Item: Cisco Firepower 4100 Series
Rating: 10
Author: José Antonio Padilla

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Firepower 4100 Series

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Cisco Firepower 4100 Series as the perimetral device for outside connections to the internal network, such as VPN for remote access, VPN L2L, NAT translation for published services and to have full control of who can access the network and what they can do. It is also used as a backup route to the internet.

Pros and Cons

Pros

VPN Site to Site
High Availability / Failover
Ldap mapping to vpn connections

Cons

Too much time to deploy changes
When there are a lot of entries in the ldap mapping the device runs slow
You can not make config changes via CLI, only via GUI

Return on Investment

Quickly respond to incidents using vpn remote access
VPN L2L used to establish connections with global providers
Up to 2000+ vpn access without having performance issues
Granular access with policy groups based on the AD user

Usability

In general, the Cisco Firepower 4100 Series works well, great performance, support a high volume of traffic, configuration, users, the device is powerful and once you have something configured you can be sure that it will rarely fail but for day to day troubleshooting or modifications needed can be a little complicated due to you have to deploy every change you make in the device and is not as fast as other devices, in general a deploy takes 5 minutes.

Alternatives Considered

Juniper SRX, Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls - PA Series, CheckPoint and Cisco ASA 5500-X with FirePOWER Services

We previously use Cisco ASA 5500 series but due to those devices are a little old, we changed to Cisco Firepower 4100 Series as more recent product from Cisco. One of the reasons to select Cisco Firepower 4100 Series was the configuration migration availability from ASA to Cisco Firepower 4100 Series, making the change a little transparent and not much additional config needed. Once the migration was completed we had the services like VPN RA, VPN L2L, NAT publications working fine and without any problem.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco Firepower 4100 Series delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Firepower 4100 Series's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Firepower 4100 Series live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Firepower 4100 Series go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Firepower 4100 Series again?

Other Software Used

Cisco 5520 Wireless Controller, Microsoft 365, Microsoft Azure

Likelihood to Recommend

Cisco Firepower 4100 Series fits well for scenarios where not much changes are needed, once the service is UP the device works very well, but sometimes for troubleshooting is complicated because for every change you make you have to make a deploy and every deploy take almost 5 minutes, si for a real failure it can be difficult to be waiting so long during troubleshooting.

Cisco Firepower 4100 Series Feature Ratings

Comments

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Great performance and secure connections with Cisco Firepower 4100 Series

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