Cisco ASA In a Nutshell
January 15, 2020

Cisco ASA In a Nutshell

Steve Davis | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco ASA

Cisco ASA was used at the organization I was employed in. Also, I deployed it to several companies as a VAR. Cisco ASA was deployed as a standalone product, as well as in an HA environment for reliability. Cisco ASA was used as an edge firewall for organizations in all environments; it was deployed.
  • Cisco ASA has a variety of features including NextGen to protect corporate networks.
  • Cisco ASA is easy to deploy and manage.
  • Multi-WAN routing could use improvement. Currently, Cisco routers are needed in front of the ASA to accommodate.
  • NextGen features such as FirePOWER can be difficult to deploy.
  • Hardware is reliable as with most Cisco products. Expect a good life cycle on the product.
  • Edge firewall security is essential to invest in — better protection of your internal network with a Cisco ASA than with some competitors.
Cisco ASA seems to be more reliable to me. However, Watchguard has multi-wan routing built-in natively to the appliance. Outside of the multi-wan functionality; however, I find the Cisco ASA to be more reliable and dependable. The Cisco ASA is more focused on security, whereas the WatchGuard focuses on being an all-in-one appliance.
Cisco ASA does a great job. The only tricky aspect of being an experienced engineer is having to sit through Tier1 support. Most of the questions and steps they request have already been done if you know what you are doing. An experienced engineer will benefit from getting past tier 1 (this is true of all support staff typically). A customer that is supporting their own device, or less experienced engineer, is well suited to have Cisco ASA as a resource from tier1 and up.

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 ASA is well suited in most environments. They have a model that is sized for all situations from a small, medium, or large corporations, to datacenters. For smaller businesses on a budget, it may not be the first pick due to cost. However, it is an excellent investment to make if you can.

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software Feature Ratings

Identification Technologies
8
Visualization Tools
9
Content Inspection
8
Policy-based Controls
9
Active Directory and LDAP
9
Firewall Management Console
8
Reporting and Logging
9
VPN
10
High Availability
10
Stateful Inspection
9
Proxy Server
10