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 If a colleague was looking to tighten down their network I can easily recommend Snort to them. It gives you some more peace of mind knowing that its always scanning traffic for malicious looking code. Even things your major firewalls and security hardware might miss, Snort has picked up. Its an easy recommendation for me.
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 IPS detection. DoS detection. Packet logging. 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 At times can be unstable with Cisco bugs, require frequent upgrading. FTD images that are being pushed for ASAs are less efficient from an administration standpoint, no CLI. 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 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 For our organization, the Cisco defense in depth concept works the best. While Cisco can be made to work with other vendors, we have found the best in depth protection by integrating Cisco products for maximum visibility. We had a
Barracuda Web Filter , but it was difficult to maintain when you had limited scope on what you could block, so we created a whitelist only setup which required a lot of additional manpower. This wouldn't have covered new threats with DNS spoofing and the like. Sourcefire also integrated with our anti-malware platform (Cisco AMP) for even better visibility on what may be happening on the end users workstation. We are planning on adding in Cisco ISE to complete the approach and possibly stealthwatch to cover our bases in the future. The Palo Alto gear was interesting, but it was priced far out of our range.
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 Being open source, ROI on free is hard to beat for something that works. I believe it greatly enhances the security of my network. Read full review ScreenShots