Item: Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software
Rating: 6
Author: Fraser Clark

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use a pair of Cisco ASAs in an active/standy pair as our internal firewalls. To segment traffic between VLANs. It is used across the entire organisation. The main concern it addresses is of course security and only allowing users to get to resources that they are allowed to go to and have a reason for going to.

Pros and Cons

HA Failover - very fast and no downtime.
Documentation.

GUI - Dated and requires specific java versions to run.
Missing out on layer 7 inspection.

Return on Investment

Greater increase in security.
Granular control of traffic.

Support Rating

The support is usually very good and gets back to you very quickly. However I had some instances of when two engineers will give me wildly different answers to what I thought was a simple question. Overall however I do rate the support highly and they are generally always very good.

Key Insights

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?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

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

Yes

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

Yes

Other Software Used

Splunk Enterprise, AWS Config, OpsGenie

Likelihood to Recommend

If inter-VLAN routing and VLAN segmentation is all that is needed for a business then Cisco ASA does this job very well.
For more complex needs such as layer 7 packet inspection I would recommend a different product such as a Palo-Alto or Fortinet device.

Cisco ASA - Well suited to a Cisco-heavy environment

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco ASA