Cisco Firepower 2100 Series vs. Sophos Firewall

The Cisco [Firepower] 2100 [Series] is an easy sell for anyone looking. You already know Cisco excels in the security department, but now that firepower lives right on the box and inline with the rest of the firewall data flow you can save yourself a lot of time and headaches. Unless you cant quite afford Cisco's 2100 line, there's not much reason to go with the competition.

Incentivized

It is well-suited for small, medium, and large organizations looking for comprehensive cybersecurity protection. It will not only safeguard their network from cyberattacks but also provide them with many advanced features like deep packet inspection, centralized management, web filtering, application control, etc. in one place. It will help them optimize bandwidth and ensure continued connectivity.

Incentivized

• Advanced threat protection
• Secure VPN connectivity
• Visibility and control (if connected to FMC)
• Regulatory compliacnce with ISO 27001, NIS2, etc.

• Web filtering. This allows us to monitor web usage and block certain categories from being access at the perimeter.
• Application Control. With application control we can block certain applications that get categorized from working accessing the Internet.
• Synchronized Security. When utilizing the Sophos Endpoint product you can use Synchronized Security to minimize Lateral Movement in a network. If a machine is shows a Red status you can auto-isolate it and it is unable to communicate with anything else on the network.

Incentivized

• Career-wise very familiar with the ASAs, you know, the previous gen firewalls, Pyxis, ASAs, the CHA. As far as being intuitive, those seem to be far more intuitive to learn and figure out what the features and changes and config management, all that stuff is. With Firepower, it's a learning curve and I feel like I have quite a bit of experience with it, and so does my team, but feels like it's not as intuitive, and trying to make changes just always seems harder for some reason. We've gone to some Cisco security training and all that, but even then it's just harder to work with. The other big thing is, and this is a big gripe of mine, I suppose, that on any other firewall, when we have various different manufacturers, if you make a change, you know, a simple change object, object name gets changed or object is deleted or whatever the simplest of change is, it gets implemented instantly.
• With the Firepower system, you have to deploy the change and it'll take about six or seven minutes for the change to actually take, which is insanely different than any other platform where that change is instantaneous. So let's say if I'm making seven different changes for a troubleshooting job I don't know which one of the seven is gonna fix it, I do one by one by one. I'm like, oh, let me try one change, one second, change, third change, four changes. It's going to take seven deploys. And seven deploys mean it's gonna take an hour of just deploy time. So that is a big, big gripe

Incentivized

• If using Endpoint security and the Firewall it would be nice to have an easier back and forth between the portals rather than have two separate tabs open. Especially if using more than one in multiple locations.
• If dealing with different revisions options are moved around and sometimes in places that doesn't normally seem like they should be there.

Incentivized

There are three main problems with this platform: - short EoL time - it is really missery because this platform was overrated from cisco sales and after shor time they accepted on EoL - sometimes problems with upgrades paths, because of strange behaviour between FXOS and ASA image on the top of it - not good performance when comparing to newer 1k platform

Because this is a user-friendly interface, and anyone can use it there are multiple articles and guidelines available, it has advanced-level security features. they provide VPN solutions all the features are very practical, SSID MAC-based authentications web control, Firewall rules segregation of the rules and policies, On-premises Active directory single sign-on feature is also available.

As we are all addicted to graphics-oriented interfaces for all our life products. Easy to manage and access as a good way of using anything

In the days of purchase of Cisco Firepower 2100 series it was new platform and Cisco aimed their sailsmains to force selling this platfrom. It was one of the first platform with FXOS with full support of ASA images. It was cheper then 4k series and would be better than ASA 5500-x series (but regarding all problems with upgrades and EoL , it is not).

I was a big fan of Cisco ASA products, but when I saw all of the security feature differences between both firewalls, I moved to Sophos devices. Its sandbox, IPS, and many more features are really advanced. Cisco does not provide features like this.

Incentivized

• Simplifying our lives by reducing our time spent in a console
• Being comfortable knowing the full might of Cisco is safeguarding your network
• A good excuse to bump up the IT budget in the next fiscal year!

Incentivized

• True UTM device.
• Very Active customer help for any help.
• Easy license and cost effective.
• Should [do] more work on logging and reporting.