Cisco FMC
Updated November 25, 2024

Cisco FMC

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center

We use Cisco Secure Firewall Management [Center (formerly Firepower Management Center)] to protect our entire organization and its IT assets. We also have firewalls managed by [Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center] that protect our IOT/OT infrastructure both ways. This is our enterprise solution to protect against ransomware attacks (partially), protect from external attacks, lock down internal systems and services, and ensure the best network security for our global network operations. Once getting used to the interface its pretty straight forward to use and navigate. Cisco has a decent (although google searches quite often is as good or better) knowledgebase on how-to's and best practices. We chose FMC as our first line of defense due to Cisco' s brand, its strong networking and security background, and its extensive product line to meet any business need.

Pros

  • Ease of administration
  • Latest security updates with easy ability to implement with little to no user impact
  • Cutting edge functionality to meet any business need and its ability to add features and functions after its already on the market

Cons

  • Licensing is difficult to navigate on purchase
  • Renewal licensing and support isn't all that easy to do and has its issues
  • The lowest end firewalls on the market seem to be EOL sooner than documented and requires earlier upgrading to ensure FMC itself can be kept current for security reasons. if you buy anything but the cheapest model firewalls this is not a problem
  • Implementing some functionality is more complex than it should be and believe Cisco could do better in this regard to the software
  • Everyday Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center proves its worth. With the ever changing ransomware and hacking tools out there it continues to prove it can protect our network and IT assets
  • With its ease of use admin portal its easy on first log in to see what is going on and things you should look at and remediate
  • With its easy update process for itself and remote firewalls it enables us admins to have more personal time versus working after hours to apply such updates
We chose Cisco [Secure Firewall Management Center (formerly Firepower Management Center)] as our primary network and security partner. We wanted the stability of one vendor for all these products and at the time no other vendor really supplied the entire network and security stack. Cisco also was great at laddering our discounts when purchasing more products from them versus going to competitors for certain products. The most important thing is, with having so much of our network and security products all being Cisco when updating any device/software we know we should have little to no issues afterwards. All due to Cisco's internal controls to test across their product line. This enables us to be more aggressive (at least for security) in keeping our equipment up to date both software and security update-wise.

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

Yes

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

Yes

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

Yes

Did implementation of Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center again?

Yes

Cisco Prime LAN Management Solution, Cisco Secure Email (formerly Cisco Email Security), Cisco Wide Area Application Services
Business which have ore than 25 staff and want excellent security should look at [Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (formerly Firepower Management Center)] as a solution to implement. Obviously, larger organizations should short list [Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center] as a top 3 candidate. Cisco security is arguably one of the best there is. And, with its R&D it continues this trend to this day. Also, cases where you need complex network/security configurations; this product is well suited for. Including situations where failover and fault tolerance is required.

Very small businesses and home offices should select something else as this type of software and hardware is more complex and difficult to administer than other well suited products on the market.

Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Feature Ratings

Firewall Security Management
8.3
Policy planning and rule management
8
Automated Policy Orchestration
8
Device Discovery
8
Policy Compliance Auditing
9
Anomalous Event or Behavior Deviation
9
Firewall Rule Cleanup
8

Resilience and Reliability

Cisco SecureX when linked to Cisco Talos and AMP provides the best real time protection for network traffic and all applications that traverse the firewall. Security staff can sleep easier knowing that SecureX will actively monitor all system traffic during the day and while you sleep. Sending admins notifications when necessary and ensuring the network is secure at all times.
Firewalls, monitoring and notifications are only the basics to protecting a business network. Adding application monitoring and real time integrated packet analysis is the latest must to protecting data. Due to the ever evolving nature of security breaches and hacking methods a business network must be active in self protection. Adding these new security systems onto network equipment adds this adaptive layer to cyber security.
We are very satisfied with SecureX and it's adaptive, active nature in protecting or data and systems. It's easy to administer, update, review notifications and update when necessary. Cisco's security practice fits into our needs and continues to evolve as global cyber events change. SecureX is easy to migrate to new cisco gear as we upgrade to newer models when supports ends on older gear. Enabling fast ROI during these capital expenditure projects.
Cisco secure firewall management center is easy to install, moderate to setup in conjunction with firewall hardware, and administration of policy changes afterwards is pretty straight forward. And flexible to add more advanced security configurations as needed. Cisco support website is pretty good for researching how to documentation too. Cisco secure firewall management center enables integration to SecureX - the cloud security protection service. And AMP which protects packet flow with real time analysis. Cisco secure fmc is the evolved name for cisco firepower management center so for those customers who have firepower this is a simple migration.
Since moving to Cisco secure management center from firepower management center we've had no application issues, outages or any other problems. It's always been there for us and always provides us the necessary protection and notification when we need it. Been very happy with all of our Cisco systems over our tenure to date.
Cisco secure management center is easy to set up itself. Integration to Cisco firewalls is a little challenging depending upon needs and functionality. As well, setting up VPN tunnels from cisco secure management to other 3rd party VPN services can be problematic but is doable. It just needs some expert level skills and knowledge to be successful.
  • Links in well with cisco email security appliance
  • Links in well with cisco threadgrid
  • Links in well with meraki switching and network management

Using Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center

2 - The two users of FMC are both in IT. We serve both network and security functions in our organization. We log in on a daily occurrence to make changes, update location access, or resolve issues we get from notifications from firewall analysis. FMC is really easy to use and provides a lot of value and ease of administration on a daily and monthly basis.
2 - Based on our long standing usage of FMC over the last 7 years I see four types of users that would use/log in and administer it; It Architect, Senior Network/Security Administrator, Security Analysts, and a Help Desk Supervisor. The logging, reporting, configuration management, and update management controls allow a wide group of IT users to log in and complete actions required of them to run IT for an organization.
  • External Firewall Management
  • OT-IT network Seperation Management
  • Backup Network Management
  • Integration to Cisco StealthWatch
  • Integration to Cisco ISE
  • Integration to Cisco DNA Center

Evaluating Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center and Competitors

Yes - We had Barracuda Firewalls with unique configurations based on use and locations. We moved up to Enterprise Firewalls (Cisco FMC) to make administration easier, standardize our Firewall platform, simplify our network, standardize our internet requirements, and enable different tiers of IT staff to access FMC. Barracuda firewalls are great for entry level businesses but for larger organizations with a number of locations interconnected and a lot of data movement requirements Cisco firewalls just do it better.
  • Scalability
  • Ease of Use
We were needing to scale up our IT infrastructure as part of our major office move. Everything we had was aged and off warranty. The office move enabled us to replace all our old equipment with new gear. We chose Cisco for our firewall, network, wifi, and data center equipment during this move. Cisco met all of our needs for every piece of equipment we needed to upgrade or replace. Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center came as a bolt on to the firewalls and enabled us to easily manage all our firewalls in one pane of glass.
If we could do this again we would do the same thing wtih Cisco. Cisco has met all our needs over the years and our network security is very robust and protects our data and users every day. This allows us in IT to focus on enhancing our user's needs and solve business challenges.

Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Implementation

  • Third-party professional services
We leveraged CompuCom IT Professional Services to move to FMC and Cisco Firewalls. Being a building move we redesigned our entire network at the same time so it was partially easier to do this versus migrate our network over to these firewalls. The build of the firewalls and FMC was pretty straight forward. However, the network redesign on top was quite extensive to design and transition to.
Yes - We implemented the new network and FMC design for our primary office tower and data center locations. The next year we replaced all field equipment with its own network redesign. The phase 2 implementation was a lot easier to do as it impacted a lot less staff on each day and required a lot less equipment to transition over to. As well, the core network and firewalls were already completed so traffic migration was easy to keep up for all users.
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled - With a large IT transition change management was integral to this whole process. It had to be thought through very extensively to ensure both outage notifications, site access, network uptime, and IT resources were available during each change (both physically changing equipment and remotely for user impact). With having a robust change management process it was pretty straight forward to get approvals and complete IT changes for this whole transition efficiently and successfully the first change window.
  • We suffered a meraki network issue that presented itself during the migration as traffic issues found only happened once we moved our office over. It took hours that first night to come up with a workaround to get us migrated.
  • We had limited IT staff to complete this work and with the need to make changes at more than one site during each change window it required novice staff to help remotely with senior resources overseeing the change.
  • Management changed our go live date and time late in the build process and we were forced to expedite the go live. We succeeded but it came at a cost to some testing happening during the implementation.

Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center Support

Cisco support is great at being able to create tickets easily. Before the pandemic Cisco support was fantastic with following up, resolving, and closing out tickets. However with the advent of covid they've had some challenges to date with support promptness and resolving cases. This is part of the reason why they don't get a 100% rating from me. We feeling like cisco can improve this area and make customer satisfaction higher.
ProsCons
Knowledgeable team
Problems get solved
Kept well informed
Immediate help available
Support understands my problem
Support cares about my success
Poor followup
Cisco security products are Paramount to business success and business continuity. Having quick customer service with responsive knowledgeable support staff is Paramount to our success. We feel that purchasing Cisco equipment is a partnership between our organization and them and that we are in this together as a team. Cisco has a vast security practice with equipment that meets our ever expanding business needs as well the software that runs on it is adaptable as well to the ever-changing security environment globally.
Yes - Yes we have reported more than one significant issue with Cisco security products including secure management center. Cisco tac support has been great and very knowledgeable in timely resolving the problems. We've actually been successful in helping them diagnose new bugs and them publicly publishing updates so that not just us but other customers can be successful when they upgrade their cisco security software.
We bought the add-on Cisco amp and Cisco threatgrid services and we were wanting to integrate them to Cisco secure management center. Cisco support made it really easy for us to enable these services with a single 30 to 45 minute support session and got them connected online and functional with no impact to users and us as administrators.

Using Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center

There are a lot of easy to use functions. These include easy to administer and for new firewall setups. There are some complicated things like the integration to Cisco cloud systems and to other on-prem Cisco platforms that prove difficult to configure as easy as it should in 2024. Cisco has made improvements in all areas over the last 7 years of usage. Some are as easy as noted above while others that are challenged are to primarily new cloud and on prem systems that have made major improvements themselves to do IT Security better.
ProsCons
Like to use
Easy to use
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Lots to learn
  • Adding new firewalls to FMC
  • Software upgrades to firewalls
  • Basic traffic monitoring is easy to review (wanting to drill in to monitoring is where it gets complex)
  • Setup of notifications of security issues
  • Sometimes there are platform upgrades that require reconfiguring the firewalls to a newer feature. These prove very difficult to update
  • Firewall upgrade replacements are difficult to move from current firewall configurations to new hardware
  • Location based traffic management is difficult to set up and equally difficult to keep up to date

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