Cisco Catalyst Switches Review
Updated July 24, 2025
Cisco Catalyst Switches Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Cisco Catalyst 9300 Series Switches
Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Catalyst Switches
Our university has over a hundred buildings and each building has multiple closets. So we deploy 9,300 switches in switch stacks in all of those closets. There's several thousand switches and we use them to provide power ethernet for wifi and office jacks for faculty, staff, and dorm rooms.
Pros
- It scales really well. We have a huge footprint, so that's probably the best thing it does is just the scaling and its stackability. I can provide any number of ports that people need, mostly for wifi points at point.
Cons
- Probably just an easier way to upgrade the operating system. It's like when you have to patch your phone and it says it's time for an upgrade. It's like when it's time for an upgrade for 7,000 switches, it's like takes a little bit of effort to get all that.
- It's been good. It's definitely helped us administer a huge footprint and a fairly reasonable cost for what we're trying to accomplish.
- Cisco Secure Endpoint
We use Cisco Fire Powers as our VPN concentrators. We also use the Cisco secure client as our VPN solution. Just making sure everything plays nice. We can't afford a dev environment that is the same as our production environment because who can? It's like, oh, let's just have two whole networks. Just trying to dev everything out beforehand and make sure it's going to play nice with each other is kind of a challenge sometimes.
They've helped us quite a bit, I think.
Just flexibility. I think the university environment is pretty important.
Pretty much, we use Cisco switches, so we haven't really tested out anybody else. We do have some other routers from Juniper and stuff like that. The Juniper routers work pretty well. We do prefer the Cisco firewalls over the Juniper firewalls at this point.
Do you think Cisco Catalyst Switches delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Cisco Catalyst Switches's feature set?
Yes
Did Cisco Catalyst Switches live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Cisco Catalyst Switches go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Cisco Catalyst Switches again?
Yes
Cisco Hybrid Work
- Working from anywhere (e.g., coffee shop, airport)
We are currently in the mid-implementation phase of our hybrid work solution. We've completed the initial planning and infrastructure setup, including assessing roles for hybrid eligibility, upgrading collaboration tools, and ensuring IT support for remote access and security. We’ve also rolled out a pilot program with a few departments to test and refine our hybrid model.
Insights so far:
Clear, consistent messaging about expectations, schedules, and performance measurement has made the biggest difference in user adoption and engagement.
Insights so far:
Clear, consistent messaging about expectations, schedules, and performance measurement has made the biggest difference in user adoption and engagement.
We’ve chosen Cisco as a core component of our hybrid work strategy, primarily using Webex, Cisco Meraki, and Cisco Secure solutions. Cisco provided the most cohesive, secure, and scalable solution for our hybrid work needs. While other platforms offered strong features, Cisco’s integrated approach gave us the operational control and user experience we needed to make hybrid work sustainable and secure.
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