Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software vs. Cisco Meraki MX

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

the Cisco Meraki MX 's work great for us we have over 40 locations and each has it's own Cisco Meraki MX that connects to our main Cisco Meraki MX in our datacenter. Each site then connects to Meraki switches and access points. Very easy to setup and keep running smoothly. Secure and easy for users to get connected to VPN.

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

• It's very easy to deploy these devices because it's a cloud-based controlling controller that controls it. So able to, once the device has internet access, all you need to do basically is to look up the controller serial number and it'll basically find it. And once you add it to your network to automatically incorporate that device into your network and basically build the panels for the SD-WAN service.

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

• Inbuilt wireless does not support tunnel SSID mode. This has meant not all SSID in our organisation can be deployed at a MX site.
• Whilst Inbuilt switch ports support dot1x, they do not report as well on our NAC server as on a MS switch or catalyst switch.

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

The simplicity and ease of use for the Meraki Dashboard make it an easy choice for our organization to renew our Meraki Enterprise Agreement. We will likely continue using the Meraki MC67-C, MX450, and other MX models in their catalog until we shift away from Meraki completely

Incentivized

Some features simply aren't there, but the ones that are there are pretty easy to use. Sometimes it is easy to get lost when trying to find the specific device you want to work on, but that's mostly due to how rarely we have to go into the interface.

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

Meraki MX devices support high availability (HA) configurations, which ensures minimal downtime if one device goes offline. This feature has helped us maintain a stable and reliable network, even in cases of hardware failures. ince Meraki is cloud-managed, we've noticed that the cloud infrastructure is generally highly reliable, with minimal service interruptions or downtime. This makes it easier to manage the network remotely without significant availability concerns. Meraki automatically pushes firmware updates and patches, which helps maintain system stability without requiring manual intervention. These updates are rolled out in a manner that ensures minimal disruption to service.

Incentivized

The interface is pretty responsive. The lower end devices are easy to overwhelm if you have a lot of throughput. Be sure the model you get is rated for the amount of traffic you will have. Overbuild if possible, otherwise you won't be fully leveraging the connection from your ISP.

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

I haven't ever had a bad experience with Meraki support. On the few occasions where I wasn't understanding the UI or needed some clarification about what a setting actually would do, I contacted them and they were very quickly able to provide help. Returns are simple and fast, too. We had to return a defective device one time and they shipped the replacement before we had even un-racked the one that was faulty. Unlike many other vendors, they didn't ask use to a do long list of scripted diagnostics, they just took my word for it that the device was broken and sent out a replacement immediately

Incentivized

great when they offered it, really tested your knowledge with hands on and see what your peers from other orgs know. glad to see that we were ahead of the curve of what our peers knew

Incentivized

it was okay as it was moderated but still better than nothing and done via semi self paced webex meeting

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

Implementing Meraki MX devices in phases—starting with a pilot group or select branch offices—was invaluable. This allowed us to identify potential configuration issues, troubleshoot problems, and refine our setup before rolling it out company-wide. It also helped to get feedback from early users and adjust the deployment strategy accordingly. The SD-WAN capabilities in Meraki MX were essential for optimizing our WAN traffic and ensuring better application performance across various locations.

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

The Meraki Dashboard has been a lot more intuitive than CradlePoint NetCloud. We switched from CradlePoint to Cisco Meraki MX because we were already familiar with the interface which allowed us to be familiar with a single dashboard.

Incentivized

I think at an organization level it's definitely a 10. You can automate when you're going to upgrade. You can do it on a peer network basis. There might be issues around scalability if things get a bit too complicated, but if you keep it simple and stupid is my examples of a retail store with an fpos machine, you're going to be fine.

Incentivized

• 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

• I'm going to say positive impact. The biggest thing is especially coming from having a third party taking care of our network to us doing it ourselves. The ease of this with the overall high level visual that we can get as to how our day is starting and running reports to see how many outages have we had, what areas have they actually been in running these reports and being able to gather if it's a certain service provider that's causing an issue in a general area, maybe we need to switch service providers for ISP. So it's been great in that mannerism for us. Ease of manage, I mean, we have a limited number of staff, we have a lot of different offices across the country. And then this is relatively new for us because we did have a previous provider doing all of this for us.

Incentivized