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Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) vs. Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center

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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 Secure Firewall Management Center

    Score8.9 out of 10
    N/ACisco Secure Firewall Management Center (formerly Firepower Management Center) are a firewall policy and intrusion detection appliance management system, providing an administrative nerve center for managing critical Cisco network security solutions. It provides complete and unified management over firewalls, application control, intrusion prevention, URL filtering, and advanced malware protection. Easily go from managing a firewall to controlling applications to investigating and remediating…N/A
    Pricing
    Cisco ACICisco Secure Firewall Management Center
    Editions & Modules
    No answers on this topic
    No answers on this topic
    Offerings
    Pricing Offerings
    Cisco ACICisco Secure Firewall Management Center
    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 Secure Firewall Management Center
    Considered Both Products
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Cisco
    No answer on this topic
    Key User Insights
    Would buy again
    96%
    Would buy again
    113 Answers
    96%
    Would buy again
    23 Answers
    Delivers good value for the price
    98%
    Delivers good value for the price
    96 Answers
    100%
    Delivers good value for the price
    23 Answers
    Happy with the feature set
    97%
    Happy with the feature set
    115 Answers
    96%
    Happy with the feature set
    23 Answers
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    94%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    82 Answers
    88%
    Lived up to sales and marketing promises
    15 Answers
    Implementation went as expected
    89%
    Implementation went as expected
    93 Answers
    96%
    Implementation went as expected
    23 Answers
    Features
    Cisco ACICisco Secure Firewall Management Center
    Firewall Security Management
    Comparison of Firewall Security Management features of Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI) and Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center
    Feature
    Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (Cisco ACI)
    -
    Ratings
    Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center
    8.1
    21 Ratings
    2% above category average
    Policy planning and rule management00 Ratings8.021 Ratings
    Automated Policy Orchestration00 Ratings7.019 Ratings
    Device Discovery00 Ratings8.019 Ratings
    Policy Compliance Auditing00 Ratings8.019 Ratings
    Attack Path Simulation Testing00 Ratings7.516 Ratings
    Anomalous Event or Behavior Deviation00 Ratings8.019 Ratings
    Vulnerability Scans00 Ratings8.516 Ratings
    Firewall Rule Cleanup00 Ratings9.518 Ratings
    Best Alternatives
    Cisco ACICisco Secure Firewall Management Center
    Small Businesses
    No answers on this topic
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    Medium-sized Companies
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Palo Alto Panorama
    Score8.7 out of 10
    Enterprises
    IBM Cloud Internet Services
    Score9.8 out of 10
    Palo Alto Panorama
    Score8.7 out of 10
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    User Ratings
    Cisco ACICisco Secure Firewall Management Center
    Likelihood to Recommend
    8.5
    (131 ratings)
    8.5
    (24 ratings)
    Likelihood to Renew
    9.7
    (10 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Usability
    5.1
    (8 ratings)
    8.0
    (4 ratings)
    Availability
    9.1
    (2 ratings)
    10.0
    (1 ratings)
    Performance
    9.1
    (9 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Support Rating
    7.4
    (11 ratings)
    8.0
    (7 ratings)
    In-Person Training
    8.2
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Implementation Rating
    6.0
    (5 ratings)
    9.0
    (1 ratings)
    Ease of integration
    -
    (0 ratings)
    8.0
    (1 ratings)
    Product Scalability
    8.6
    (9 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    Vendor post-sale
    5.5
    (1 ratings)
    -
    (0 ratings)
    User Testimonials
    Cisco ACICisco Secure Firewall Management Center
    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
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    Cisco
    FMC is feature-rich and user-friendly. Cisco firewalls can run on standalone mode (FDM) but fewer features are supported on FDM. FMC is a must when working with Cisco Firewall. Migration from Cisco ASA to Cisco FTD is easy. There is a tool (FMT) that converts and imports the cisco IOS configuration file to FMC. FMC runs in VM or can be purchased as a physical appliance. The downside is that FMC is not quite fast and has bugs, especially when running in the older version 5x. and 6x.
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    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
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    Cisco
    • Great protection and security against the multiple digital virus attacks.
    • Provides detailed logs to track any threat and helps to secure the network promptly.
    • VPN service for remote access of important organizational applications.
    • Best management tool for controlling data and bandwidth resources.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Cisco
    • Stability when managing firewalls, we're having issues with Firewall 01 and Firewall 02 remaining in sync
    • Reporting when it comes to access control policy rules - there is no way to export a report of the rules easily. Using a custom Python script on the Cisco forums is the only way to easily export a CSV.
    • Support for policy and route-based site-to-site VPN was not available until 6.6.0 and later. This forced us to purchase ASAs to bridge that gap.
    • Dashboard reporting - when clicking a link for more information, nothing displays. Currently working with Cisco on the support case, which has been escalated.
    Incentivized
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    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
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    Cisco
    We are very satisfied with SecureX and it's adaptive, active nature in protecting or data and systems. It's easy to administer, update, review notifications and update when necessary. Cisco's security practice fits into our needs and continues to evolve as global cyber events change. SecureX is easy to migrate to new cisco gear as we upgrade to newer models when supports ends on older gear. Enabling fast ROI during these capital expenditure projects.
    Incentivized
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    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
    Overall usability is an eight for me because it is easy to manage the firewall policies and monitor the devices' health. The configurations are all done in the GUI which makes it more convenient and hassle free. You can also see the devices' health and the progress of the task thru its taskbar.
    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
    Since moving to Cisco secure management center from firepower management center we've had no application issues, outages or any other problems. It's always been there for us and always provides us the necessary protection and notification when we need it. Been very happy with all of our Cisco systems over our tenure to date.
    Incentivized
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    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
    We have the direct support of the manufacturer through its service channels, the attention is 24/7, and the response time is acceptable. The support for this tool is almost nil. It all depends on the level of implementation is carried out so that it can fail and request collaboration. Anyway, the manufacturer backs the entire Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC series appliances) solution.
    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
    Cisco secure firewall management center is easy to install, moderate to setup in conjunction with firewall hardware, and administration of policy changes afterwards is pretty straight forward. And flexible to add more advanced security configurations as needed. Cisco support website is pretty good for researching how to documentation too. Cisco secure firewall management center enables integration to SecureX - the cloud security protection service. And AMP which protects packet flow with real time analysis. Cisco secure fmc is the evolved name for cisco firepower management center so for those customers who have firepower this is a simple migration.
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    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
    We are managing multiple customers having a large number of Cisco devices that need to be managed by a single platform. For that reason, we have selected the Cisco Firewall Management Center than checkpoint firewall management. It simplifies and automates newly bought cisco firewalls at remote branch offices to manage, configure and troubleshoot them.
    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
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    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
    • It's a very straightforward and user-friendly tool that has enhanced the total detection of malware and other threats t from intrusion into our network.
    • Provides stable deep network scanning, security visibility, and protection from unauthorized access.
    • The platform modular allows us to deploy across multiple budget cycles.
    Incentivized
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