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 Qualys Cloud Platform is well suited for organizations that need additional tools to secure and bolster their security from end to end. The automated, real-time threat protection is very quick to notify an admin of potential vulnerabilities and risks, as well as recommending quick fixes to resolve/close the gap before an incident occurs. QCP excels at portraying all of these in a single pane of glass, and find that the Qualys reports are more detailed than competitor product lines. One of our big issues with QCP is that you do have to pay for each scanner, which can quickly add up to large costs. For this reason, I would rate Qualys at a ~7 due to great features and functionality, but overall value could be better for a large organization. I would also say that QCP may make more sense for smaller organizations due to this pricing model.
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 It really does well at vulnerability scanning, which it is well known for. It's accuracy at finding vulnerabilities is top notch, more so than a lot of other vulnerability tools out there. In an organization/company you want this kind of accuracy at finding vulnerabilities in your network/endpoints It is very good at managing endpoints on a consistent basis, meaning you can add endpoints to Qualys and have the platform scan/track/protect for vulnerabilities on an ongoing basis, without user intervention It does really well at separating out and identifying what levels of criticality each vulnerability should fall into. This way, an organization/company can attack the more critical vulnerabilities first 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 This program is really complicated, the multiple functions that are presented to us are not very clear and in some cases, it is a matter of intuition to execute a function, it is not very informative. The interface of this program can be a real problem; for our taste, this program looks a bit messy, and the interface does not help or guide you to find the options you need. 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 Usability Again, the usability of Qualys has been a pinpoint for this entire review. It was easily the worst thing about the product and because of this, I would not recommend Qualys to anybody in my field. This should be something that Qualys strives to improve if they wish to stay in business.
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 They had a support page within the WAS to report any concerns or seek help. But the UI of that is not smooth. Regardless support staff were pretty responsive and helpful. They scheduled calls to understand and address our problems. Email support is good as well.
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 As described before Qualys is used to scan periodically the environment in order to check if there are some packages (Linux) or Applications (Windows) outdated, generating reports to the Service Owners, fulfilling what's is expected from us, attending all our expectations regarding the tool. That's why we'd choose Qualys to our organization.
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 Big time-saving tool vs. having to comb through several system reports which ultimately can still have you missing unapproved software. Quick snapshot via the dashboard provided a nice summary of where you're assets meet or do not meet your organization's policy requirements. Read full review ScreenShots