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Cisco AnyConnect vs. Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco AnyConnect

    Score9 out of 10
    N/ACisco offers an SSL VPN solution via AnyConnect.N/A

    Cisco ACI

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/ACisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco AnyConnectCisco ACI
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco AnyConnectCisco ACI
    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 AnyConnectCisco ACI
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco ACI
    We haven't tried any thing else, it was the logical step forward from N7K.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    92 Answers
    96%
    Would buy again
    113 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    80 Answers
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    92 Answers
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    115 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    61 Answers
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    82 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    66 Answers
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    93 Answers
    Features
    Cisco AnyConnectCisco ACI
    Virtual Private Network
    Comparison of Virtual Private Network features of Cisco AnyConnect and Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    Feature
    Cisco AnyConnect
    9.2
    29 Ratings
    3% above category average
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    AES 256-bit Encryption9.429 Ratings00 Ratings
    Kill Switch9.122 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multi-Platform Support8.828 Ratings00 Ratings
    Split Tunneling9.126 Ratings00 Ratings
    IP Address Masking9.426 Ratings00 Ratings
    No-Logs Policy9.122 Ratings00 Ratings
    Multiple Server Locations9.123 Ratings00 Ratings
    Automatic Wi-Fi Protection9.524 Ratings00 Ratings
    Simultaneous Connections9.424 Ratings00 Ratings
    Customer Support Services9.025 Ratings00 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco AnyConnectCisco ACI
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Medium-sized Companies
    No answers on this topic
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Enterprises
    No answers on this topic
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco AnyConnectCisco ACI
    Likelihood to Recommend
    9.3
    (118 ratings)
    8.5
    (131 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.8
    (12 ratings)
    9.7
    (10 ratings)
    Usability
    9.2
    (97 ratings)
    5.1
    (8 ratings)
    Availability
    9.9
    (9 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Performance
    8.9
    (3 ratings)
    9.1
    (9 ratings)
    Support Rating
    8.9
    (95 ratings)
    7.5
    (11 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    9.0
    (7 ratings)
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    Configurability
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    10.0
    (7 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    9.0
    (3 ratings)
    8.6
    (9 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    Vendor pre-sale
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco AnyConnectCisco ACI
    Likelihood to Recommend
    Cisco
    Providing secure remote access with a robust VPN, creating an encrypted tunnel so employees can safely access internal company resources like file servers and private apps from anywhere. It also allows enforcing device compliance: depending on policies, checks whether a device has an active antivirus and the latest OS updates before allowing it to connect. When there is not much need for remote access, the cost is too high.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    The ACI solution is perfectly fit for a large or multi-site data center environment. It permits simplifying deployment, management, automation, and security. ACI is especially valuable when strong scalability, automation, security, and segmentation are required. However, ACI is less suitable for a small environment due to its complexity and high cost.
    Incentivized
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    Pros
    Cisco
    • All Cisco AnyConnect data transfer processes are secure to enhance security.
    • It can connect multiple terminals across various sites directly.
    • Centralized management of the workstations connected to the network became easier than ever for managers with multiple locations in the organization's workforce.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    • Cisco ACI, The object model is very complicated. It's something difficult to understand and also because there is a user interface, there's a web user interface, but it's not optimal to use it because if you want to deploy a large amount of VLAN or a large amount of tenants, it's quite difficult to do it or it's quite challenging. Maybe if you want to configure a large amount of ports using the web interface, it's not appropriate because it takes a lot of time. It also provides APIs to do that, but as I say, the object model is very difficult to understand and there is very little documentation about automation of the ACI and maybe there is but it's not so easy to find.
    Incentivized
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    Cons
    Cisco
    • Cisco AnyConnect can use the system resources as long as the program is being run.
    • Account activation may be very difficult when connecting from areas requiring captive portal login, if certain settings are not allowed.
    • By default, it is possible to request the user to authenticate again at specific intervals.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    • I think something I've just went to a session with hyper fabric and the ideas that hyper fabric has. Keep it really simple because Cisco ACI is a complex system and adopt some of the ideas behind hyper fabric, bring it to ACI that will be really beneficial. So as I said, automation is a great thing, but it's still, you need to have the background and the really complex stuff that happens behind the scenes to leverage the value of that solution. And by adding more simplicity to it, I think that will be a great thing. And also integrating with other applications in terms of the automation.
    Incentivized
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    Likelihood to Renew
    Cisco
    It is perhaps the second most functional tool we have, it will definitely be renewed every year. Our network is stable, which ensures that there is less for our technicians to troubleshoot, which frees them up to ensure other parts of the company are maintained. This keeps our costs low and our downtime at a minimum.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Provided with the intensive fault isolation for the CISCO ACI, we are glad that we have this Data Center Solution in place and we will continue to renew as long as the future needed requirements are meet and more helpful features will be enabled in the future with the integration of security
    Incentivized
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    Usability
    Cisco
    It is very useful tool for companies having hybrid work culture. It will allow their employees to work seamlessly from home, office, other branches. This tool will increase your productivity as it will facilitates your employees to access corporate applications 24x7. Overall it is easy to use, deploy and integrate.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    You'll need a lot of training and hands on experience to get the most out of the product. There are a lot of very useful features in the ACI product. Often times there are a lot of ways to get to a solution for chalanges in the field. The solutions might be different eacht time. Knowing which one to implement is somtimes a challenge.
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    Cisco
    I have been using Cisco AnyConnect for past two years and thus I can say very firmly that I have never seen the outage from the Cisco AnyConnect services either It is VPN, System Scans or the Network Connectivity. Talking about the errors likewise major errors I have faced throughout my period of use.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    It allways works. If there are problems with links going down by accident (say someone accidentally unpatches something they shouldn't have), we rarely miss more then one packet over the link. Also, using VPCs we are able to upgrade the software on the switches without the attached EPs ever noticing.
    Incentivized
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    Performance
    Cisco
    Absolutely no speed issues, and I see no evidence of slowdowns across any of the multiple platforms I use daily. It's operation is completely invisible most of the time, except where there is a loss of connection due to server issues or a loss of power. Everything loads quickly and accurately.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Day to day operations on Cisco ACI do not require much human intervention, the platform ticks over without any major faults. Being able to rapidly replicate the communication between two groups of machines across multiple sub networks speeds up new application delivery, and the integration into vmWare allows multiple teams within IT to work together to problem solve rapidly.
    Incentivized
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    Support Rating
    Cisco
    I don't know but nobody provides proper support for us as end user. They should have people to check whether end user is facing issues or not. Cisco AnyConnect having very high charges and still there is no proper support! Many requests and many tickets have opened, but the working speed is very low for the support team! They should have it to optimize.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Cisco provides users and partners with a multitude of data for you to consume. I think that the stuff in the public domain goes a long way to assisting you find any answers you may need, plus insights and information from areas such as DevNet provide you with access to more than just the traditional release notes and the like
    Incentivized
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    In-Person Training
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Cisco
    The Cisco ACI training provided by Cisco was in depth, covered all of our requirements, and allowed us to implement and maintain the platform without issues.
    Incentivized
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    Implementation Rating
    Cisco
    Our Managed Services vendor helped us with the implementation. When we initially setup our AnyConnect using MFA for remote connectivity, the setup was easy and straight forward and worked just fine. After a year, we decided to change to an "always on" feature and use machine and user based security certificates instead of MFA. We had to open a ticket with Cisco support and have their assistance getting this feature to work. Turned out they had a small bug in the code for that version of AnyConnect and it has since been corrected. We have had no issues with the upgrades since that time. The deployment of the software to the user machines was done with SCCM and was straight forward. The user machine upgrades are easy - when the user machine connects and sees a new version available, it upgrades itself! What could be easier?
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Being involved in the implmentation gives you more overview on how things are supposed to be working and communicating, you can easily performce troubleshooting and understanding the troubleshooting scenario
    Incentivized
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    Alternatives Considered
    Cisco
    Cisco is one of our core partners besides Microsoft and SAP. And so yes, we are utilizing very many projects from Cisco. I would mention the whole networking equipment, the routing equipment, the wireless LAN, and also when it comes to infrastructure to compute infrastructure, we are utilizing Cisco servers within our converged infrastructure Flex spot. So we have been running a flex bot from Cisco, NetApp, and VMware for 12 years, and we are still very satisfied with the product. We are looking forward to upgrading to the newest blades and fabric interconnect to continue this journey.
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    Actually we start our learning in networking career with Cisco. So it is very useful or easier to learn this product. And honestly speaking, I didn't work in any other data center solution other than Cisco. So I cannot compare what it gives us more than other popular stuff. But this is very nice product like from Cisco.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    Cisco
    Cisco AnyConnect has been a speedy, reliable, and efficient tool for the creation of your own VPN whatever location that you've brought your laptop. Customer support is consistently top-notch, coming up with quick fixes to whatever difficulties are thrown your way. I would not hesitate to reccommend Cisco AnyConnect to any business that needs connected employees throught the world.
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    Cisco
    Cisco ACI scales well and is suited in scenarios such as multi-cloud or large data centre implementations. It is not suited to smaller deployments as the efficiencies that it provides are not fully realised. It is well suited in large environments that contain both virtual and bare-metal machines allowing a great deal of flexibility. It is also perfect to support multi-tenancy platforms.
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    Return on Investment
    Cisco
    • We are able to seamlessly work on multiple clients daily, and it allows us to quickly handle more projects at the same time.
    • Cisco AnyConnect has allowed our own company's coworkers to remotely connect back to the corporate network, easily assisting work schedules and processes, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Being forced to work remotely, meant our processes still happened quickly and efficiently, by being able to leverage and use Cisco AnyConnect VPN.
    • Even prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, I have worked 100% remotely for a few years now. This was always due to the reliable connectivity and ease of use with Cisco AnyConnect VPN. I live 2+ hours from our nearest corporate office, and even further from some of my client locations, and I have always been able to connect to any of my multiple Cisco AnyConnect VPN connections, within seconds.
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    Cisco
    • We've definitely spent quite a bit of time relearning how to do things in ACI, but I think the investment has been well worth while considering that we can now deploy tenants and leaves from the ground up in a matter of seconds.
    • We can if we choose to upgrade an entire datacenters worth of switches in a single night. (We've chosen to break it up for availability requirements, but if you didn't require 99.999% uptime like us you may be able to do it)
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