Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) vs. Cisco Umbrella Easy Protect for MSPs

Overall, management is not terrible if you have a stable network that is not overly complex. If you don't, this product will take considerable time to plan for an effective solution. I will say support is not very helpful, so if you need assistance after the initial sales rep assisted setup, good luck and be prepared to spend hours on the phone.

Incentivized

If you have a large number of clients that need to access different products within your company it is a good fit. If you just need to protect access within your company, you'd probably just want to look into Cisco Umbrella. The MSP product is specifically tapered to [manage] access from 3rd parties outside of the company.

Incentivized

• Manage high-privilege access to communications equipment. It allows to be granular in the permissions, to have it integrated with the LDAP users and, most importantly, to audit what tasks each user performed.
• Profile users and devices and assign privileges and access levels based on that combination. It greatly improves the user experience, since it does not depend on the network it is in, but on the access levels it has depending on the device. It also allows self-managed guest access with approval flow, which is essential for our business.
• It has also allowed us to automate actions based on findings from StealWatch, Umbrella, AMP, etc.

Incentivized

• I guess the user experience itself, it's sometimes a little bit slow, but this is also dependent on the platform and the scale of the deployment of course. But actually functionality-wise it's really, really good. But yeah, it could sometimes be a little quicker to react on the good front.

Incentivized

• Analyzing security logs can be challenging as the interface is rather slow and due to the large quantity of logged data.
• It is not always clear why a resource was blocked as there are 2 types of block lists
• Clients sometimes have to re-logon in order to get an updated policy rolled out.

Incentivized

We are so very reliant on Cisco Identity Services Engine at this point that finding another solution would be a big hassle for us.

Incentivized

For us the solution is very easily useable on its own. Perhaps that has to do because we started using ISE in the 1.2 days and have seen it grow during the years. Policy creation, etc. is all very visible and thus easy to use. Deployment of multiple nodes is also incredibly easy and flexible. You can easily add or remove nodes as you wish.

Incentivized

We do have to occasionally reboot the servers when they get low on memory, but we're also a few versions behind. Availability has generally been pretty good though with no major outages in the time that we've had it implemented.

Incentivized

ISE performance has never been an issue for us. The system doesn't tend to slow down at all.

Incentivized

Cisco support is second to none, both in terms of how you access support but also the knowledge of the individual support teams. If you focus on one technology and provide "manufacturer support" then you can rest assured that you are accessing Cisco's top individuals. I feel like this is a USP for Cisco support.

Incentivized

I did participate in the implementation of Cisco ISE and while there were times when it was confusing and we had a lot of trial and error, overall the experience was fine.

Incentivized

So the security team selected Forescout because of its inventory functionality. We have had to utilize Cisco ISE though to actually push the SGT Policies as well as the SGACL mappings and the SXP Propagation across the switch infrastructure. There is a lot more configuration that has to happen in Forescout in order for it to manage the switches.

Incentivized

Yes, we have the ability to scale ISE to however many nodes and clusters we want, but of course this takes time and money for licenses.

Incentivized

• Cisco ISE is fairly expensive, but I feel that the time it saves our team is well worth it.
• We have been able to roll this our to all of our teams, and they can each manage their own device and it is really convenient to have each team mange their own devices
• Once it is deployed and configured, it seems like there isn't much upkeep, so we don't have to hire someone to manage it we do it by committee.

Incentivized

• Not always clear which block list caused an access issue. [There are] several places that need to be checked.
• Client policies take a while to get updated, sometimes need to re-logon

Incentivized