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

Likelihood to Recommend

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

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Anjali Nair

project lead

DashClicksInformation Technology & Services, 51-200 employees

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The ability to decrypt traffic is exceptional and has been useful many times in our organization. The analytic capabilities provide significant insight into internet behavior. We do not utilize it as the primary firewall, because it is not quite as robust as our core firewall vendor.

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Ronald Barrett

Director of Information Technology

City of Marietta, GAGovernment Administration, 501-1000 employees

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Feature Rating Comparison

Cisco Secure Firewall

Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series

Identification Technologies

Visualization Tools

Content Inspection

Policy-based Controls

Active Directory and LDAP

Firewall Management Console

Reporting and Logging

VPN

High Availability

Stateful Inspection

Proxy Server

Pros

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

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Verified User

Engineer in Information Technology

Education Management Company, 201-500 employees

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Securing public cloud on same level as an on-premise environment.
Ease of migration and management, similar to physical infrastructure.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Real Estate Company, 10,001+ employees

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Cons

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.

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Kuntal Das

Graduate Research Assistant

University of Colorado DenverHigher Education, 5001-10,000 employees

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I feel like there is not enough of a support community, similar to checkpoint.
VPN client is not as user-friendly as Anyconnect.
No root access to device.

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Logistics and Supply Chain Company, 1001-5000 employees

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Usability

Cisco Secure Firewall 8.0

Based on 1 answer

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

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Kenneth Ma

AVP Network Security Team Lead

East West BankFinancial Services, 1001-5000 employees

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No score

No answers yet

No answers on this topic

Support Rating

Cisco Secure Firewall 7.9

Based on 6 answers

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.

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Kuntal Das

Graduate Research Assistant

University of Colorado DenverHigher Education, 5001-10,000 employees

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Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series 10.0

Based on 2 answers

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

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Verified User

Professional in Information Technology

Real Estate Company, 10,001+ employees

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Alternatives Considered

Cisco Firepower is a costlier solution but you get what you pay for, with the added costs Cisco provides a full feature solution to be configured in any scenario. The setup can be complex but sometimes this is needed for challenging setups. This is the full featured standard for enterprise security solutions.

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Victor Lau

Network Architect

BSSTelecommunications, 10,001+ employees

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We did a shootout between the SonicWall / Fortinet / Barracuda / Cisco ASA + Firepower / Palo Alto, both hardware and (when applicable) VM appliances.The Barracuda / Sonicwall / Fortinet technology is interesting, but nowhere near as robust as the PA technology. Using the money we saved by switching to Palo Alto instead of Cisco, we purchased a small island in the Caribbean.

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Bear Golightly

IT Operations Manager / IT Service Manager

Nashville WrapsWholesale, 51-200 employees

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Return on Investment

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

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Tom Erdman

Network Systems Administrator

Johnson County LibraryLibraries, 201-500 employees

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It has help us determine the necessary spend for internet bandwidth
Has helped us easily monitor policy compliance
Provided tools that increase understanding of security for non-IT staff

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Ronald Barrett

Director of Information Technology

City of Marietta, GAGovernment Administration, 501-1000 employees

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Pricing Details

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

General

Free Trial

—

Free/Freemium Version

—

Premium Consulting/Integration Services

—

Entry-level set up fee?

No

Rating Summary

Cisco Secure Firewall

Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series

Cisco Secure Firewall

Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series

Cisco Secure Firewall

Virtualized Next-Generation Firewalls - VM Series