Item: Cisco Firepower 2100 Series
Rating: 5
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Firepower 2100 Series

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Cisco Firepower 2100 series - specifically Cisco Firepower 2130 in my organization is used as a main VPN concentrator. Main business problems the product addresses are connecting remote access users to our data center and out of band networks where services usually seat. The platform is suitable directly for deployments in bigger data centers or DMZs.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Advanced threat protection
Secure VPN connectivity
Visibility and control (if connected to FMC)
Regulatory compliacnce with ISO 27001, NIS2, etc.

Cons

performance and scalability
slow policy deployment times
not all configurations are supported via FMC - you have to use flexconfigs
when using flexconfigs, it is little bit confusing

Return on Investment

positive impact when used as replacement from old ASA firewalls, and migrated 200-300 vpn users with anyconnect image upgrade
negative impact because very early EoL so we need to consider replacement for another platform - it would be expencive
positive imact - reduced incident response time and security breaches - management is happy because of lower operational risk and cost of downtime.

Usability

There are three main problems with this platform:
- short EoL time - it is really missery because this platform was overrated from cisco sales and after shor time they accepted on EoL
- sometimes problems with upgrades paths, because of strange behaviour between FXOS and ASA image on the top of it
- not good performance when comparing to newer 1k platform

Alternatives Considered

Cisco Firepower 1000 Series, Cisco Firepower 4100 Series and Cisco ASA 5500-X with FirePOWER Services

In the days of purchase of Cisco Firepower 2100 series it was new platform and Cisco aimed their sailsmains to force selling this platfrom. It was one of the first platform with FXOS with full support of ASA images. It was cheper then 4k series and would be better than ASA 5500-x series (but regarding all problems with upgrades and EoL , it is not).

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco Firepower 2100 Series delivers good value for the price?

Are you happy with Cisco Firepower 2100 Series's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Firepower 2100 Series live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Cisco Firepower 2100 Series go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Firepower 2100 Series again?

Other Software Used

Cisco Firepower 1000 Series, Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series, Cisco Firepower 4100 Series

Likelihood to Recommend

The Firepower 2100 sersies are suited well if you need next generation firewall for very specific usage, with one or two "roles" - for example use it as VPN concentrator, or for network segmentation. But it is not that suitable in environment, where you need lots of new functions, because it is on its end of live way - and so you have to think about changing it soon.

Cisco Firepower 2100 Series Feature Ratings

Comments

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Firepower 2100 - slowly dying but still usable

Software Version