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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NetScaler
Score 7.9 out of 10
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NetScaler ADC is an application delivery controller.
Cisco has made it easy to buy, set up, and manage all of our firewalls with the central FirePower Management Center. All licensing is done via one license portal too. Tech support is standardized for all ASA devices and like support engineers who know the different models to …
Our Palo Altos and Cisco ASAs are pretty comparable. They both seem to work well when used in an HA pair. They can both do IP/Port based ACLs. But the Palos also have APP-ID which helps to make sure that the traffic passing through your firewall is the type of traffic …
We actually went with the Palo Alto firewalls in most sites, and are using the Palo Alto to replace the classic ASAs; however, there was one location where cost was a major issue so we decided to go with the X-series ASA. We spent a few thousand dollars (though only the L4 …
Citrix NetScaler seems to be a beast right away. Once you start testing and getting used to the logic that is in place, it becomes the obvious choice for selecting such appliance to be used in an enterprise setting.
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.
Citrix Netscaler can be a powerful network appliance for environments that are fully committed and open to utilizing a network appliance that isn't made by a traditional network vendor. Administrator user experience has improved over the years and will continue to improve with the flexibility of virtual and physical appliances available for medium and large enterprises.
Flexibility. NetScaler assumes its admins know a bit about networking and in-depth details surrounding the applications they are configuring access for/to. This being so, the range of configuration options is very broad allowing various versions' combinations of protocol patterns, expressions, rules etc., all to the benefit of the admin.
Granularity. Having such a broad range of configuration options available, while still allowing simple options to be configured simply. The GUI is well-stylized and navigation has a good flow.
Ease of control. For load-balancing of simple services right out of the box, NetScaler makes it pretty easy, compared to the range of options available in the surrounding GUI and under the hood.
The documentation could use an overhaul with specific examples related to the command line as well as GUI. Explanations in the documentation would also be helpful.
Being able to have more than just one routing table would allow the ability to leverage security.
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
I gave the NetScaler a 7 here because the system once configured and deployed is very easy to use. However, if you did not deploy the system and do not have the fundamental background knowledge then you will have trouble using the product in general. Overall it is a great product and service but does typically require professional services to be deployed.
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.
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.
Overall, our organization's experience with Citrix support is that support can be hit or miss. Oftentimes it takes multiple attempts and much longer than desirable to obtain a viable solution for issues experienced with their products. It would be great to see Citrix invest time, effort, and almighty dollars into improving their support and bug fix process across the board.
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
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.
easy to use and setup and reliable. Once the configuration was setup and running this has been really useful and easy to maintain. The other solutions seemed overly complicated and difficult to configure and get up and running with the security that we required
We had this set up before COVID and it saved us. We just added user licenses and scaled out our citrix farm and IT sat back and just monitored users from home.
Scales up and out with ease
Challenging to find NetScaler experts for advanced features you want to enable and use
