Cisco Secure Firewall delivers comprehensive threat protection for modern, distributed networks. Built to support hybrid workforces and multicloud environments, it enables Zero Trust access, application visibility, and secure remote connectivity. With integration across the Cisco Secure portfolio, including SecureX and Talos threat intelligence, the firewall powers organizations to detect and stop more sophisticated threats. Centralized management simplifies policy enforcement, orchestration,…
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FireMon
Score 7.9 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
FireMon is a real-time security policy management solution built for today’s complex multi-vendor, enterprise environments. Supporting the latest firewall and policy enforcement technologies spanning on-premises networks to the cloud, FireMon delivers visibility and control across the entire IT landscape to automate policy changes, meet compliance standards, to minimize policy-related risk. Since creating their policy management solution in 2004, FireMon states they've helped…
I would say both are great piece of hardware and I'm not selecting one over another, as I have used both for different purposes and would like to do same for my clients.
Cisco provides a far superior product based on our evaluations. Along with the integrations of or other Cisco products that are not available from other vendors
Fortinet is a great competitor but it has had a lot of vulnerabilities and fair share of issues. We chose Cisco Secure Firewall solely because we are a CIsco environment that uses a lot of the Cisco products. We use the Catalyst switches, the Meraki switches and access points …
Cisco Secure Firewall is worth all the money spent. it allows you to create and manage your configuration in a very easy way, furthermore, with the analytics you can see what is happening in your network in real time, and this is very important with all the threats nowadays. …
Fortinet and Palo both offer strong firewall capabilites but integrating them with the rest of our Cisco infra required additionnal efforts and multiple management consoles (so less visibility). With Cisco Secure Firewall, everyting operates in a complementary and unified way …
I have used from other vendors like Palo Alto, Fortinet, Ubiquiti. This product is the whole thing. I mean, when you're buying a product from Cisco, you're buying a support function, you buy a whole case for products. And with all that other products Cisco have, like the SNR, …
Software Stability: While the hardware is legendary for its reliability (low RMA rates), the software (FTD) has historically been prone to bugs during major version jumps.
I was not involved on the decision but having multiple brands in the company make sense to use a tool such as Firemon because it integrates easily with multiple vendors.
The Dell product ran on its own hardware, which failed often. The reports were not available to us in real-time, we had to request them. Many false detections of issues.
Both perform admirably with regards to providing that single pane of glass and visibility in a normalized view. They both provide great insight into where your organization stands in terms of compliance controls. In terms of upgrading and scalability, I would have to give the …
I has worked with Algosec and while they are very similar product, I find the FireMon is easier to understand and get rolling with. While both require some learning, FireMon is by far the easier one. Once you have an understanding of how things are arranged and labeled you can …
FireMon has the most supported devices. The UI is easy to use and intuitive. There is a comprehensive list of built in compliance controls that are missing in the competition.
To be blunt, at the time of purchase most of these products appeared to do the same things in the same ways. What really brought us to the table with FireMon six years ago was their willingness to earn our business, and to this day they remain just as committed to keeping our …
They are two very well done tools, FireMon is better suited for firewall rules evaluation, configuration and review, Tenable.io is better suited for CIS benchmarking. We ended up using both of them in the end, it really depends of your needs and what you are looking for, the …
We performed a head-to-head PoC between FireMon and AlgoSec several years ago. Both platforms were well developed, but FireMon had the upper hand in three areas:
Its UI was more unified and intuitive across the different components and products
AlgoSec and Tufin both have initial issues during the POC stage, and FireMon even though with the changes they have made still works better and is more user friendly.
I can't think of scenarios where it is less appropriate, unless we are talking about real tiny businesses. More businesses will find Cisco Secure Firewall an outstanding tool to use, love, and trust from a reputable Network giant vendor. It is a must for businesses that want to focus on what they are doing, and leaving the network security for the pros.
FireMon is best used in a large environment (for example, I have >100 firewalls in my environment). It's best used when trying to improve security posture and showing changes in firewall security over time. It might not be the best choice for smaller environments or those that aren't concerned about security management.
Cisco's firewall actually does its job of blocking what it is supposed to block. We had an old Firewall that led to slippages. Cisco catches 97% of malware and vulnerabilities during testing. For Coitiar, that means an engineer who clicks a link with malware is handled quickly.
We actually tested if failovers would affect running sessions. We pulled our primary unit during a certification submission period. The firewall just switched, and the connection kept running.
The AI assistant in policy management is excellent, and for our lean team, it makes the whole process easy and efficient. I don't have to audit 200 policies manually; the AI steps in and does its thing.
PCI Reporting - After identifying which firewalls and rulesets are in scope, producing a report artifact to satisfy PCI requirements on Firewall reviews is literally a two-click operation.
Storing Rule Metadata - FireMon stores metadata (prefilled fields, standard fields, and custom fields) for each rule in each policy which is valuable for context during firewall reviews in particular
API - FireMon exposes most if not all of its functionality via REST API
I wish that the deployment of the updates to the sensors from the FMC was faster.
Cisco ASA firewall did a great job of authentication and authorization on the local firewall. FTD does not authorize users well in terms that an AAA must be setup to provide the granular tools that the ASA did.
Cisco's method of licensing the firewall can be improved. The FMC and the FTD are licensed through the Cisco software manager and there are instances where the devices are licensed but the firewall still displays and error due to licensing.
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.
Once all the customization has been completed, the business is starting to see the return on investment. The visibility it provides into the network gear that is owned by other IT groups is immeasurable and has allowed us to apply standards across the board. The only thing I have concern with is their support documentation.
i think overall after ALOT of tac cases it works allright now. But still have alot of issues if you use cloud based mangement. fx, if you open 2 windows of access policys, both of the pages, rules starte to jump form side to side. if you then open one more list, its start to jump even faster. if you close the 2 of them, its back to normal. ALSO the extended access lists for VPN, SUCKS. Its the tiniest window when opening the editor, and you are not able to give the rules names, Which means finding and editing rules SUCKS, its a horrible experience, and eveytime we have to we want to yell :P
FireMon has been relatively stable overall. However, there have been a handful of times where we had issues with the console. For example, we couldn't update which devices to include in a security assessment. The initial suggestion from support was to just reboot it. It seems like there weren't many other options available such as to restart services before going to the extreme of a complete reboot.
We have not had any performance issues with Cisco Secure Firewall, even with DPI and IPS enabled, we have not seen a performance hit. Emoployes have not complained about any slow network speeds that could have been attributed to the secure firewall it has always been something else within the office network.
I'm not sure we have the largest implementation of FireMon out there but we do have a few 1000 devices being probed by FireMon. Overall, the system's performance has been rock solid. The console refreshes quickly and reports are generated within an expected timeframe.
Our experience with Cisco TAC support for Cisco Secure Firewall has been very good. The support engineers are knowledgeable about the product and have many tools available to them to work "under the hood" of the firewalls or management center. When we've had equipment failures, the RMA process has been simple and straightforward.
FireMon technical support is awesome! They respond quickly to our requests and they are well trained and very knowledgeable about the tool. Some issues have to be referred to the development team, but technical support largely provides solutions for any issues that we may have.
was a good training but questions was answered not so good. Training was "Fundamentals of Cisco Firewall Threat Defense and Intrusion Prevention (SFWIPF)".
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.
Cisco Secure Firewall works better with the Cisco ecosystem when we can utilize it and feels beefy enough when we utilize it in the data center. The Fortinet we have found are great, small cost boxes for remote offices with a better UI then Cisco Secure Firewalls. The feature set included with the firewalls feels similar from a security point of view.
I has worked with AlgoSec and while they are very similar product, I find the FireMon is easier to understand and get rolling with. While both require some learning, FireMon is by far the easier one. Once you have an understanding of how things are arranged and labeled you can easily import firewalls and begin to work on them to improve them
Cisco Secure Firewall has never given us any trouble, it has stayed up at all times, upgrading the appliance has also become much simpler. We operate the appliance in a HA pair, so 0% downtime within our organisation. During switchover while upgrading, not a single packet seems to get lost, so this has been a very valuable asset to our company.
Firemon Is easily scalable and maintainable with any size team. Although it requires some tech debt, it is well worth the time to invest to ensure compliance is visible and reports are accurate. Although our environment is very large we do not fully utilize the scalability of the Firemon product.
Given we are an higher Ed. organization, our reselling leveraged that and got us a significant discount on the appliances. We have our licensing rolled into an EA. I would say we save over $100k in adoption costs, and at least that much per year on licensing.
We combine event data from our Cisco Secure Firewall Firepowers with ISE, Umbrella, Catalyst Center and other utilities to assist us with troubleshooting and security issues. The event logs are a bit difficult to use, and don't always provide us with useful information, but we do use the to correlate events across the tools.
It helps us save us time in determining what change was made and by whom.
Real time alerting is a great convenience in helping us know if something went wrong, we can immediately review the last report to determine what has changed.
Allows us to determine what rules are not used and if said rules are still required.
