Likelihood to Recommend Cisco Secure IPS is required for every organization and it gives us all the advanced security features for more visibility and control on our incoming and outgoing network traffic. We can easy to configure and management is also very easy. You can deploy in the existing network very easily. The price is very low and performance is very high and it works very quickly on threats and takes the necessary action.
Read full review Solarwinds SEM is great for generating reports for investigation purposes. Once you set up the connectors you can walk away and the product runs without needing maintenance. It was however pretty difficult to create the reports and alerts when now starting out and it can be very intimidating for new users.
Read full review Pros The option to deploy it as a virtual machine in a UCS-E inside a Cisco Router is something to consider a lot. It simplifies a lot the deployment in places where you need to optimize resources and keep things simple. It also saves some money on unnecessary hardware. Having the most complete license, we can have in the same box IPS, inspection for malware and URL filtering. As Cisco uses Talos Intelligence network to mitigate and evaluate risks, having this complete set of security features turns the box into a powerful resource to protect our remote locations. Considering the hyper-connected business we have today, it's almost impossible to think that we can run a business without this kind of protection. The integration between Firepower NGIPS and other products, like Cisco ISE and Splunk, is also a key feature for this solution. In both cases, you can integrate the product to have the best of both. As a security appliance, it's very important for us to have all the logs centralized in Splunk and this is done simply connecting FMC (Firepower Management Console) to the Splunk collector. Read full review It does a great job of notifying us when accounts have been locked out. We can then find out the device on the network where the login attempt occurred. Searching for incidents is now a lot faster with the implementation of the HTML 5 interface. Read full review Cons Wish additional modules were included such as FireAmp. Wish it was easier to include customized signatures if needed. Required to know how to code with Snort in order to add real customization. Read full review All SolarWinds product suffer from slow response times in management portals. SolarWinds SEM is no exception. While it is much preferred over a "thick client" there is much room for improvement in speed. If you use the email alert features with SolarWinds make sure to prepare you staff and team for the large amount of emails they could receive. Make sure to reduce the number of alerts so your team does not ignore the alerts. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We are in the middle of outsourcing and may not be able to keep this product.
Read full review It is pretty likely that we will renew SEM when the time comes up. It is easy to use and maintain so there isn't much of a need to replace this product. It is also a pretty fair price for the capabilities provided by the SEM
Read full review Usability Very easy to navigate GUI in the FMC and very effective at performing the intending duties.
Read full review If you are familiar with SolarWinds then you can use this product it's as easy as that. If you have never used a SolarWinds product then it will take a minute to get how they do reports and make dashboards but that being said the tool is great and can make things very easy once you get a feel for how it works and get everything setup how you like it.
Read full review Support Rating We didn't have any major issues that let us need support. Only, for this reason, I think Cisco Firepower deserves the rating. Even for small issues, the partner that helped us during the project could solve it quickly. There are also tons of documents and other online resources to help maintain, administer and support the product.
Read full review The quality of support can vary depending on whom you end up speaking with. I was fortunate enough to work with a support representative who was very familiar with the product. He had even authored some of the support documentation on the website. On the flip side, I had two other experiences where I was simply directed to online training material.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Cisco Secure IPS is our first product. We were not using any other tools before. We are very happy with the Cisco Secure IPS features and customer support
Read full review Splunk was a pretty good product but the licensing structure needed a lot of work. They changed the structure three times that I am aware and I still had problems understanding LogRhythm had a lot of issues correlating users to IP addresses, the mappings were frequently wrong so this product could not be trusted in my environment as all our access logs are IP based and this needs to be matched to usernames from AD Fortianalzyer is a great product but it can only do logs from Fortigates so that was not helping for anything other than our firewalls.
Read full review Return on Investment Has made it much easier to determine when incidents have occurred Has been effective in reducing false positives and making solution management more efficient and cost effective Read full review For the price, it produced a decent value. It did a lot of the easy stuff well. I can't give any specific data given the objective of the product was to monitor very basic events in the environment. There are free options that can do a better job. Read full review ScreenShots SolarWinds Security Event Manager (SEM) Screenshots