Cisco Secure Firewall
Updated July 23, 2025

Cisco Secure Firewall

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Firepower 1010

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Secure Firewall

We use Cisco Secure Firewall to protect our edges and implement security policies. We struggle to keep a unified security policy applied for all our firewalls and our DR internet firewall should have the same policy as our headquarter internet. We also would like the firewall deployment of policies to be faster.

Pros

  • High availability is reliable is the firewalls rarely crash
  • In depth security insights provide our SOC useful tools to identify risks
  • Config audit to keep track of changes to the network helps troubleshoot outages

Cons

  • We would like the dynamic access object to be moved from CDAC to FMC directly
  • We would like nat dynamic objects
  • We are looking forward to removing fxos from our hardware refreshes
  • Cisco Secure Firewalls help with our segmentation policies and protect our company assets
  • Cisco Secure Firewalls help identify when our policies have changed on or network and troubleshoot network outages
  • Cisco Secure Firewalls help identify threats through Cisco Talos and other threat feeds that they ingest
When inspection mode is turned on we do see the firewall resources increase but they have never impacted production traffic. The product only gets better where in the past we would see more issues particularly when upgrading the software but now we rarely encounter any issues. We can also ingest Cisco Talos, our own IP blacklist feed and other taxi feeds. We have our NOC constantly monitoring the health of the firewall with these inspection turned on.
Firewall support is professional just like any other technology Cisco sells. From answering simple questions to bringing out outages affecting a large population of our workforce, Cisco support is always courteous, professional, and communicates with our team to keep our request on their radar. Some of the brightest people I've met are from Cisco support both in IQ and EQ which shows the talent Cisco is able to onboard to their team.
Since the pandemic our company has successfully incorporated a hybrid telecommuting policy using Cisco AnyConnect tunneling to our group of ASAs installed on prem. Log management has been invaluable to troubleshooting and verify whenever we make changes to the network and keeps the SOC informed of any threats trying to breach our security polices.
Cisco has a more seamless integration with its firewall management center compared to palo alto's panorama which tends to become out of sync with their firewalls. This can cause config differences, duplicate rules, or just the inability to deploy polices due to inconsistencies. Also we enjoy cisco anyconnect over palo alto's secure access.

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

Cisco Secure Firewall are well suited for mass deployment rather than a single deployment. When making changes on fmc (the firewall management system) it is easy to deploy to multiple firewalls at once and you can do the same for multiple firewall upgrades at a time. However I find that it is easier to manage a small group or individual firewalls with some competitors. Specifically the NGFW requires capturing the firewall image for a backup rather than just a text configuration file which is used for ASAs.

Cisco Secure Firewall Feature Ratings

Identification Technologies
7
Visualization Tools
6
Content Inspection
7
Policy-based Controls
7
Active Directory and LDAP
7
Firewall Management Console
7
Reporting and Logging
7
VPN
7
High Availability
9
Stateful Inspection
9
Proxy Server
7

Using Cisco Secure Firewall

16 - These users are network engineers that help run operations and productions to support new network connection drops, support datacenter server installations, initiations of new cloud instances, while enforcing cybersecurity policies. To summarize they support operations on a customer support level, IOT device managements, network architecture, and cybersecurity and threat prevention.
16 - The skills needed to support Cisco Secure Firewall include procurement, hardware installation and racking, configurations and software installation, upgrades and maintenance, outage coordination, routing, and configuration migration between different firewalls from different vendors. Essentially, they need to have CCNA knowledge with extended firewall and VPN training and a good understanding of traditional and next generation firewalls
  • Traditional Firewalling layers 1-4
  • Next generation Firewalling layers 5-7
  • Logging connection events to SIEM
  • EVE to detect malware with TLS encryption
  • File Policies to detect malicious files
  • Prefilter policy to allow more elephant flows through

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