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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) vs. Cisco Multicloud Defense

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    Overview
    ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price

    Cisco ACI

    Score8.5 out of 10
    N/ACisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) is network virtualization technology.N/A

    Cisco Multicloud Defense

    Score8.4 out of 10
    N/AA solution to simplify security and gain multidirectional protection across any public or private cloud to block inbound attacks, lateral movement, and data exfiltration using a single solution. Cisco Multicloud Defense protects all cloud environments using a single software-as-a-service (SaaS) control plane, eliminating inefficient, complex, and costly point solutions.N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco ACICisco Multicloud Defense
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ACICisco Multicloud Defense
    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 ACICisco Multicloud Defense
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Cisco
    Chose Cisco Multicloud Defense
    As mentioned on the previous comments, Ease of use, Saved a lot of operational overhead compared to other products.
    Incentivized
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    113 Answers
    100%
    Would buy again
    6 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    6 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    115 Answers
    100%
    Happy with the feature set
    6 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    82 Answers
    100%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    6 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    93 Answers
    100%
    Implementation went as expected
    6 Answers
    Features
    Cisco ACICisco Multicloud Defense
    Cloud Computing Security Features
    Comparison of Cloud Computing Security Features features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Cisco Multicloud Defense
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Cisco Multicloud Defense
    8.3
    4 Ratings
    3% above category average
    Automated Data Backup and Recovery00 Ratings8.22 Ratings
    Intrusion Detection and Prevention:00 Ratings8.04 Ratings
    Regular Vulnerability Management00 Ratings8.22 Ratings
    Identity and Access Management00 Ratings8.02 Ratings
    Secure Data Transfer00 Ratings8.24 Ratings
    Security Incident Response00 Ratings8.33 Ratings
    Compliance and Auditing00 Ratings8.94 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ACICisco Multicloud Defense
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
    Armor
    Score6 out of 10
    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Trend Micro Deep Security
    Score8.3 out of 10
    Enterprises
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    AWS CloudTrail
    Score8.8 out of 10
    All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
    User Ratings
    Cisco ACICisco Multicloud Defense
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (131 ratings)
    8.3
    (6 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.7
    (10 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Usability
    5.1
    (8 ratings)
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (9 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.5
    (11 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (9 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ACICisco Multicloud Defense
    Likelihood to Recommend
    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
    Read full review
    Cisco
    For WAF functionality and delivery of websites, It's very well suited for traditional firewalling, if you're doing that already, it can be quite difficult to rearchitect everything around this product. So an example of that would be if, like us, you came from a datacenter style architecture within your cloud environment and you are trying to move to a more cloud-fronted architecture. Probably the best way to put it is that can be quite difficult, but once you've deployed, it gets easier operationally. So to kind of reverse engineer everything and then do everything again can be quite tedious in some ways. But that will be specific to people depending on where they're coming from with it.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Pros
    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
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • DLP monitoring - key item for us which helps to view if anything which should leave our environment our or even between each part of network between/inside specific clouds
    • Segmentation of subnet, basic but helpful to isolate each host into their own part of single subnet and connect them, including all visibility features which are offered by Cisco defense systems
    • Allow/deny rules helps us to block, monitor and logs traffic passing in each direction of our environment
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cons
    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
    Read full review
    Cisco
    • The ability to see traffic flowing and identify malicious traffic is amazing.
    • The ease of setting up the connections of the cloud platforms is perfect.
    • Dynamic based security policies allow for better protection.
    • I don't have any detailed examples of improvement so instead I highlighted a couple of aspects that make the solution amazing.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Likelihood to Renew
    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
    Read full review
    Cisco
    If it maintains its current direction it will be very disruptive in the cloud security space
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Usability
    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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    Cisco
    Ease of Use
    Incentivized
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    Reliability and Availability
    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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    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Performance
    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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    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Support Rating
    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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    Cisco
    As of yet I havent logged a TAC case - It will be interesting to see how it is supported as a new product in the medium term
    Incentivized
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    In-Person Training
    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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    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Implementation Rating
    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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    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Alternatives Considered
    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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    Cisco
    Cisco Multicloud Defense, Crowd Strike Falcon, and Arctic Wolf Cloud Posture Security Management System as a service SAAS platforms are very comparable platforms. Unfortunately for Croud Strike, they had a mishap recently that caused major downtime for many companies worldwide. I do not think that you would have to worry about this happening with Cisco Multicloud Defense.
    Incentivized
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    Scalability
    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.
    Incentivized
    Read full review
    Cisco
    No answers on this topic
    Return on Investment
    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)
    Incentivized
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    Cisco
    • The insight that it provides allows us to move away from other tools and just utilize the Cisco Multicloud Defense.
    • Insights into data usage provides tangible analytics.
    • Ease of management and use allows for less in-depth and specialized training.
    Incentivized
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