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Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software vs. NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software

    Score9 out of 10
    N/ACisco 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.N/A

    NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection

    Score8 out of 10
    N/ANETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection security software offers protection across multiple layers of the OSI model. It provides security measures for Layer 2 (Data Link layer) through Layer 7 (Application layer), ensuring complete protection for network infrastructure.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Free Trial
    NoNo
    Free/Freemium Version
    NoNo
    Premium Consulting/Integration Services
    NoNo
    Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
    Additional Details——
    More Pricing Information
    Community Pulse
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    NETSCOUT
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    87%
    Would buy again
    40 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Delivers good value for the price
    95%
    Delivers good value for the price
    42 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Happy with the feature set
    91%
    Happy with the feature set
    42 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    36 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation went as expected
    98%
    Implementation went as expected
    41 Answers
    No answers on this topic
    Features
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Firewall
    Comparison of Firewall features of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Feature
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
    8.9
    50 Ratings
    4% above category average
    NETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    -
    Ratings
    Identification Technologies7.932 Ratings00 Ratings
    Visualization Tools7.931 Ratings00 Ratings
    Content Inspection8.433 Ratings00 Ratings
    Policy-based Controls8.446 Ratings00 Ratings
    Active Directory and LDAP8.448 Ratings00 Ratings
    Firewall Management Console9.049 Ratings00 Ratings
    Reporting and Logging8.949 Ratings00 Ratings
    VPN10.049 Ratings00 Ratings
    High Availability9.649 Ratings00 Ratings
    Stateful Inspection10.046 Ratings00 Ratings
    Proxy Server9.032 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Small Businesses
    SonicWall NSA Series
    Score8.3 out of 10
    Cloudflare
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    Barracuda CloudGen Firewall
    Score9.6 out of 10
    Cloudflare
    Score8.9 out of 10
    Enterprises
    F5 BIG-IP Advanced Firewall Manager (AFM)
    Score8.8 out of 10
    No answers on this topic
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.0
    (88 ratings)
    9.0
    (2 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    7.1
    (4 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Availability
    7.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.7
    (8 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    8.0
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    6.5
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) SoftwareNETSCOUT Arbor DDoS Protection
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    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
    Read full review
    NETSCOUT
    Arbor has the propensity to deal with even the larger firms. I have been using it for a year span and I don’t have any such complaint which is affecting us in a bad way. I can recommend this to all the companies who want to have a good network behavior analysis and to monitor the problems if there is any chance of it to occur and which has the potential to affect the whole working environment of the company.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Cisco
    • 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
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    NETSCOUT
    • Arbor's layer 7 countermeasures are very good out of the box, but it is very easy to reconfigure values and see the impact in real-time.
    • Peakflow SP provides fairly detailed traffic analysis and breakdown for top-N data such as top talkers, top ASNs, top ports and so on. They offer "SP Insight" as a product to build in more powerful reporting on the already-collected metrics with an interface very similar to Kibana or one of its many forks. We are not licensed for that so I can't speak to its capabilities.
    • Arbor allows for a good amount of automation. Fast flood detection ensures that if pre-determined thresholds are quickly exceeded, preconfigured mitigations can be started or in the event of an extremely large volumetric attack you can trigger an Arbor Cloud (sold separately) mitigation or a remotely-triggered blackhole announcement to drop traffic to the attacked destination IP address(es) upstream.
    • ATAC (Arbor support) is very helpful. The level of support our organization maintains covers ATAC performing all update functions to all Arbor appliances - SP and TMS.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    Cisco
    • 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
    Read full review
    NETSCOUT
    • Arbor is a highly expensive company. this was the major reason behind not going for the Arbor sightline in the first place. Although its features are good but the cost is unjustifiable.
    • The implementation and the understanding of this tool are full of complexity and perplexity.
    • I am looking forward to having a new update on it. They used to update their versions quite frequently but it's been a long time they haven’t updated or maybe it is not in their priority lists right now.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    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
    Read full review
    NETSCOUT
    No answers on this topic
    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    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
    Read full review
    NETSCOUT
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    Cisco
    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
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    NETSCOUT
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    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
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    NETSCOUT
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    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
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    NETSCOUT
    We evaluated Corero and a number of external scrubbing services. In the POC, we found Corero's mitigation capabilities to extremely limited beyond blocking common traffic types at preconfigured rates. It's not impossible to configure custom mitigation methods and countermeasures, but it requires a deep understanding of BPF and bytecode, where Arbor is checkboxes, radio buttons, and dialog buttons that all sit next to a graph showing traffic dropped and permitted by the current settings. I'm not going to enumerate each of the cloud services evaluated because the decision came down to the same reasoning. The amount of traffic we receive is enough that it would be prohibitively expensive for our use case.
    Incentivized
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    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • 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
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    NETSCOUT
    • Arbor is good in empower us to monitor the issues in the network.
    • We can get better traffic analytics and reports are quite detailed.
    • The price is quite high which makes it a little hard choice for us.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
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