Cisco Secure Firewall vs Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series

If you are already using [a] Cisco product like the Cisco ASA Series and you need more security on layer 7 then you can upgrade with firepower. This is well suited for middle and big organizations. If your company deals with credit card information then you should buy this firewall. It provides you all the features to stop any type of advanced attack on your organization

PaloAlto VM-200 is a virtualized firewall with high processing power and network edge protection. The great advantage is being able to implement in a VMware environment without worrying about hardware, rack space, physical network connections and others. It can be easily managed via the web and remotely to create protection, access and reporting rules. The VM-200 firewall can be used by any company, small or large because it has several models available according to the real needs of each one.

• Updates with the HA Pair are incredibly easy and automated
• FMC with Firepowers provide a single place to view information about devices and connections
• Tedious policy changes can be staged during the working hours and then deployed in one click after hours

• Decrypt internet traffic
• daily reporting of top internet users
• classify internet traffic in real-time to allow us to understand the organization needs.
• Strong AI capabilities

• 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.

• High Availability can be improved to allow active-active deployment
• All command line documentation to provide and support automation
• It will be nice to have link aggregation just like in the hardware firewall models.

It's overall very great, however the Management Console needs updating to fix the slowness of policy and rule deployments.

Cisco support is not at all suitable for this product, at least. It takes a long for them to help us with our server issues. A lot of the time, the customer support person keeps on redirecting calls to another person. They need to be well versed with the terminologies of the product they are supporting us with. Support needs a lot of improvement. Cisco Fire Linux OS, the operating system behind Cisco Firepower NGFW (formerly Sourcefire), also doesn't receive regular patches. In short, average customer service.

Palo Alto VM series are best selling and industry's top-selling security product which customers prefer while securing their public cloud environment

Cisco Firepower firewalls have all the features expected of an NGFW. Managed with a Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, most of the learning curve is just knowing where in the menus to go to do what you want. All brands of firewalls work as expected, and learning each GUI is the trick. The GUI for Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is simple. Though when devices are registered to Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, there are no options to make changes locally and sync them back to the management center. That does limit accessing a remote site that might go down.

The Palo Alto seemed like a more mature product, with better online documentation and support. Based on previous support cases with both companies, we felt that we could get support from Palo Alto much quicker than with Fortinet when we badly needed it. Palo Alto was also easier for our existing engineers to get to grips with, since they had prior experience

• This product is great for inspection and normal firewall controls.
• If there's a bug in it, it can take a lot of resource time to chase it and work around it.
• Deciphering which data is useful has taken a bit of time and trimming.

• ROI has been achieved quickly through lack of security incidents.
• Inline filtering happens at line rate, unline Sourcefire from Cisco.
• Great incentives from PAN to switch made a difference in the choice to change.