We have some in our DMZ. We have some located in several locations throughout our state. Then we have our local Egress and VPN firewalls that we use.
Cisco Secure Firewall ASA Virtual - BYOL
Cisco Systems, Inc.External reviews
63 reviews
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External reviews are not included in the AWS star rating for the product.
Secures our infrastructure from end to end
What is our primary use case?
What is most valuable?
The VPN is our most widely used feature for Cisco Secure Firewall. Since we were forced into a hybrid working situation by COVID a few years back, VPN is the widely used feature because everybody is working remotely for our agency. So it came in very handy.
What needs improvement?
Cisco Secure Firewall’s customer support could be improved.
For how long have I used the solution?
I have been using Cisco Secure Firewall for 20 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Cisco Secure Firewall is a very stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We bought scalable products, and we're in a good position.
How are customer service and support?
With Cisco Secure Firewall's technical support, it's always hard to get somebody that knows what they're doing on the line. However, when you finally get somebody on the line, it's pretty good. Having to deal with the licensing and be able to open a TAT case based on the serial numbers was very difficult. The individuals we get support from are pretty good, but the solution's support is two out of ten because of the process of having to get to that point to get support.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
I have previously used Juniper. Our company decided to go with Cisco Secure Firewall because of the cost and ease of use. Also, the people in our team knew Cisco versus other solutions.
How was the initial setup?
Cisco Secure Firewall's initial setup was pretty straightforward. They have a wizard, which helped in some instances, but there's also a lot of documentation online that helps a lot.
What about the implementation team?
We have a reseller that we go through, and they helped implement Cisco Secure Firewall for us.
What other advice do I have?
The application visibility and control with Cisco Secure Firewall is pretty great. We have the FTD, the firewall threat defense, and FMC, the management console we use, and we have great visibility using that product.
Cisco Secure Firewall's ability to secure our infrastructure from end to end is really good. We always find things and or block things before they even happen. So it's great, especially with Talos.
Cisco Secure Firewall has helped free up our IT staff for other projects to a certain degree. We still have to review logs in the firewall, and hopefully, someday, we'll have AI to help do that for us too. The solution has probably saved our organization about ten hours a week.
We use Talos, among other threat advice tools, and it's very good. Talos automatically updates us on the threats out there, and we can deploy those to our devices if we deem it fit to deploy them.
Cisco Secure Firewall has helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience. We've used Cisco for so long, and we've never had a data breach up to this point.
Overall, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall ten out of ten.
Does what we need to do and when we need to do it
What is our primary use case?
We use Cisco Secure Firewall for traditional firewall use cases, like VPN, segmenting of traffic, and creating PPSs.
How has it helped my organization?
We need reliable communication to do what we do, and that's very important. The solution does what we need to do and when we need to do it. It has a great reputation for the support that we need because if things don't work within the Department of Defense, people don't survive. Communication and keeping the adversary out are key components of our work. So we need a robust, reliable, and secure product, and that's what Cisco provides us.
What is most valuable?
Cisco Secure Firewall is robust and reliable.
What needs improvement?
The process of procuring modern-day technology within the DOD needs to improve.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've spent quite a few years with Cisco Secure Firewall.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
Cisco Secure Firewall is a very stable solution.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
Cisco Secure Firewall is a very scalable solution.
How are customer service and support?
Cisco Secure Firewall's technical support is great, reliable, and responsive.
What was our ROI?
We have seen a return on investment from using Cisco Secure Firewall. From the DOD's perspective, we need a reliable and robust solution that has to be reliable in real-time. Cisco Secure Firewall is a reliable solution that works when needed.
What other advice do I have?
Cisco Secure Firewall is a great scalable, secure, and robust product.
There is a dedicated team designed to handle firewalls.
I have a good impression of Cisco Talos and its effects on our security operations. They have a great reputation for doing a lot of great things.
Cisco Secure Firewall has helped our organization improve its cybersecurity resilience.
Overall, I rate Cisco Secure Firewall nine out of ten.
It could be better
While Cisco ASAv is very good security appliance we have had the following issues while deploying BYOL version and Auto-Scaling solution from Cisco:
1. AnyConnect image is missing and you can't enable anyconnect without the package.
2. While there's a good choice of instance types you can select from - current configuration/documentation is designed for 1Gbit interfaces and if you opt for c5 instance types - they're 10Gbit (so the bootstrap doesn't work).
Provides great security for our applications
What is our primary use case?
We use them for site-to-site VPN solutions as well as other VPN activities, and for general application security.
We needed a good VPN solution and, as our network grew, we had more applications that were virtualized and that can be spun up. We needed a solution that would keep us ahead.
How has it helped my organization?
Cisco ASA provides great security for our applications.
What is most valuable?
One of the best features is the ease of use. It's also easy to teach new engineers to use the ASA CLI. When I first started learning firewalls, Cisco was the first one that was taught to me and it was pretty easy to grasp. When I'm teaching other engineers to use Cisco ASAs, the results of their learning are immediate.
What needs improvement?
It needs to provide the next-generation firewall features that other vendors provide, like data analytics, telemetry, and deep packet inspection.
Also, the ASAs need to be improved a little bit to keep up with the demand for high bandwidth and session count applications.
For how long have I used the solution?
I've been using Cisco ASAs for about 11 years.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It's reliable. It doesn't have all the features of some of the newer firewalls, but it's very reliable. It doesn't break. It's pretty rock-solid.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
We have at least a pair in every one of our data centers. We gateway our applications around the firewall system, meaning all application data goes through firewalls.
How are customer service and support?
We have good support from Cisco for the ASAs. That helps us out a lot. Some of our ASAs are pretty old and technically not supported anymore, but TAC always helps us out.
How was the initial setup?
The initial one, for me, was a little bit complex because I hadn't done it before. It was inline and an active/standby pair, so it involved a little bit more than just deploying one firewall.
We had some documentation written and we tested it in the lab and then the deployment took about four hours.
We deployed it alongside different solutions and then we cut over to it when it wouldn't impact the customers.
The maintenance involves doing code upgrades periodically to keep up with the security environment requirements. One person handles that.
What about the implementation team?
We deployed with a consultant from Cisco support. Our experience with them was good. They provided a lot of documentation ahead of time to help us with our configuration.
From our side there were two people involved. One was doing the configuration and the other person was checking to make sure there were no errors, looking at IPs and the like.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
The licensing is straightforward and simple, so we don't have to keep relicensing every year as we do with other applications.
Which other solutions did I evaluate?
We use Juniper as well.
MFA to enable
Hi Team,
How can we enable the MFA on this kindly suggest for the solution or any documentation.
Looking to integrate the Google Authenticator.
Thanks in advance
Good product, bad documentation.
This is a great way to get complex firewalling into your VPC, especially if you already have ASA in your environment. The install documentation is terrible, though. Watch this video before you try it the first time and you'll have a much better experience! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LvYDqcldt24
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