Cisco Secure Firewall delivers comprehensive threat protection for modern, distributed environments. It offers an architecture designed to support hybrid and multicloud strategies, enabling Zero Trust access, robust application visibility, and secure remote work. With integrations across the Cisco Secure portfolio and threat intelligence from Talos, Cisco Secure Firewall helps organizations stop more threats, respond faster, and reduce complexity through centralized management and automation.
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SonicWall TZ
Score 8.1 out of 10
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SonicWall TZ is an entry to mid-tier NGFW for small to mid-sized companies. It is a Unified Threat Management solution, with additional native decryption and deep-packet inspection capabilities.
Kind of going back to my previous point, segregating networks, it's super useful for that. It's easy to look through firewall logs and see what's going on in your network. Also like intrusion detection and prevention. So great security products for the network.
Based on my experience, this is a solid platform for a small to mid sized company, especially when there is someone who has IT experience, or can get outsourced IT help. I would not recommend for someone who is a technology novice. Also, this is a competent device for someone who is looking to add VPN services for remote workers.
I have one argument, failover scenario. It's not quite easy. Failover scenario of firewalls. It's sometimes not quite easy to know the issue. But if we open a tech case, a technical case to Cisco, Cisco will help us, it's a little bit con, but we are happy with this product.
There are Service Bundles in SonicWall TZ that are Unlicensed and do not know why they have not be Activated - would need help to further understand benefits
Do not know why Standard Support is Unlicensed
WiFi range of TZ270W is very limited - need to add Access Points or Extended to obtain adequate coverage
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.
Solution is highly effective, offers a lot of features with constant improvements and additions of new features over time. It's relatively easy to get familiar with the system, especially if transitioning from adaptive security appliances. If this is not the case, as for learnability there's a learning curve but once learned it is relatively easy to remember the details about the system even after a period of non-use
Overall the new interface is very logical and easy to navigate. We did struggle at first coming from the older interface and finding our way around the new. But our new users found it very simple to find what they were looking for. One negative we do all struggle with is packet cpature not always being clear how its set/what is being monitored. this could do with more information on teh intial page instead of having to look for it
We have had really good success with Cisco Secure Firewall when it comes to availability. Even when we’ve had temporary issues with one appliance or the other, or with the Firewall Management Center, it has stayed up and defended our network diligently. We even had an issue where the licensing got disabled for multiple days, and it kept spinning like a top
Firewall support is professional just like any other technology Cisco sells. From answering simple questions to bringing out outages affecting a large population of our workforce, Cisco support is always courteous, professional, and communicates with our team to keep our request on their radar. Some of the brightest people I've met are from Cisco support both in IQ and EQ which shows the talent Cisco is able to onboard to their team.
Once you get to a competent technician the support experience is better. But I have found that the lower tiers of support are very slow to respond (like 1 email per day) and you typically have to re-explain yourself a couple times before they get it. I have not used Phone support, and that may be a better experience.
was a good training but questions was answered not so good. Training was "Fundamentals of Cisco Firewall Threat Defense and Intrusion Prevention (SFWIPF)".
Our initial implementation was aided by Cisco's professional services and was excellent. The engineer was very knowledgeable and helped us work through issues while building out our new internet security edge Part of this involved tools to migrate the firewall configuration from old to new.
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.
SonicWall and WatchGuard are both fine appliances, but I am accustomed to the Barracuda NG. The Barracuda Control Center is so powerful and useful that it beats out the other two. SonicWall does a great job of dividing up firewall rules and NAT policies, but this is a preference among engineers.
I think it's all been positive, except for the fact, like I was mentioning before, when we had problems with the initial integration, we were trying to migrate over to the new FMC and from the 1500 to the 1600, we had some downtime during that time and we had to do some escalations within Cisco Tech. They were very helpful, but I think that was the biggest thing, and that's long since been resolved. So I don't really have any other thing, anything negative to say at this point. I think it's all positive.
