Item: Cisco Secure Firewall
Rating: 8
Author: John Liehr

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Secure Firewall

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We utilize Cisco Secure Firewall to protect our data centers, branch networks, and critical infrastructure. Cisco Secure Firewall has allowed us to centralize our policy management and visibility of all of our security footprint. We integrate our security with our network and leverage Cisco Identity Services Engine alongside our Cisco Secure Firewall to ensure end-to-end identity and security across our organization.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Identity across the network and security are key differentiation in the market
Centralized policy management makes our platform easier to manage
With the recent hardware releases the price to performance ratio is very competitive in the market

Cons

Continued integrations with the broader ecosystem will enhance usability
Software validation and QA before GA release should be improved
Better options to manage logs and give granular controls to ensure we only need to send the data we need

Return on Investment

The Firewall Management Center has allowed us to reduce administrative overhead by 40% for firewall management.
The recent hardware offerings have provided excellent value to our organization.

Security and Performance

The Cisco Secure Firewall does an excellent job at not seeing performance degradation when utilizing all features. This has been a pain point with other vendors and technologies in the past.

Support Rating

Overall, support has been good, but sometimes responses or support take longer than we would like to resolve priority issues.

Cisco Security Ecosystem

Log management has improved, but could continue to improve. Better granularity in being able to export logs would improve our experience.

Key Insights

Do you think Cisco Secure Firewall delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Cisco Secure Firewall's feature set?

Yes

Did Cisco Secure Firewall live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Secure Firewall go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Secure Firewall again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

For branch and campus the hardware is highly competitive. The data center space for large scale has had a gap with hardware performance. Managing a distributed footprint has continued to see improvements and is on the right direction.