Item: Cisco AnyConnect
Rating: 8
Author: Justin Hannan

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco AnyConnect

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco AnyConnect is being used across all of our staff within the organisation to enable our user devices to securely connect to our on-premise data centre services. This was a key part of our migration to a recent user focused project of improving collaboration and productivity for staff, in combination with a M365 migration.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Robust and stable connectivity
Low administration overheads
Enables flexible solution design
Pretty invisible to users
Good integrations with other Cisco products

Cons

Improve the speed and submission of client diagnostics collection
Easier to manage client updates
Less intrusive end user client update (restart required or service restart)

Return on Investment

Increase of user productivity (estimated saving of 900 working days per year)
Reduced incidents raised to the Service Desk by approx. 50% compared with older versions and different approach
Increased happiness of users (captured post-migration project)

Usability

From an expert admin user perspective the overall usability is pretty good. Obviously an understanding of networking and VPN concepts are required but this would be standard requirement for any solution of this nature. Both the hardware and software that makes up this solution are of high quality which leads to confidence in its usability as an enterprise class solution.

Whilst we want the solution to be invisible as possible to end users, it does meet those minimal needs such as talking users through troubleshooting connectivity issues etc.

Security

The quality of security is key to us and one of the reasons we chose this solution being an organisation that must meet regulated and stringent security standard and controls. Cisco AnyConnect enables us to meet all the needs of our ISO27001 controls, to apply our design for balancing user experience with high levels of security and additionally integrating National Cyber Security Centre (UK) guidelines in end user device security.

Support Rating

Our experience of support from Cisco AnyConnect (and other solutions we use) has always been above average. We find the agents that are handling the technical issues are knowledgeable and good at communicating which in turn gives us the confidence we're in a safe pair of hands. As a manager, I'm yet to receive any escalation for my team in support requests logged, which is always one of my measures on how good customer support is.

Alternatives Considered

Zscaler Private Access and WatchGuard Network Security

We have reviewed other traditional VPN solutions and more modern Zero Trust technologies, so it can be a little comparing apples vs oranges. But Cisco AnyConnect stacked up very well against other options for us. Primarily this was already a known technology solution for the team, so there was a minimal skills gaps for onboarding the newest version and slightly different ways of applying the right solution for us. We wanted to leverage our existing investment and minimise risks of introducing something new into an already high pressured delivery for a major project.

Additionally we have integrated the Cisco Umbrella solution, which helps us shift more to cloud delivered services and with the integration of these two solutions it gives a more efficient management of both.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco AnyConnect delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco AnyConnect's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco AnyConnect live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco AnyConnect go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco AnyConnect again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

We have used Cisco AnyConnect for both a dedicated and split-tunnel VPN approach, which recent key technology in refreshing all of our user devices and migration to M365 from on-premise services. The capabilities for the software enabled us to improve the user experience for connecting from a manual + physical multi-factor fob (can take minutes to connect) to an automated split tunnel VPN as out traffic patterns change from just on-prem to on-prem + internet with an automated connection (trusted device as the factor) and removal of physical fobs. This fundamental change, delighted our users to remove repetitive steps to them being to be productive.

Comments

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Secure and seamless user connectivity to organisational crown jewels