Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Any scenario where a dedicated firewall administrator is on staff and a secure firewall solution that requires high availability is needed will be a good solution for the McAfee Firewall Enterprise product. The McAfee Firewall Enterprise however comes with some of its own parlance that is different from other vendors and does require some comfort on the administrators side when it comes to working in the command line. Added knowledge of protocols and how they interact is a must for any firewall admin but particularly for the McAfee Firewall Enterprise product due to its flexible nature. If the environment is to be mostly hands off where a very limited rule set is to be configured and not likely to change often, I would defer to a different product
Read full review Pros For us, to power the whole system does scaling quite a bit. So we can definitely have a lot of room to grow if needed. The device can support a lot of way more than we need right now, but in the future, if we need more it seems to be a big pro of that. Also the support of Cisco, knowing that it's backed by Cisco definitely is good. You guys are the largest players in the market Read full review Based on the SecureComputing Sidewinder firewalls, the McAfee Firewall Enterprise does similar backend containerization of each service which provides for added security in the unlikely event of failures or breeches. Tie in reporting services (if used by the admin) provide very granular details on rules accessed and the firewalls response to the requests. Configurable options are plentiful. Unbound DNS can be configured on each "burb" (SecureComputing/McAfee parlance for interface), similar options for sendmail while rulesets can be configured at the application level down to simple IP-filter making options for enhancing security as well as troubleshooting equally as useful. Full control over shell for scripting and/or scheduling (cron) purposes. Solid HA and patching architecture. Support was always helpful, knowledgeable and insightful (especially the staff that migrated from SecureComputing). Read full review Cons Cisco patches bugs quickly but patches are slow to install and reboot Smart licensing is getting better but still can be troublesome Some weird visual interface glitches that require clicking the same options a few extra times Read full review For an application-layer firewall the applications supported (at the time I managed them) were too few and would need to be expanded and the application ruleset needed to be expanded as well. The remote access VPN client configuration was overly complex for the average user and would need to be supplemented with a configuration file that had already been generated. Other solutions from CheckPoint or Cisco ASA are not as complex for end user remote access. Enhancing the GUI with a builtin "packet capture" feature would be useful for administrators not familiar with tcpdump. Read full review Alternatives Considered Compared to other firewalls I've managed (Palo Alto, Cisco ASA & CheckPoint) I would say that McAfee Firewall Enterprise was probably at the time not the leader in its field however it is a product that proved its reliability and flexibility over the other vendors. The addition of many new features usually comes as a detriment to some other area (restricted CLI, decreased logging etc.). In my experience this product gave the flexibility and options that the organization needed.
Read full review Return on Investment It's keeping threats out like a firewall should. Definitely cost wise it is at a higher cost center than other alternatives. Especially when it comes to licensing. Cisco is generally the higher, for perhaps, definitely for good reason, right? I mean, definitely positive impact as far as working as it should that's at cost. Read full review In its highly available configuration the impact on any business objective has been positive given the fact that any downtime of the firewall would negatively impact all business objectives. Read full review ScreenShots