Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) vs. OpsCompass

Cisco ISE integrates will with a Cisco solution such as firewalls, network switches and routers. It does an incredible job of granting access based on the role that an individual or groups have, and the ability to remove access to that individual or group is also east. In our environment ISE is used to authenticate external users that have access by vpn, and also to manage access to the large network infrastructure

Incentivized

We previously had separate products to manage Azure and AWS, each with different capabilities, and it was very complex for our team to go back and forth and try to make sense of each environment. OpsCompass is very well suited to give you a single view of our entire cloud environment. OpsCompass also brings excellent compliance policies. We were not highly skilled with these policies, but the product made it easy to perform an assessment of our current state and identify areas where we had non-compliance issues. CIS policies were a great area to start and we later tried the Microsoft 365 policies, which were also helpful. More policies would be great to see.

• The most beneficial thing that I love about it, there are tons of things that I love about ISE and that it does well, but the most fascinating that I feel about is its integration with DNA center or Catalyst Center using PX Grid as the protocol wherein ISE acts as a policy server for the entire campus hand in hand with Catalyst Center to make sure that the policy policy follows the user and also in the background hand in hand with DNA Center or Catalyst Center makes sure microsegmentation is implemented so that east west traffic is blocked and takes care of the campus.

Incentivized

• Quick inventory of all my cloud resources
• Detects changes to my cloud resources--including the source of the changes (user or system)
• Cost impacts of changes to my cloud infrastructure

• Trustsec needs more documentation and configuration best practice examples
• The licensing model can be difficult to explain and understand for customers
• Difficult to get an accurate benchmark to know exactly how many Cisco Identity Services Engine nodes and the size of the deployment should be

Incentivized

• I would like to see more integrations to help surface alerts. Slack would be great, as an example.
• An imbedded tour or onboarding would help our new users, but overall, the product is pretty easy to figure out

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

yes it does. depending on where you coming from. Logs are pretty busy same as report. it also depending on devices count and design.

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

Training can only cover certain areas, there are a lot of areas training just can't cover. You have to learn by doing it.

Incentivized

I think our system integrators lacks some competencies and this has led to an implementation that is still perfectible. (i.e. dedicating an interface for intra-cluster communication)

Incentivized

I think all give some visibility of device monitoring and management, but Cisco Identity Services Engine gives a good way to manage more details about the device in a centralized way that gives a wider range of monitoring and control than the other softwares individually. I don't think Cisco Identity Services Engine eliminates the need for these other software as of now, but there is potential for Cisco Identity Services Engine to be able to take over more of these roles.

Incentivized

In this price range, we didn't find any other tools that provide this degree of cloud resource visibility. It's been an efficiency game-changer. I hope we'll see new modules as they expand their features to include active resource management policies. They've done such a good job of anticipating the needs of our CloudOps team, I plan to evaluate those new features (if/when they arrive).

Cisco ISE was competitively priced and Cisco was able to leverage some of our existing contracts to help ease the purchase.

Incentivized

It's fully customised and comprehensive. only thing is you need to know what you want. Proper research and planning would save lots of time and effort .

Incentivized

• I don't know about negatives because we haven't seen it right now, but positive impact is one is the roadmap we have. And now since we are going ahead with doing the deployment of Cisco ISE, we see that we are getting closure to, so at the end of the day, we have to make sure that operationally we stay excellent. So that's where operational excellence comes in. Cisco ISE is basically addressing that for us. Right now we are in a situation if there is a WIFI issue or if there is an authentication issue, it gets really difficult to isolate the problem. But with Cisco ISE , this functionality is going to come in. So we believe that it would be a good ROI.

Incentivized

• Our team was able to do roughly 30% more with the product. The automation helps us spot issues without a lot of manual work
• We identified changes that would have had a massive cost impact--spinning up or forgetting about infrastructure we didn't need.
• OpsCompass prevents configuration drift and maintains a healthy state across multi-clouds.