Cisco Firepower 4100 Series vs. Palo Alto Networks Advanced URL Filtering

When we are asked by local partners which security equipment we use we always recommend our Cisco security products. The Firepower firewall is no exception and we can easily recommend this to others who need a fast, secure, and well built system that integrates well with all your existing hardware and software.

Incentivized

Because of it's complexity, Palo may not be well suited for a small organization that may not have dedicated networking staff. But for a mid to large-sized enterprise, Palo shines.

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• VPN Site to Site
• High Availability / Failover
• Ldap mapping to vpn connections

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• Threat Detection and Prevention (Malwares, Un-Authorized Access)
• Out of the box patterns for threat detection
• Built in and Updated identification patterns
• Unified Dashboard/Alerting on anomaly

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• The failover process is clunky. When out Fortigate firewalls failed over, we lost 1 ping. When our Firepowers failover, whether it is on purpose or not, we experience a 2.5 minute complete outage.
• Cisco could stand to improve their support documentation. I have found it difficult to find good directions for configuring these, especially when it comes to NAT and IPSEC tunnels.

• Steep learning curve
• The top-down URL filtering match can sometimes be tricky and requires some expertise in setting up the desired policy

Incentivized

In general, the Cisco Firepower 4100 Series works well, great performance, support a high volume of traffic, configuration, users, the device is powerful and once you have something configured you can be sure that it will rarely fail but for day to day troubleshooting or modifications needed can be a little complicated due to you have to deploy every change you make in the device and is not as fast as other devices, in general a deploy takes 5 minutes.

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Palo support is excellent, and I have never had to wait when contacting them for support. One of the best support teams in the business, in my opinion.

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Cisco Firepower 4100 Series deployment is straightforward and easy to implement. It is also can support high availability and able to achieve redundancy. Besides, firmware upgrade is quite simple and the process does not take much effort as the upgrade will be automatically done by itself. Cisco Firepower 4100 Series is also very cost effective compared with other similar ranges of firewalls.

Palo Alto Networks Advanced URL Filtering is the best solution to work with Palo Alto Firewalls and Panorama as an orchestrator. We choose Palo Alto Networks Advanced URL Filtering as it could reach the success criteria during the PoC.

Incentivized

• Positive impact would be our increased security network wide.
• Another positive would be the increased processing power, saving us time and [from] needing more equipment.
• A negative impact would be the increased need for having to learn a new interface.

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• Palo has been an excellent investment for us.
• Having robust URL filtering built into the same device as the firewall saves the cost of a separate appliance and improves performance.

Incentivized