Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software is the core OS for the ASA suite. It provides firewall functionality, as well as integration with context-specific Cisco security modules. It is scaled for enterprise-level traffic and connections.
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Cisco Meraki MS
Score 9.2 out of 10
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Cisco offers the Meraki brand of Ethernet switches.
Cisco Meraki equipment is easier to configure, setup, and deploy as well as manage. The only thing I will say for the other gear is that they have their special niche requirements, protocol options, and special configuration options that not all Meraki gear has. Meraki gear …
I think that Meraki stacks up well against the competition. I have not found a situation where it does not meet the needs from speed to security. I think that this concept of how it is designed will become a trend of the next few years and the competition has something to …
The products are now becoming very similar in their capabilities with both supporting a similar backplane, redundant PSUs in certain Meraki models and a variety of gigabit uplinks. The Meraki solution is turnkey in as much that you don’t need to bolt on additional products to …
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.
A Cisco Meraki solution should always be in the toolbox for a small-medium office. Especially for a project team that moves around a bit. It is very easy to deploy and if after 6 months the project moves to another location, re-deployment times are much faster than traditional kit. Whilst it could do the job. It is not at the point of replacing a large corporate office of Catalyst Switches but we feel it does not need to do that necessarily.
I think when it comes to the Meraki products, it's just the ease of use and ease of troubleshooting because it's all cloud-based, easy to access from anywhere I can literally get on now and troubleshoot. So I think it's just the ease of use, which is great.
So compared to the Cisco Catalyst series, there isn't that many dolls you can turn and just optimize stuff. So particularly I'm not quite sure around how stuff like MACsec would work on the MS. It's something that I've really got to look into more and the documentation isn't really that obvious for that feature.
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
At the time I am writing this, Meraki MS has conver all of the required needs. Is really easy to implement, the dashboard helps a lot with the implementation and troubleshooting process, the devices are very robust and you can count with the meraki support in case you face a physical or logical issue with them.
The Meraki dashboard is one of the most intuitive and user-friendly network management interfaces available. It simplifies many traditionally complex tasks, such as VLAN configuration, port management, and firmware updates, making it easy to deploy and manage networks without extensive CLI work. Features like zero-touch provisioning, remote troubleshooting, and real-time monitoring significantly reduce the time and effort needed for network administration. The reason it’s not a perfect 10 is that while Meraki is great for most standard networking tasks, it can feel somewhat limiting for advanced configurations. Additionally, the reliance on the cloud dashboard means there’s very little local management option, which could be a drawback in environments with strict compliance requirements. Overall, it’s one of the easiest networking solutions to work with, but power users might find certain advanced features lacking.
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.
Cisco Meraki MS switches are quite reliable, robust, and incredibly rare to experience failures. Most of the time, as with all equipment, problems arise from incorrect configurations, not from poor performance of the equipment itself. In any case, when a hardware or software issue arises, Meraki support responds promptly, and if equipment replacement is required, the service is dispatched quickly and efficiently.
In deployments using Cisco Meraki switches, no issues with performance, slowness, or loss have been reported; overall, performance is quite good. Communication and integration with other devices and brands is quite good, and the devices rarely fail.
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.
Meraki support is excellent. They are also highly proactive. They literally replaced all of a particular model of our MS switches when it was discovered that they were not sure about the longevity of a particular chassis fan inside those switches. Without us having to do anything other than ask, they shipped us all new replacements (with a better fan in them) for the 10 or so of the switches that were in the affected model group, and we shipped the defective ones back to them int he same packaging, prepaid. None of the recalled switches had ever experienced a fan failure, but they were not willing to let them run in a production environment. I like that. Meraki MS support staff are also quick to get back to you and very knowledgeable about their product. I actually contact our Meraki rep to instigate a support case (although i could call support directly), and he gets the details from me first, then opens the ticket for us and explains it to support. This means that I only even need to talk to one person, and I like that, too. Meraki MS switches are designed to be essentially "plug and play", so support is generally not needed unless the end user is not following the deployment and operation guides
The In-person trainings are very useful because allow you to ask questions in live to the instructor. In general, most training sessions have been delivered directly through the Meraki platform with on-demand videos. However, having a dedicated instructor has allowed us to address specific topics that in some cases aren't covered in depth in the courses.
The Cisco Meraki learning platform is very user-friendly and offers all kinds of videos, reading material, and forums related to the different courses. There are courses for specific topics and also dedicated learning paths for certifications. In both cases, the content and explanation are easy to understand and provide highly didactic examples, sample equipment configurations, and quizzes at the end of each lesson to assess the acquired knowledge.
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
In general, the implementation process was relatively simple, given that we already have a relationship with the partners and experience in other implementations, from the acquisition of licenses, purchase of equipment, configuration of switches and support from the Meraki team, everything has been easy to manage and the support from both the partner and the Meraki team has been excellent.
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.
Catalyst is good but it requires CLI configuration which can be very complex for beginners because they tend to forget commands. Cisco Meraki MS takes out the complexity by having a GUI, and another advantage is the risk of committing bad configuration is minimized (such as typing a typo in a long command for a vlan or IP address). The GUI's just a lot cleaner to work with.
I would say probably eight. I think there's a lot of, the scalability is very nice and I've definitely deployed a lot of sites quickly. I think for us right now that we have to pivot away from manual configurations and using automated configurations. And so just being sure we prevent things like drift between sites is kind of important right now for us. And so I think that's the next steps for us in that product. And so I think if there was better documentation or better best practices about how to automate and deploy standardized, I think that would help.
I can't think of any negatives. Positive, well, I had nothing but positive things to say about it. Like I said, multiple times. Of course it does give us so much visibility, which is important to us. As far as on a daily basis, I mean the dashboard daily of course, and the use of the phone. It's just also they keep innovating and adding new features to it, which help us lower our troubleshooting times and uptime. And just the overall use of the product itself.
