Just an honest review of Cisco Routers

Cisco Routers are typically used as our edge devices between network segments. The routers typically perform basic routing with some traffic filtering ACLs. My knowledge of the entire organization is limited, however, I know I have seen Cisco Routers deployed all across the world in my organization's networks. The business problem addressed by Cisco Routers is simply high throughput, low latency, and reliability.

The biggest factor in the decision to purchase Cisco Routers was the uniformity of operating systems and how easy it was to deploy. Cisco, having a market-leading share of networking devices, means that the technical workforce also tends to be trained on Cisco products. This makes it easier to find engineers qualified to deploy these technologies. Cisco is also getting a lot better at making all of their products have a similar look and feel.

Our organization has not fully utilized all of the threat protection features from Cisco Routers. To date, most of the features used include basic ACLs and maybe some zone-based firewalls. We look to improve this by implementing security group tags which will better utilize some of the security features in Cisco Routers we already own.

The Cisco Routers we use have provided continuous access to applications and data. We experience very little downtime due to hardware failures. Most downtime that is related to a router ends up being a self-inflicted misconfiguration or a protocol related problem.