Industry Standard and for Good Reasons
January 10, 2020
Industry Standard and for Good Reasons
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco ASA
Our Cisco ASA's are the firewalls for our entire enterprise, so in a sense, they're used by the whole organization. However, only IT manages and monitors them, so it would also be fair to say it's used by one department in that sense. All businesses, no matter the size, need to have a firewall. Cyber attacks are a significant problem in the world, and a safe, secure, up-to-date firewall is a critical piece of securing a business's data.
- Security: The Cisco ASA does security well, with all the standard port blocking and filtering, as well as for analytics with the Firepower module.
- VPN: Cisco AnyConnect allows remote users an easy way to connect into the network securely. It also has site-to-site VPN capabilities that let us seamlessly link sites.
- Learning Curve: While there is ample documentation available, it takes a lot of time, training, and experience to understand and manage an Cisco ASA firewall.
- Cost: Cisco ASAs can get very expensive, most of that cost in support contracts rather than hardware. And since they don't support sales on the secondary market, there's little choice.
- I cannot gauge precisely how much it would cost us to recover from a successful cyberattack, be that ransomware or stealing sensitive data, but I am positive it would cost more than what we paid for the firewalls.
- The redundancy with high availability keeps our workforce productive, even if there's an issue. It also means IT can update the firewalls during the day without accruing overtime.
Cisco ASAs are a world apart from SonicWall's, and even more so pfSense. Sonicwall's are okay for SOHO purposes; they're not expensive, but they're not as robust either. They often choke bandwidth because of CPU limitations. pfSense is a Linux-based firewall, and it does the bare minimums. I'm not sure it's even worth comparing, but it has none of the tools to secure a network like robust reporting or VPN connections. I said this earlier, but I want to repeat it: there's a reason Cisco ASAs are an industry standard.
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