they didn't help me fix and I always learn something when talking with them. The story that best describes my overall experience with Barracuda's support is this: When I first put in the xSeries they had a problem with a policy route. There was a bug in the code and in the one situation I was it, it just would not work. I went up the levels of support and they couldn't fix it. Well, next thing I know I am on the phone with 2 of the guys that programmed the thing and they work out the solution in no time and get me going. That is support. That is what I have come to expect from Barracuda. If the tech on the phone doesn't know the answer, they do not stop until they find it. Grant it, I also have to admit I do not call support with every problem, I try to work it out on my own first as that is how I learn best, so when I do call support it is going to be complicated.

Incentivized

Our Cisco firewall was always difficult to make any changes against. It had no user-friendly GUI interface. We were calling technical support most of the time whenever we needed to make any changes. The Barracuda CloudGen Firewall has a GUI interface which we are looking forward to getting better acquainted with as we move off of our old Cisco. Of course, Barracuda's technical support is always there and is top notch!

In the days of purchase of Cisco Firepower 2100 series it was new platform and Cisco aimed their sailsmains to force selling this platfrom. It was one of the first platform with FXOS with full support of ASA images. It was cheper then 4k series and would be better than ASA 5500-x series (but regarding all problems with upgrades and EoL , it is not).

• We saved multiple thousands of dollars the first year out with the firewall in maintenance fees. We paid for the firewall and 3 years of service and still saved money.
• The ease of management allows me to do my job more efficiently. I save a lot of time when doing my day to day job because I can get to my firewall virtually anywhere.
• I feel a lot safer and my business more secure knowing that I have configured things the way they need to be and it was simple and not overly complicated.

Incentivized

• Simplifying our lives by reducing our time spent in a console
• Being comfortable knowing the full might of Cisco is safeguarding your network
• A good excuse to bump up the IT budget in the next fiscal year!

Incentivized