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Cisco ASA Review.
Updated August 05, 2022

Cisco ASA Review.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software

We have used ASA to interconnect branch offices and also as a gateway. It's been a good product over the past years. Nowadays a lot of firewalls have overtaken the product. Especially in terms of user-friendliness. Also, the performance of the product should be improved compared to the other firewalls out there in the market.
  • Vpn
  • Natting
  • Av scan.
  • Web filtering.
  • Definitely when troubleshooting. It should be made simpler.
  • AV scan engines should be improved.
  • Configuration can be made simpler.eg: Fortigate.
  • It's too costly.
  • An annual subscription is also a pain. Every time we go to the management there is a struggle for approval. This should be at least fixed for a 3-year period. (Not by requesting to pay I'm advance).
This was selected due to our organization standard and our branch office is using ASA. Integration with the same product is really a good option with ASA.

Do you think Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software's feature set?

No

Did Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software again?

No

It's well suited for the rigid environment. In remote site locations where there is difficulty in accessing it's not a good idea as it's difficult for an end-user to provide remote access to the device. I understand it could be a security issue. But there are other means it can be secured. 2FA should be integrated.

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software Feature Ratings

Firewall
6.8
Identification Technologies
7
Visualization Tools
3
Content Inspection
4
Policy-based Controls
10
Active Directory and LDAP
1
Firewall Management Console
9
Reporting and Logging
10
VPN
10
High Availability
10
Stateful Inspection
4

Resilience and Reliability

Clearly, resilience differs from security. Resilience is about knowing something is going to come. That is the new paradigm in the security world, compared to the past which was about defending and making ure nothing happens. Over time, it became clear that watertight prevention is no longer a realistic goal. Scaled detection and measured response are. Hence resilience is one of the most important factor which needs to be considered on a cyber secuirty product.
The answer to this is defenelty AI has to play a bog role in this. If we need to achive a shorter resilience time then AI should play a major role.
To be honest there has been now great products out in the market compared to Cisco ASA. I beleieve Cisco has to do a lot of improvement in this area. The other defeiniete factors is the cost when it comes to renewals which is always a premium on Cisco products.
It was quite a good one, how ever requires an expertise to deploy hence the SMB segment would be finding it difficult to implement this product. The one good reason is that there are lot of ASA certified engineers in compared to the other certified engineers. Hence this resembles positively on the deployment as you have quite a lot of experienced engineer on your deployment.
The software has a lot of boot time compared to the other OS which is one of the biggest problem I have faced on the unplanned outages. In terms of availability I would recommend Cisco to work hard on improving this feature as you could see products like Juniper / Fortgiate they have this available with a single click of a button. In cisco quite a few engineered work is required to achive this. But once this is achieved, this is very reliable.
Intergration has never been Cisco's forte even though they claim they have a lot of open source protocols. As a network vendor Cisco has to focus more on contributing to the open source protocols. An EG in the routring protocols Cisco has OSPF as an open source however, EIGRP has been the best compared to OSPF. So we might end up with a full Cisco equipment which I believe is not right, rather Cisco should have invested in developing the OSPF.
  • VPN
  • IPS
  • Support