Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software vs. Cisco Spaces

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

Cisco Spaces is well suited from Small businesses to large businesses. The ability for Cisco Spaces to scale as your business scale is an important feature to leverage, especially for small businesses. The insights for the Cisco Spaces are helpful to the organization with utilizing what access points we have where and what load the access points are taking on. Our business also likes the fact that the switches, access points, and other Cisco equipment can be seen all in one, anywhere anytime. This makes it easier to manage our equipment.

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

• So the first thing it does really well is a lot of our sites are rural, so we don't have very good cellular connectivity. So we invested in this product because we want our clients, our customers that are coming in to be able to walk in and be able to use a our wireless infrastructure just like it was a cellular device. So they don't even know, they walk in, they think, man, my cellular's better right now. I can do all the things that I wanna do. I can do video. And they don't even know. So that's the biggest bonus for us.

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

• I would say out-of-the-box plugins. It's very easy to make it for DNA spaces, but I'd love to see more part more companies partner with them so that the plugins are just available to add on right out of the box. You don't have to work with a vendor and say, "Hey, I need you to come in and develop this API", it's already there. That would be the one thing that I would say that could get a little bit more help with.

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 product has everything that offered and more.

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

i have never contacted support

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 DNA Spaces is the next iteration for CMX. CMX is be retired and the move to Spaces was just a next step for us. All the features in CMX are present in Spaces. As well as additional features and capabilities.

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

• We collect emails from our customers to populate our email marketing database
• The customers are constantly giving good feedback for the service as an aggregated value to the service
• It has been a good way to get more visits to our eCommerce site which is defined as landing page inside the captive portal

Incentivized