Barracuda CloudGen Firewalls provides a wide range of security and connectivity features, including web filtering, NAC and SSL VPN and other features for remote access, as well as protection as edge devices and IoT security.
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Cisco Secure Firewall
Score 7.7 out of 10
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Cisco Secure Firewall (formerly Cisco Firepower NGFW) is a firewall product that integrates with other Cisco security offerings. It provides Advanced Malware protection, including sandboxing environments and DDoS mitigation. Cisco also offers a Next Generation Intrusion Prevention System, which provides security across cloud environments using techniques like internal network segmentation. The firewall can be managed locally, remotely, and via the cloud. The product is scalable to the scope of…
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.
Sometimes it is really hard to handle. There are so many bugs especially when it comes to ACL or HA creation. Sometimes the Cisco Secure Firewall just needs a restart in order to work but that shouldn't be like that in our environment the Cisco Secure Firewall is the heart of the network and if the Cisco Secure Firewall is down the whole branch is down, for that we need a more reliable product.
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.
How the firewall works well is normally the firewall is protecting the secure network for the internal network to prevent the attack from external network. normally for the ISP customer, we usually filter the firewall polices only for the server farm, server farm because normally in ISP is the customer doesn't want to be filtered. So only for the server farm, they need the firewall for the enterprise like banking and for the DDoS attack, like the malware attack, something like that. And then sometimes it's some customer in ISPalso, they got the many DDoS attack and then they are using the public ip. When there are using the public ip, they need to protect their ip. So they need to use the firewall. So the firewall is essentially needed. many attackers and many, many things, terrible things have been to the network which has large impact..
The UI in Cisco Firepower formerly Sourcefire) is complicated and entirely redundant. A lot of these features are not useful, and therefore, it can be removed from the main window.
The interface is very slow, with each operation taking a lot of time. Searching through the logs takes too much time.
It works really well. We can do most anything we want or need to with it, and you don’t have to have a doctorate or multiple certs to necessarily figure it out. The thing that would probably have to happen to make us switch would be if we just got priced out - Cisco’s more powerful and higher bandwidth models cost a pretty penny.
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.
Solution is highly effective, offers a lot of features with constant improvements and additions of new features over time. It's relatively easy to get familiar with the system, especially if transitioning from adaptive security appliances. If this is not the case, as for learnability there's a learning curve but once learned it is relatively easy to remember the details about the system even after a period of non-use
We have had really good success with Cisco Secure Firewall when it comes to availability. Even when we’ve had temporary issues with one appliance or the other, or with the Firewall Management Center, it has stayed up and defended our network diligently. We even had an issue where the licensing got disabled for multiple days, and it kept spinning like a top
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.
Customer service has been great. TAC has been mostly able to identify and fix problems that we may have and have been very responsive. If for some reason something isn't fixed right away, they have been adamant on staying with us and working the issues out before things get escalated up the chain.
In the beginning transition from Adaptive Security Appliance to Cisco Secure Firewall did not look like the best choice. Solution was new, there were a lot of bugs and unsupported features and the actual execution in the form of configuration via Firepower Management Center was extremely slow. Compare configuring a feature via CLI on ASA in a manner of seconds (copy/paste) to deployment via FMC to Secure Firewall which took approx. 10 mins (no exaggeration). Today, situation is a bit different, overall solution looks much more stable and faster then it was but there's still room for improvement.
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!
We use the FMC as a virtual machine, it combines administration, monitoring and can be used perfectly for error analysis. There are restrictions due to administration without the FMC, so we decided on the FMC as the central administration.
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.
