Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual - PAYG

My main use case for Cisco Secure Firewall  is to protect corporate internet access from malicious people.

I can provide a specific example of how I use Cisco Secure Firewall  to protect my corporate internet system from malicious activity: I block malicious sites and create rules to detect them.

I also use it to provide remote access for vendors and IT support people.

The best features Cisco Secure Firewall offers in my experience are its GUI, clear definition, and process to create rules.

The GUI is clear and I am able to follow the description of processes such as backup, creation of rules, and other management processes.

This has helped my team feel more confident that we are protected from malicious intruders, and I have noticed specific positive outcomes and changes since using Cisco Secure Firewall.

I believe Cisco Secure Firewall can be improved, particularly regarding the specifications such as the memory that is used on entry-level firewalls, because sometimes when doing an upgrade or changing configuration, issues arise.

On the performance side, I notice that the upgrade to a different version is slow, so hopefully improved CPU and RAM will help performance.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for three years.

Cisco Secure Firewall is stable in my experience.

The hardware is working and we have not encountered the firewall failing because of a firmware upgrade.

We have not needed the scalability feature of Cisco Secure Firewall as of now.

I have not needed to reach out to Cisco support for any issues.

I have not switched from another vendor or used another firewall vendor prior to Cisco.

Before choosing Cisco Secure Firewall, we did not evaluate other options.

I would advise others looking into using Cisco Secure Firewall that it is easy to use and manage, easy to create rules, and upgrade the firmware, and it is reliable; I have not encountered any failure on my Cisco firewall so far. I rate this product an 8 out of 10.

I have mainly worked with Cisco Firewall, specifically FTD and FMC, controlling the Firewall Threat Defenses from FMC, using Talos and Cisco ISE  for approximately two and a half to three years. I completed a comprehensive re-architecture and added different vendors for a company called Gaming Laboratories International, where I extensively used their products.

For a span of two years, I extensively used Cisco products, ranging from switching and routers to firewall solutions for Gaming Laboratories International. For the last year, I have mainly worked with Palo Alto and Cato products, transitioning toward SD-WAN and SASE  solutions.

At Gaming Laboratories International, I inherited a poorly designed network architecture and completely re-architected the network using Cisco Secure Firewall  FTD and FMC across 45 different offices around the globe, spanning 435 jurisdictions at that time. My team and I used Cisco Secure Firewall  as our internal firewall, securing the internal perimeter and protecting our DMZ from the inside. On the outside, we implemented Palo Alto because Cisco Secure Firewall could not handle the capabilities we required, such as application identification, which Palo Alto truly excels at.

Cisco Secure Firewall is quite scalable, and I have found it relatively easy to set up high availability using their proprietary protocol HSRP. I have truly enjoyed the flexibility, though their proprietary cables can be prohibitively expensive compared to standard options available from other vendors.

The benefit of Cisco Secure Firewall lies in keeping it to the basics through hardware, which costs a bit more, but the real problem emerges when integrating other platforms and their licensing, which is quite expensive. When calculating the total costs, including ISE, DNA Center , and hardware maintenance, it becomes exorbitant for medium-sized enterprises. It may work for large enterprises already entrenched in Cisco products.

The biggest inefficiency with Cisco Secure Firewall, to be honest, is the licensing—too many licenses for too many different products. There is not a single platform, which is essential nowadays. Cisco Secure Firewall is a bit of a colossus where they add weight on top of it, and I believe it amounts to simply placing products next to each other, which is not a very good solution from the perspective of a network security engineer.

There are many features I would personally remove, amend, or create differently from an engineering perspective. The Frankenstein architecture needs to stop and focus on AI. Nowadays, with different products, it is essential to have a single platform for better data and line application control. Everything about AI is to control application usage and how users interact with your systems.

The process with FMC is quite a hurdle, and attempting to integrate it with DNA Center  or ISE turns into a nightmare. There is a stark contrast with Palo Alto and Prisma—everything just flows.

When setting up Cisco Secure Firewall, I encounter significant challenges, especially with on-premise Next-Generation Firewalls . There is lacking clarity in documentation, particularly when changing internet service providers or external IP addresses. This lack of guidance often leads to being locked out or corrupting files within the Next-Generation Firewall, resulting in wasted time troubleshooting.

I worked with Cisco Secure Firewall more than a year ago, exactly eleven months, to be precise.

I am really happy with the performance and capabilities of Cisco Secure Firewall to manage heavy workloads. Although it performs well, integrating the software with existing systems often creates complications.

Cisco Secure Firewall is quite scalable, and I have found it relatively easy to set up high availability using their proprietary protocol HSRP.

Cisco's customer service and technical support respond in a timely manner, which is good. However, they do not always come up with effective solutions. Many times, I need to dig deep to find solutions due to the complexity of the environments where I work, especially in game development.

I would rate Cisco technical support as a seven. They deserve a six or seven for their efforts, but I feel sympathy for them given the challenging circumstances they work under.

At the moment, I do not use Cisco Secure Firewall at all. For the last eleven months, I have been working solely with Palo Alto Next-Generation Firewall, Prisma Access , and Cato. I am primarily integrating Cato for companies, and I have witnessed its rise over Cisco Secure Firewall because of its simplicity, ease of management, and deployment cost and time efficiency.

When setting up Cisco Secure Firewall, I encounter significant challenges, especially with on-premise Next-Generation Firewalls . There is lacking clarity in documentation, particularly when changing internet service providers or external IP addresses.

For high traffic rates and heavy CPU consumption, Cisco Secure Firewall could fit well. However, security can lead to lock-out situations, so those considering Cisco Secure Firewall should thoroughly assess their needs. SASE  solutions are dominating the market; I primarily work with Cato, which finds traction in eight out of ten meetings I have with customers, with Palo Alto depending on the desired security posture.

I suggested in the design, and that was approved to be moved internally because Palo Alto had better capabilities to handle security concerns. Cisco Secure Firewall overly relies on administrators to do the heavy lifting to connect those platforms with open-source or third-party solutions. Licensing is a recurring issue—it would be much easier if there were a package, but that is not the case.

When we do not talk about money, time has become the critical factor where Cato massively outperforms Cisco Secure Firewall. I would rate this review a five point five overall.

We have two deployment models for the use case: one is a perimeter firewall and one is a data center firewall. If you have a perimeter, you will position Cisco Secure Firewall  as a perimeter firewall; it fits more in data as a data center firewall because in a data center firewall, you are inspecting incoming traffic and you need a very good IPS, so Cisco Secure Firewall  is very effective as a data center firewall.

The best feature in Cisco Secure Firewall is the stability; we have a stable product with no lagging or crashing, unlike others. Additionally, the IPS is the next-generation IPS from Cisco, which has many features and many signatures with updated signatures for my IPS.

I switched to Cisco Secure Firewall to get very good IPS signatures and next-generation IPS; that is a market leader from Cisco.

The stability is very good. I do not experience any downtime, crashes, or performance issues; that is the best feature from Cisco Secure Firewall.

Most of the time, Cisco provides features on some versions and the updated versions will move them; for example, we can do firewall policies based on users, which is from Active Directory. It should be from Cisco ISE , so it is a very bad drawback from Cisco Secure Firewall. Not all customers have Cisco ISE , and we need to integrate to make a policy on users, not just by IP, but with users also. We had integration before with LDAP and Active Directory, but on some versions, Cisco requires us to do it through Cisco ISE.

I have five years of experience with Cisco Secure Firewall overall.

The stability is very good. I do not experience any downtime, crashes, or performance issues; that is the best feature from Cisco Secure Firewall.

Cisco Secure Firewall is providing scalability. I rate the scalability as a number 10.

I rate the technical support a number 10.

Compared to Fortinet, we have a complex configuration, but we still have a stable product rather than Fortinet's product.

Cisco Secure Firewall requires maintenance. Maintaining it is slightly complex; it is not easy or very easy.

I am a customer. It was purchased through a partner. I was satisfied with my experience with the partner.

I have seen a return on investment of 50.

The pricing for Cisco Secure Firewall is very good, and we got many discounts from them.

Cisco Secure Firewall is deployed on-premises. We have a team of four users using the solution. I rate this review a 10.

I use Cisco Secure Firewall  essentially as a firewall and for a secure access VPN solution. I need Cisco Secure Firewall  to fulfill that role; I need it for secure access, and it performs the firewalling I need it to do in the network segment where it is located.

I have seen a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall. Generally, where it sits in my network, there are other vendors as well, but Cisco Secure Firewall is a better product and easier to manage than those alternatives. It does more of the features that I want it to do to be more secure, and I will move the other vendors into Cisco Secure Firewall.

The biggest challenge I have with Cisco Secure Firewall is that I often need to look in a few places to find what I want to do or I find myself searching for where a particular feature is located. I know what I want to accomplish, but I cannot always find it easily; it takes some time looking around. Because I do not use Cisco Secure Firewall as heavily as other vendors, I find it a little harder to navigate, though I would caveat that with the possibility that with more use, it would become easier for me to navigate and accomplish what I want to do. I am not sure how I would specifically improve that aspect, but it is probably the biggest day-to-day challenge I have with it.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for about a year, maybe just over.

Stability of Cisco Secure Firewall is generally very good.

In terms of scalability, because it is there for the secure access solution as well, it was right-sized when it was put in, so I have not had any scalability challenges for what I do. My organization is fairly static in terms of scale, so users and that type of thing do not scale up and down quickly; it is more slow-moving in that regard.

I have not done a whole lot of customer support with Cisco Secure Firewall.

Before Cisco Secure Firewall, I used Juniper as a vendor; I have used them with other vendors as well, but where I am using Cisco Secure Firewall, they are sort of a direct competitor with Juniper.

It took a couple of months to deploy Cisco Secure Firewall; that was the same for secure access, as it was all part of the same rollout. What took those months to deploy was probably more internal change controls; it is just slower moving, as I have done a lot of testing deployments in lab environments, so it is less of a technology issue and more of the constraints of where I work that slow it down.

I did not implement Cisco Secure Firewall personally, but I was there for the implementation.

I have seen a return on investment with Cisco Secure Firewall. Generally, where it sits in my network, there are other vendors as well, but Cisco Secure Firewall is a better product and easier to manage than those alternatives. It does more of the features that I want it to do to be more secure, and I will move the other vendors into Cisco Secure Firewall.

Integration with other systems is fairly slow-moving and static in that way. I would rate this review an 8.

In terms of security, Cisco Secure Firewall  is very reliable, especially when clients are up to date and run their security updates regularly. It is one of the greatest solutions for security in terms of networking. It is very easy to use, aside from being somewhat costly compared to other firewalling solutions. Cisco has been in existence for a while compared to other firewalling devices, which makes it more expensive. It is very easy to use, especially when you have hands-on experience with any of Cisco's devices before. You do not even need to probably take higher professional courses before you can manage it, especially if you can learn easily. For me, I learn quickly and I approach anything with the understanding that nothing is impossible, though it might take some time.

Because we have a centralized solution that manages all of our Cisco Secure Firewall  and Cisco devices within the network, and IHS spreads across more than 10 countries, all of which communicate together using the same devices, we can push policies centrally from the central management system to all the Cisco Secure Firewall devices and the policies take effect immediately.

We have been using Cisco Secure Firewall since 2015, which is when I joined IHS. Currently, I cannot remember the exact name because it has been a while since I logged into that environment, and I have already resigned from IHS to work as a consultant. We are using Cisco AnyConnect for our VPN, to be precise. We majorly use the VPN because all of our clients are on VPN, so whenever they want to connect to any of the resources from outside the network, they connect through the VPN.

The major improvement so far is that everything has moved from a black screen interface to a GUI that you can easily use. It is not necessary to do everything on a black screen. Aside from the price constraint, I do not really see much in terms of the disadvantages of this product. Although everything has advantages and disadvantages, the major disadvantage is the cost, which is why many people in the industry are moving to products like Check Point or Sophos because they are cheaper compared to Cisco Secure Firewall.

The major improvement needed is the GUI interface. Most of the new generation firewalls actually come with a GUI where you can do whatever you want to do without running a command, and they give that privilege. I believe Cisco Secure Firewall has already probably introduced that, as from the Cisco centralized application, you can manage many things, push many configurations, and do many things. However, they need to do more so that it is not necessary to give access to the black screen as in the core device to your users before they can do certain things. From the GUI interface, they should be able to do certain things. It creates a kind of restriction, and it is only when it is necessary that you probably launch the GUI or SSH to that device that users do whatever they need to do.

I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall since 2015, which is when I joined IHS.

Reliability is superb because we usually have monthly maintenance on all of our devices. Because all of our devices are on HA, we test the high availability and run any patches that need to be run. So far so good, it is reliable because there has never been a time when we have had a failover test that we ran into a problem.

Cisco Secure Firewall is scalable.

Technically, Cisco covers a lot.

Currently, I do not use any other firewalling solutions. I think the other HP product I probably worked with is not used anymore.

I might not say because I cannot compare my own experience with other people's experiences. For people like me and probably the majority of my team, we do not find it difficult to implement or deploy. However, for some new generation people that are just coming to the industry, they might find other firewalls very easy and straightforward in terms of deployment because they cannot be compared to Cisco Secure Firewall devices. For me, probably based on my years of experience, I do not find any challenges in terms of deployment.

The implementation team was effective.

Of course, what we are getting from Cisco Secure Firewall is worth it. There is always a return on investment because you find you invest heavily, but your environment is secure and then you are at rest; you do not need to panic. Even if attackers are coming, you know you will be rest assured that you are covered. Although other firewalls are okay, they cannot be compared to Cisco Secure Firewall.

The setup cost is somewhat high compared to other firewalling solutions.

I have a different job title now as I am doing more consulting work.

For instance, we have some resources on Azure , and when it comes to security posture on Azure , I take about more than 50% of it because I am in charge. When it comes to cloud security, we do not really have full control 100%, unlike when you have your firewall on-premises where you are the alpha and omega of the solution and these devices. You can do whatever you want to do. However, cloud security gives a kind of platform whereby you have some limitations because you do not have physical intervention to that device.

Aside from that, it is very easy to use, especially when you have hands-on experience with any of Cisco's devices before. You do not even need to take higher professional courses before you can manage it, especially if you can learn easily. For me, I learn quickly and I approach anything with the understanding that nothing is impossible, though it might take some time. My overall rating for Cisco Secure Firewall is 9 out of 10.