Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software vs. Cisco Firepower 4100 Series

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

When we are asked by local partners which security equipment we use we always recommend our Cisco security products. The Firepower firewall is no exception and we can easily recommend this to others who need a fast, secure, and well built system that integrates well with all your existing hardware and software.

Incentivized

• 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

• VPN Site to Site
• High Availability / Failover
• Ldap mapping to vpn connections

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

• The failover process is clunky. When out Fortigate firewalls failed over, we lost 1 ping. When our Firepowers failover, whether it is on purpose or not, we experience a 2.5 minute complete outage.
• Cisco could stand to improve their support documentation. I have found it difficult to find good directions for configuring these, especially when it comes to NAT and IPSEC tunnels.

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

In general, the Cisco Firepower 4100 Series works well, great performance, support a high volume of traffic, configuration, users, the device is powerful and once you have something configured you can be sure that it will rarely fail but for day to day troubleshooting or modifications needed can be a little complicated due to you have to deploy every change you make in the device and is not as fast as other devices, in general a deploy takes 5 minutes.

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 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 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

Cisco Firepower 4100 Series deployment is straightforward and easy to implement. It is also can support high availability and able to achieve redundancy. Besides, firmware upgrade is quite simple and the process does not take much effort as the upgrade will be automatically done by itself. Cisco Firepower 4100 Series is also very cost effective compared with other similar ranges of firewalls.

• 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

• Positive impact would be our increased security network wide.
• Another positive would be the increased processing power, saving us time and [from] needing more equipment.
• A negative impact would be the increased need for having to learn a new interface.

Incentivized