Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software vs. Pulse Secure Unified Client (discontinued)

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.

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It is well suited for large corporations for granularity on users' roles, security levels for each application, and for logging in with an extra security layer. For doing demanding network tasks, like downloading a large set of data or for streaming, it could get slower than with a direct connection.

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• 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.

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• Provides what any VPN should provide
• Works on many OSs, though I will relay my Mac OS experience in another section of the review
• Their clientless VPN offering could be interesting, depending on your needs

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• 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[.]

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• It's a little slower
• Requires to be careful with the configuration on network
• It seems to cause a weird behavior in MAC when loading after turn on sometimes

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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I wasn't a part of the decision process to use Pulse Secure. I believe NordVPN Teams and ExpressVPN are both far superior products. Modern UI (Pulse Secure's UI is incredibly outdated), less reconnects, cheaper, less hacks (On April 20, 2021, CISA issued an "Emergency Directive on Pulse Connect Secure"), and simply faster overall connection speeds.

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• 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

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• It has a positive ROI

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