Cisco Secure Firewall vs Stonesoft Firewall (Discontinued)

• 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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• Based on the SecureComputing Sidewinder firewalls, the McAfee Firewall Enterprise does similar backend containerization of each service which provides for added security in the unlikely event of failures or breeches.
• Tie in reporting services (if used by the admin) provide very granular details on rules accessed and the firewalls response to the requests.
• Configurable options are plentiful. Unbound DNS can be configured on each "burb" (SecureComputing/McAfee parlance for interface), similar options for sendmail while rulesets can be configured at the application level down to simple IP-filter making options for enhancing security as well as troubleshooting equally as useful.
• Full control over shell for scripting and/or scheduling (cron) purposes.
• Solid HA and patching architecture.
• Support was always helpful, knowledgeable and insightful (especially the staff that migrated from SecureComputing).

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• 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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• For an application-layer firewall the applications supported (at the time I managed them) were too few and would need to be expanded and the application ruleset needed to be expanded as well.
• The remote access VPN client configuration was overly complex for the average user and would need to be supplemented with a configuration file that had already been generated. Other solutions from CheckPoint or Cisco ASA are not as complex for end user remote access.
• Enhancing the GUI with a builtin "packet capture" feature would be useful for administrators not familiar with tcpdump.

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• 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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• In its highly available configuration the impact on any business objective has been positive given the fact that any downtime of the firewall would negatively impact all business objectives.

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