Barracuda Web Application Firewall vs. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software

Easy to use and reliable, with very little maintenance required and zero downtime to date. For the education sector, ease of use is hugely important as IT Managers/Technicians are often "Jack of all trades" with a good, broad general knowledge but perhaps lacking specific expertise in certain aspects. Being provided with easy-to-follow tutorials and instructions has been very useful in setting up and configuring the firewall, especially as my background is more in desktop support.

Incentivized

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

• Email Filtering and Inspection
• Web-based intrusions and attacks
• Traffic Patterns

• 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

• Reports could be somewhat confusing.
• The initial setup was a little difficult for our Security Admin team.

Incentivized

• 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

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

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

The Barracuda Web Application Firewall is easy to use. Support from Barracuda is great also. Load Balancing of the Web Application Firewall is also nice. This allows you to do maintenance or have large loads for the end-user. Threat monitoring of our network and traffic coming into our services within our cloud solution.

Incentivized

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

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

We have used SonicWalls and WatchGuard firewall appliances neither are even remotely close to the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. In addition, Barracuda support is fantastic. Throw in the 4 year (free) refresh cycle and there is no reason we would even consider the other two again (at least for the foreseeable future).

Incentivized

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

• Negative impact: a default port was open and missed by one of our techs.
• Positive impact: it protects us everyday now that we have it locked down.

• 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