Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review It is a great fit for small to medium enterprises who are low on budget. The pricing is very competitive when compared with other major players like Palo Alto and the features match any NGFW Firewall in the market. However, in my opinion when it comes to massive performance requirements, I would say the Sophos SG Firewall Appliances lacks the sheer power that other devices in the market have.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Sophos' support is actually pretty decent compared to Fortinet. We as a customer who uses both have first-hand experience in that. Sophos' way of support is much more hands-on. For instance, if you raise a ticket, they will contact you via chat, email, or phone in a timely manner and based on your SLA. Sophos antivirus can speak with your firewall natively so that when a threat happens it can be blocked on a network level. We had first-hand experience of this where there was a potential outbreak on the network but the machines were getting isolated and prevented the spreading of malware. Sophos comes with a whole suite of products like Intercept X, MDM, Antivirus, On-premise, and a virtual firewall. So they are like a one shop stop for all your security needs. We liked Sophos compared to our other firewall, which only had on-premise and virtual firewall boxes. Read full review Cons 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[.] Read full review The user interface could use a refresh. It's been a few years. Not having the ability to use an Open VPN configuration is a little disappointing. Home license is too restrictive with only 50 IPs. Matthew James Junior Systems Administrator | POS Programming Specialist
Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review The biggest selling point for sophos is their vendor support. Those guys put a smile on our faces. There are multiple ways you can contact their support like chat, or telephone or email. They are very responsive and they do have very knowledgable and patient support staff. We have raised tickets at all odd hours and they have been addressed correctly
Read full review Implementation Rating 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Both are equally good when comparing the features,
FortiGate has a better dashboard while Sophos SG Firewall Appliances has good vpn texhniques.Overall price was better for Sophos SG Firewall Appliances,So we considered this for our Remote Branch Location .
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Read full review Positive ROI due to the competitiveness of the product. Positive impact as the device is fully functional and easy to operate. Negative impact when it comes to log integration as it does not support industry logging standards. Read full review ScreenShots