Item: Cisco Firepower 1000 Series
Rating: 6
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I implemented Cisco Firepower 1000 Series firewalls on more than 10 clients all over France. It's used generally for small and medium businesses as an edge firewall for uses like internet surfing, routing, traffic filtering, VPN hub, etc. Generally, it's used by the whole organization if it's well sized for it.

Pros and Cons

Application filtering
IDS/IPS
Remote access VPN based on AnyConnect

Management console
Commit deployment success ratio
Hit count

Return on Investment

Remote working possible thanks to RA VPN
Site-to-site communication possible thanks to IPSEC VPN
Security enhanced thanks to Talos

Simplified Administration

FDM is a very simplified management solution but not complete, and FMC needs an additional machine to be installed, so any client could use FDM but they need to have a spare virtual machine. It's better to install FMC, but the weak point is that both FMC and FDM could bug on configuration deployments.

Performance

It's using Snort IPS, which is one of the best. Basically, they brought Snort from Sourcefire when Cisco bought the company but I think that they still have much work to improve it. Moreover I think they need to implement SSL decryption for better threat management.

Support Rating

Cisco support is acceptable, but we still need to ask case escalation to get real advanced technicians handling support. the positive point is that you can call Cisco support by phone immediately after opening a ticket and get real level 2-3 support. But sometimes you need to wait a lot on hold to get someone with a really advanced technical level.

Alternatives Considered

Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus, Fortinet FortiGate and SonicWall E10000 Series

Cisco Firepower 1000 Series is a challenger; it still needs improvement to become a leader like Checkpoint or Palo Alto. I installed Palo Alto firewalls, Checkopoint firewalls, and FortiGate, which are much more efficient for now than Cisco Firepower 1000 Series. I also had to work on legacy firewalls like Cisco ASA and SonicWall.

Firepower is an improvement of cisco ASA and stills better than meraki but some ASA functions like any-connect are still to improve

Other Software Used

Sophos Central Device Encryption (formerly SafeGuard), Cisco Umbrella, Cisco Secure Email (formerly Cisco Email Security)

Likelihood to Recommend

The Cisco Firepower 1000 Series is suited for small to medium businesses with basic security needs. It's less appropriate for bigger companies with advanced technologies and needs like multicast networking, SDWAN, etc. In fact, SDWAN is not yet possible to configure (in this case, you need Meraki as another Cisco product), and for multicast I recommend FortiGate.

Edge firewall with limited capacities

Software Version

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Firepower 1000 Series