Cisco Secure Access

Our main use case for Cisco Secure Access  is providing security for hybrid and mobile workforces. One of the big challenges these days is the fact that you will have users in the office, working remotely, and all will have different access policies.

You will have users that will be technically hopping between offices, remote work, and working on the road. The trick is determining how we can have a single, consistent security policy for those users. Cisco Secure Access  helps us with that quite a bit.

We did our first pilot deployment of Cisco Secure Access about three years ago, and we have deployed it successfully at several customers since then.

The VPN as a service is the feature that we like the most and the one that our customers like the most. Historically, you would have to maintain a firewall or other local VPN concentrator device. With Cisco Secure Access, now you can VPN in directly to Cisco Secure Access cloud, have that security policy applied, and then get directed either to the internet for SaaS apps or cloud services or to local on-premises resources through Cisco Secure Access system.

AI Access feature is a relatively new feature in Cisco Secure Access, but it is one that has become very important, especially in the last year or so, as end users have started to make a lot of use of the big AI tools, ChatGPT, Claude, and all that. There is now a big concern about those users putting inappropriate information into them, confidential information, regulated information. Being able to more tightly control what models my end users use, what services they use, and what information they submit has become a major part of end-user security in general. With Cisco Secure Access, I can do that whether you are in the office, on the road, or working from home. I can ensure that wherever you are at, you are not using AI models inappropriately and exposing us to risk.

Digital Experience Monitoring is for Cisco Secure Access and really any kind of SASE  deployment. You need to know how the users are using the system and what their experience is so that it is easier to troubleshoot. Because you could have users anywhere, how are they getting access to the resources? If they are having problems, how can we help troubleshoot that? ThousandEyes  integration with Cisco Secure Access is a pretty comprehensive visibility tool. It works everywhere from, for example, a work-from-home user. Are they having poor connectivity? ThousandEyes  will let us see that it is their home network. They have bad wireless signal. We can work with them to fix that. Alternatively, it reveals problems with their internet connection. Or if they are traveling, what is the total visibility within the entire path between them and the application, whether it be a SaaS app, locally hosted, or something hosted in Azure , AWS , or any of the big cloud providers.

These days with supply chain attacks being a major problem, being able to vet anything that is downloaded by developers, by end users for business use, is almost a requirement these days. With Cisco Secure Access, because I can do that, this goes back to that security anywhere for any user at any time. Being able to ensure that we have that coverage for someone working from home, someone working remotely, someone on-premises, keeps that supply chain risk low.

I think it is a matter of especially keeping up with the times. I mentioned AI defense earlier, but as AI use and especially as we get into agentic AI use, seeing how Cisco Secure Access works to control those agentic uses especially is important. I think that is where we expect the big improvement to be.

I have been working in IT consulting for about 22 years.

It has been rock solid and stable. I can only think of one service disruption that I have seen with it in the last several years we have been using it, and that was really only for a very short amount of time.

Cisco Secure Access is a very scalable solution. Being cloud-native, scalability is really built in. The user management controls work well even for our larger customers with large numbers of users. I would say scalability for Cisco Secure Access is a very strong point. It builds on Umbrella , which is a highly scalable security solution. We see that there as well.

When we have had problems, they have been very quickly resolved. The support engineers have always been of a high quality. The only bad experiences we have had were really sort of when the platform launched and I think even Cisco was still learning how to support it.

There was no single solution before. What we were doing before Cisco Secure Access was just a traditional on-premises VPN or other standalone remote access solutions, which was always, I think, a management headache. Multiple products were needed for different use cases. Moving to Cisco Secure Access really helped consolidate all that into one overarching end-user security platform.

Overall, it has been a fairly good experience. Deploying Cisco Secure Access, because for a lot of customers they started with Umbrella , and it goes back to that same operational model, that same user interface, the same configuration model, has made it probably one of the easier SASE  solutions to deploy compared to some of the other vendors out there.

For our customers, it has been a big time saver in terms of policy management. Because now, I do not have to maintain separate policies for my remote users versus my on-premises users or people in a hybrid environment. For our customers, there has been a pretty good ROI and pretty quickly too.

For our customers, it has been a big time saver in terms of policy management. Because now, I do not have to maintain separate policies for my remote users versus my on-premises users or people in a hybrid environment. For our customers, there has been a pretty good ROI and pretty quickly too.

Pricing for Cisco Secure Access has been very reasonable in the context of the entire world of SASE solutions. Setup costs for customers coming off of Umbrella, because of the fact that it is an evolution, the setup costs for our customers have been low. A little bit higher for greenfield, but Umbrella has always been a fairly easy product to turn up and Cisco Secure Access sort of continues that. Getting customers up and running with it is pretty easy and not too expensive.

The other solution that we considered heavily was Palo Alto's Prisma Access , or what they call Prisma SASE now. What we found is that with Cisco Secure Access, it was a much easier on-ramp for our customer base. It was easier to get that quick ROI.

One of the things about policy verification is with Cisco Secure Access and modern security products in general, policies can become very complicated, very quickly, especially once you start doing role-based policies. To have a tool that helps you validate the policy before you push it out to the end users ensures that the end user satisfaction is higher, fewer complaints, and fewer headaches for the IT staff when making big policy changes.

It is a solid 10. It does exactly what we need it to do. It does so in a way that is easy to manage, easy to control, and gives us the information that we need to make sure our end users have a good experience wherever they are working. My overall rating for Cisco Secure Access is 9.

The biggest advice I give to anyone looking at Cisco Secure Access or really any other SASE solution is a lot of planning. SASE deployments tend to be complex, and while Cisco Secure Access does a great job of simplifying things compared to some of the other vendors out there, a good solid project plan, a good solid assessment of your needs before deploying is always something that I would recommend anyone does.

Cisco Secure Access  is used primarily for remote access into on-premises servers. We are currently in a hybrid ZTNA  and VPN solution, and with ZTNA , we have more flexibility about what traffic goes over VPN and what traffic stays through the internet.

We still have the VPN aspect, and with ZTNA we also have the ability to make those on-premises servers accessible securely anywhere in the world.

Cisco Secure Access  has affected our transition to zero trust and least privilege principles by enabling us to run an RDP session through a web browser and tie it in with our Azure AD  SSO , so users do not even need a client and can still log into these servers securely.

I am happy with the performance and security levels it provides. I feel it is a robust and high-performing product, and it has both the clientless and the client aspects, which I really appreciate.

The features of Cisco Secure Access that I like the most include its ease of use.

Cisco Secure Access is both client-based and clientless.

The multi-organization management capability of Cisco Secure Access is very usable and very user-friendly, and the end users are happy with it. I try to make the product and the process as painless as possible for all our end users, so it runs well.

Cisco Secure Access has affected our transition to zero trust and least privilege principles by enabling us to run an RDP session through a web browser and tie it in with our Azure AD  SSO , so users do not even need a client and can still log into these servers securely.

I am happy with the performance and security levels it provides. I feel it is a robust and high-performing product with both the clientless and the client aspects.

We have not explored much of the Experience Insights feature powered by ThousandEyes  of Cisco Secure Access, as it is part of our Meraki package, but we have not really done much with it yet.

We have been using Cisco Secure Access for about five years now.

I would assess the stability and reliability of Cisco Secure Access as very good. Nothing comes to mind regarding downtime, crashes, or performance issues.

My experience with customer service and tech support is great, and I am very happy. Every time I run into an issue, I can get a hold of someone at Cisco to get it fixed.

They are responsive and quick on their feet.

To address the same issues, my organization did not have any solution put in place.

I have not used the policy verification to help reduce policy misconfigurations.

Policy configurations have not caused slowdowns or blocked access for users in the past.

My experience with deploying Cisco Secure Access is that it is very easy to integrate with the Meraki products.

We implemented Cisco Secure Access about five years ago.

The pricing setup cost and licensing was not complicated; it was painless.

When selecting Cisco Secure Access, we were not looking at different options in comparison. We knew we were going to move all of our hardware over to Cisco, and so it made sense.

Comparing Cisco Secure Access to something like Cloudflare One , in the future the cost can come down. I have also looked at Zscaler for ZTNA, but overall, it is a robust product. Obviously, we always look at cost. I think Cloudflare  may not have as robust of a product, but the cost is very minimal.

I would give Cisco Secure Access a rating of eight.

I would give customer service and tech support a rating of nine.

My overall review rating for Cisco Secure Access is eight.

My main use cases for Cisco Secure Access  are firewalls between our IT and OT networks and VPN access to our OT network. For the most part, I am strictly using Cisco Secure Access  as a next-gen firewall, using it for deep packet inspection visibility, but mostly for VPN remote access.

The integration has been really good for my identity management and security measures. There have been some difficulties at times, but we have been able to get it to work.

I would describe my multi-organization management capability of Cisco Secure Access as having its ups and downs. There are times it feels difficult to navigate and get things configured, but that is coming from a CLI perspective. I can see improvements from the previous versions and generations. It is getting better. I think I just need to get acclimated to it and get used to it.

For us on the OT side, Cisco Secure Access has been good in scaling with the growing needs of my organization.

I am not sure which features of Cisco Secure Access I appreciate the most.

I have not used the policy verification feature of Cisco Secure Access to help reduce policy misconfigurations.

I am not certain how Cisco Secure Access can be improved or what additional features should be included in the next release.

My experience with deploying Cisco Secure Access has faced a few challenges, I believe, just as with policy configurations. That is getting familiar with the interfaces and other aspects. I think these are things that I was able to work through.

I have been using Cisco Secure Access for approximately three to five years.

I have not experienced any downtime, crashes, or performance issues with Cisco Secure Access, so I assess its stability and reliability as good.

I have not expanded usage of Cisco Secure Access significantly. Only client user-wise have I expanded, but not infrastructure-wise.

I would rate my customer service and technical support for Cisco Secure Access a five out of five. I give them a ten on a scale from one being the worst to ten being the best because they are very responsive.

Prior to adopting Cisco Secure Access, I was not using another solution to address similar needs.

My experience with the pricing, setup costs, and licensing of Cisco Secure Access has been straightforward with our Cisco partner.

I did not upgrade from Umbrella  to Cisco Secure Access.

I have seen a return on investment with Cisco Secure Access.

I have always been a Cisco shop and did not consider other solutions before selecting Cisco Secure Access.

My advice to another organization considering using Cisco Secure Access is to do your homework. I would rate this review a nine out of ten.