Choosing Cisco ASA and ASAv for reliable, scalable, and secure VPN
Updated March 10, 2025
Choosing Cisco ASA and ASAv for reliable, scalable, and secure VPN
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
Our employee count was growing and we wanted to have a scalable, easy to administer and cost effective solution for a VPN concentrator. We wanted to support concurrent connections that was 2x our employee count. We chose Cisco's ASA as our VPN concentrator and that allowed us to scale with low administrative cost and a reasonable license/tooling cost. We also wanted to support 4 different entities, which ASA was able to help us achieve.
Pros
- ASA is our VPN concentrator. The client and server are very stable and very easy to use
- ASA also offers Intrusion Prevention, to an extent. This is also very useful for an improved security posture for a small company
- ASA allowed us to scale very quickly. We could onboard clients, partners, and consultants and give them a great onboarding experience as well
- Administrative costs with ASA are low. It's very easy to administer.
Cons
- For small companies that require DLP, ASA could add a basic DLP system
- ASA has an easy web administration screen. It's look-and-feel could be improved
- ASA could develop and/or promote agentless VPN access
- Positive: ASA and ASAv allowed us to transition from on-prem to the cloud very easily
- Negative: ASAv's logging is not great. I can't tell which user logged on with which device. To get better logging, we'll need to add identity services to the ASA
- Positive: Our cost of operation went down with the ASAv
- Positive: We added a lot more staff and they were all able to enjoy the benefits of VPN, especially now that telecommuting is common
The ASA led the pack for our use case since we were familiar with it and the ASA (and ASAv) was able to integrated with our environment very easily. We were also able to apply MFA to the ASA with very little effort, further improving our posture. In comparison, other tools were more expensive and required a lot more evaluation than we had time and excitement for. After doing a few demonstrations with competing products, we were able to determine that ASA was the right fit for us with the timelines and use cases we were dealing with.
Do you think Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software's feature set?
Yes
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?
Yes
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software Feature Ratings
Cisco Security
One of the largest threats to our business is the constant evolution of cyber attacks, which prompt us to evolve our security in anticipation or in response to the evolution of cyber attacks. We analyze risks to our business frequently. Security risks are evalauted as a part of our enterprise risk management strategy and aligns with what the company wants to achieve and what risks we are willing to take.
Cisco ASA helped us further secure our virtual private network connections relatively effortlessly. As team members frequently worked remotely and needed to connect to protected resources, Cisco ASA helped team members get access to the internal resources they needed, when they needed, and ensured security of such access. It was the ease of configuration and use that drew us to Cisco ASA.
Cisco ASA was easy to procure, easy to configure securely, and easy to use.
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) was easy for us to procure, configure, and use. It was also very scalable at an acceptable price. We utilized consultants to help us harden our installation and we could find many consultants easily that had Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) skillset. We evaluated competition; the competition offered many features, many of which we did not need. Comparatively, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) did VPN concentration really well, which is what we needed.
I anticipate that AI will greatly assist in decision support in cybersecurity. Machines may be able to correlate security events faster and more efficiently than humans. Summarized events can help humans use their experience and understanding to solve issues faster. We may be able to see AI autonomously resolve or isolate some suspcious activities without human intervention. There'll be a cost to pay as well when AI makes mistakes that humans find difficult to troubleshoot - if humans cannot understand how AI made the wrong decisions.
We do not use predictive threat detection and analysis.
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