Cisco ASA 5500-X with FirePOWER Services vs. WatchGuard XTM - Discontinued Product

This firewall is best suited for the network edge/perimeter deployment. The next gen features works very well and the remote access VPN is also very much suitable for the organizations which have a huge user base working remotely. The Remote Access VPN is very much customizable and the authentication integration option like LDAP and RADIUS provides and addon.

Incentivized

WatchGuard XTM comes in different models, so you can choose the model best suited for your company size. I think it works well in small as well as very large networks. I have not used this feature, but you can create a "FireCluster" to connect member devices of the same model if you need to put multiple WatchGuard XTMs in your environment. Coming from command line, it took a little adjusting to learn which screen to use to set up the different rules. Once you understand how to set up policies, it is simple to create more. New firewall administrators would appreciate the ease of creating policies, and expert administrators should find everything they need plus extra features.

Incentivized

• The Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services model works perfectly for network edge protection scenarios.
• It allows for the creation and connection of sites through site-to-site VPN configuration.
• It enables remote connection and home office with remote SSL or IPSEC VPN.
• It has layer 7 traffic protection and visibility.
• It has anti-malware protection from start to finish.
• The configuration is easy to perform.

Incentivized

• Proxy filter.
• Link redundancy.
• Security.

• URL Filtering feature could be easier to utilize for beginners
• I'd like to see a visual of VPN networks setup and show the functioning or malfunctioning status to assist in making troubleshooting easier
• Recommendations on ACLs for beginners based on their account creation date

Incentivized

• Support can be hard to work with. While they are typically knowledgeable, there can be a language barrier. Also, most troubleshooting seems intrusive which is a problem in a production environment.
• The throughput of the cheaper models leaves something to be desired.
• Have had some issues running VOIP behind these, but have not been able to narrow down the issues to the phone provider or WatchGuard yet.

Incentivized

Ever since we installed Cisco ASA 5500-X with FirePOWER Services we have never had to deal with an attack. We can see in the logs almost every day hackers attempting to break into our networks and failing. We also have the ability to blacklist every IP address that attempts to break into our firewalls

Incentivized

Cisco firepower provides automatation for an organisations security operations to detect and stop the most advanced threats fast. It also assists in preventing attacks in using intelligence and innovative solutions.

Incentivized

We have never had an outage caused by firewall failure. We have had a few outages caused by the internet failing or cloud applications going offline but never a firewall breaking down. When making changes we have a very strong change control, major software updates are always carried out out of working hours. At places where we have two firewalls in HA, we are able to do upgrades in working ours and the users will never know that an upgrade is taking place, that how great these firewalls are

Incentivized

The Cisco ASA 5500X with Firepower performance needs consideration before deploying. Although the solution is Pay as you grow, adding additional features to the system has a negative impact on overall throughput. I would more like now only to deploy the Cisco FPR units as they have better performance and will last the test of time.

Incentivized

I would recommend the purchase of the Smartnet 24x7 service in the case of a unit and the Smartnet 8x5NBD in the case of only one appliance installed on site. This service is important to always have the latest firmware updates, corrective updates and especially the hardware warranty and maintenance service in case of problems. The service is done by phone or on the official Cisco website and I can say that it is very good and efficient.

Incentivized

We implemented a centralized management of all our Cisco ASA 5500-x with FirePOWER Services so that we can have a holistic view of all our sites in London and other European countries. This also helps when making changes, instead of login on to each firewall we can use Firepower Management Center (FMC) to central deploy changes across all devices

Incentivized

Previous],] I was using the [pfSense] in my organization but when i switched to [Cisco ASA 5500-X with FirePOWER Services] I realized there are lots of issue and missing security features in [pfSense]. The deployment and configuration is very easy as compare to [pfSense]. I highly recommend this product to everyone.

Incentivized

Again, WatchGuard is priced much lower than other vendors in its space. It may not have some of the bigger features such as Layer 7 awareness. It's more simple to manage and provides IT staff the time to work on other tasks versus time spent to create complex rule sets.

Incentivized

• Working of remote workforce made easy
• Security was enhanced on the data traffic shared with the vendors due to the use of VPNs
• Inbound attacks were mostly blocked on the edge and saved a lot of resources (which could had been used in case of attacks getting successful on the application servers)

Incentivized

• Easy to set up and connect firewalls
• Easy to set up branch tunnels
• Less time spent training