Likelihood to Recommend When it comes to security on the edge of your network (downstream) Cisco's IOS security features provide pretty much everything you need when it comes to securing your network, network devices, and access. I would absolutely recommend Cisco switches due to many reasons, but a big reason is security.
Read full review Intermapper is a light weight, quick and easy to use monitoring application. It will get you up and monitoring key infrastructure devices with a simple management interface and effective alert system that doesn't generate a lot of noise. It provides mobile device access through a web interface and is relatively inexpensive.
Read full review Pros Authentication. Access lists. Port security. Read full review The best thing about Intermapper is that it is map-based. You start by building your map, which is done completely automatically. I've used many different monitoring software packages, Solarwinds, Nagios, Opmanager, and it is a royal PITA to create live maps with those. Another great feature is that it shows you, visually, the bandwidth utilization of your network by using "ants" and color codes. Incredibly useful. Alarms are very easy to setup, again much easier than the packages mentioned above. Read full review Cons Cisco could provide an initial set up script for those are not used to the CLI (Command Line Interface). With that initial script, people could easily deploy the security features instead of having to learn how to use the commands. The web interface that Cisco provides with the routers, although it’s useful to set up the security features, it could also have some sort of tutorials to help people understand the main concepts of iOS security. You have to license iOS security separately from the main OS. For that reason, sometimes it tends to be a little expensive if you have a small business. Read full review Setting up probes in bulk can be difficult, so it can take a long time to get the system set up correctly to start. Sometimes the probes can be sensitive and report false positives. Interface can be a little clunky and non intuitive at times. Read full review Support Rating Cisco has the best Support team that gives us 24/7 support as we need. Cisco has huge detailed documentation for design, implementation, and troubleshooting all areas of the IOS security. There are many communities discussing all Cisco devices and solutions for studying groups and for customers to share their stories, technical problem and solutions.
Read full review The product works well and is very easy to maintain. As such, we haven't had many occasions to use support. When we have called them they were easy to contact and responsive to our questions. We have had the product for years and it may have been a year or better since the last time we contacted them.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I also like HP Procurve. It is my choice when the customer cannot afford Cisco. Cisco is better all round but HP is the only other [product] I will use if I have a choice.
Read full review Read full review Return on Investment Cisco iOS security helped our business deploy a relatively safe solution for a small amount of money. If you don’t have enough budget to invest in a robust and expensive firewall solution, you can safely use Cisco iOS security to protect your branch or remote office without compromise your network. Because Cisco iOS security uses a simple command-line based interface, you can deploy standardized scripts and keep the operational costs low. Read full review Downtime costs money. Every minute we can get ahead of an outage is time that a plant is not sitting there waiting. We don't need to wait for a call from a plant, we know they are down immediately and we can begin troubleshooting. Read full review ScreenShots