Cisco Secure Firewall (formerly Cisco Firepower NGFW) is a firewall product that integrates with other Cisco security offerings. It provides Advanced Malware protection, including sandboxing environments and DDoS mitigation. Cisco also offers a Next Generation Intrusion Prevention System, which provides security across cloud environments using techniques like internal network segmentation. The firewall can be managed locally, remotely, and via the cloud. The product is scalable to the scope of…
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WatchGuard XTM - Discontinued Product
Score 8.3 out of 10
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WatchGuard XTM is a firewall option, from WatchGuard Technologies.
Sometimes it is really hard to handle. There are so many bugs especially when it comes to ACL or HA creation. Sometimes the Cisco Secure Firewall just needs a restart in order to work but that shouldn't be like that in our environment the Cisco Secure Firewall is the heart of the network and if the Cisco Secure Firewall is down the whole branch is down, for that we need a more reliable product.
WatchGuard XTM comes in different models, so you can choose the model best suited for your company size. I think it works well in small as well as very large networks. I have not used this feature, but you can create a "FireCluster" to connect member devices of the same model if you need to put multiple WatchGuard XTMs in your environment. Coming from command line, it took a little adjusting to learn which screen to use to set up the different rules. Once you understand how to set up policies, it is simple to create more. New firewall administrators would appreciate the ease of creating policies, and expert administrators should find everything they need plus extra features.
How the firewall works well is normally the firewall is protecting the secure network for the internal network to prevent the attack from external network. normally for the ISP customer, we usually filter the firewall polices only for the server farm, server farm because normally in ISP is the customer doesn't want to be filtered. So only for the server farm, they need the firewall for the enterprise like banking and for the DDoS attack, like the malware attack, something like that. And then sometimes it's some customer in ISPalso, they got the many DDoS attack and then they are using the public ip. When there are using the public ip, they need to protect their ip. So they need to use the firewall. So the firewall is essentially needed. many attackers and many, many things, terrible things have been to the network which has large impact..
The UI in Cisco Firepower formerly Sourcefire) is complicated and entirely redundant. A lot of these features are not useful, and therefore, it can be removed from the main window.
The interface is very slow, with each operation taking a lot of time. Searching through the logs takes too much time.
Support can be hard to work with. While they are typically knowledgeable, there can be a language barrier. Also, most troubleshooting seems intrusive which is a problem in a production environment.
The throughput of the cheaper models leaves something to be desired.
Have had some issues running VOIP behind these, but have not been able to narrow down the issues to the phone provider or WatchGuard yet.
It works really well. We can do most anything we want or need to with it, and you don’t have to have a doctorate or multiple certs to necessarily figure it out. The thing that would probably have to happen to make us switch would be if we just got priced out - Cisco’s more powerful and higher bandwidth models cost a pretty penny.
Solution is highly effective, offers a lot of features with constant improvements and additions of new features over time. It's relatively easy to get familiar with the system, especially if transitioning from adaptive security appliances. If this is not the case, as for learnability there's a learning curve but once learned it is relatively easy to remember the details about the system even after a period of non-use
We have had really good success with Cisco Secure Firewall when it comes to availability. Even when we’ve had temporary issues with one appliance or the other, or with the Firewall Management Center, it has stayed up and defended our network diligently. We even had an issue where the licensing got disabled for multiple days, and it kept spinning like a top
Customer service has been great. TAC has been mostly able to identify and fix problems that we may have and have been very responsive. If for some reason something isn't fixed right away, they have been adamant on staying with us and working the issues out before things get escalated up the chain.
In the beginning transition from Adaptive Security Appliance to Cisco Secure Firewall did not look like the best choice. Solution was new, there were a lot of bugs and unsupported features and the actual execution in the form of configuration via Firepower Management Center was extremely slow. Compare configuring a feature via CLI on ASA in a manner of seconds (copy/paste) to deployment via FMC to Secure Firewall which took approx. 10 mins (no exaggeration). Today, situation is a bit different, overall solution looks much more stable and faster then it was but there's still room for improvement.
We use the FMC as a virtual machine, it combines administration, monitoring and can be used perfectly for error analysis. There are restrictions due to administration without the FMC, so we decided on the FMC as the central administration.
Again, WatchGuard is priced much lower than other vendors in its space. It may not have some of the bigger features such as Layer 7 awareness. It's more simple to manage and provides IT staff the time to work on other tasks versus time spent to create complex rule sets.
