Likelihood to Recommend For a larger organization, this is a must. It provides insight into what the users are doing online and most malicious sites will no longer be accessible if access is denied. This can also give access to non-work related sites, but in a limited capacity, based on user or time of day. Though a smaller company would benefit from the features, it may be cost prohibitive.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Pros Integrates with other Barracuda products, including the Barracuda Web Application Firewall and the Barracuda Email Security Gateway. Helps manage bandwidth to improve network performance. Easy to use. Allows you to perform SSL inspections to view content on social networks. Help prevent data loss. Protect our privacy. Read full review 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.. Read full review Cons I don't think I have anything to mention here. The Barracuda Web Security Gateway does everything we need it to do. Read full review 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. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review Usability There are a lot of settings you can adjust. The web log is easy to use. If a user is having issues accessing a website, you can go in and see what's being blocked and why. After that, you can make adjustments fairly easy. The GUI is easy to navigate and updating the software is a simple click of a button.
Read full review 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
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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
Read full review Support Rating Barracuda support have also been excellent when we have had to contact them. The only time we had a hardware issue on a device (and that device was about 8 years old) it was replaced within about 24 hours of reporting it. Generally there has not been much need to contact their support, as once the device is in and set up, it just works.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered SonicWall,
Barracuda NG Firewall , and WatchGuard provides Content Filtering, but are primarily firewalls with Content Filtering features. The Web Filter is a dedicated appliance with more storage space and better reporting of users.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Return on Investment I came into the company with Barracuda already implemented so it worked well for a number of years. Their support contract was a bit pricey. For what the company paid for the system, Barracuda was worth the money over the 10 years it was implemented. Read full review Cisco Secure Firewall has provided a single management interface for all of our devices. We have had issues implementing 1010 in HA where a site was using a dynamic IP previously. Lack of DHCP options has slowed deployment to our smaller sites. Read full review ScreenShots Barracuda Web Security Gateway Screenshots