Guardicore is a segmentation company, now part of Akamai since the late 2021 acquisition, aiming to displace legacy firewalls. The Guardiocre software-only approach is decoupled from the physical network to provide a faster alternative to firewalls. It is built for the agile enterprise that offers greater security and visibility in the cloud, data-center and endpoint.
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Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE)
Score 8.7 out of 10
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The Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE) offers a network-based approach for adaptable, trusted access everywhere, based on context. It gives the user intelligent, integrated protection through intent-based policy and compliance solutions.
This is the best possible solution for enterprise-level organizations where server counts will be in the thousands. To manage these and understand the communication can be very cumbersome without this tool. Ease of creation map zone and application-wise can be relaxing to OS teams and support teams as well. There is no limit to labeling schema of servers and it gives the freedom to do so.
Cisco ISE integrates will with a Cisco solution such as firewalls, network switches and routers. It does an incredible job of granting access based on the role that an individual or groups have, and the ability to remove access to that individual or group is also east. In our environment ISE is used to authenticate external users that have access by vpn, and also to manage access to the large network infrastructure
The most beneficial thing that I love about it, there are tons of things that I love about ISE and that it does well, but the most fascinating that I feel about is its integration with DNA center or Catalyst Center using PX Grid as the protocol wherein ISE acts as a policy server for the entire campus hand in hand with Catalyst Center to make sure that the policy policy follows the user and also in the background hand in hand with DNA Center or Catalyst Center makes sure microsegmentation is implemented so that east west traffic is blocked and takes care of the campus.
I guess the user experience itself, it's sometimes a little bit slow, but this is also dependent on the platform and the scale of the deployment of course. But actually functionality-wise it's really, really good. But yeah, it could sometimes be a little quicker to react on the good front.
The solution is deployed throughout the organization. Teams are working and integrating it with the help desk tool wherever required. Helps in identifying the network traffic flows in lateral movement and east and west as well. Allows policies by default and later fine-tuning to be done to narrow it and enforce blocking action. Exporting reports from the tool is easy and can be observed for any issues.
For us the solution is very easily useable on its own. Perhaps that has to do because we started using ISE in the 1.2 days and have seen it grow during the years. Policy creation, etc. is all very visible and thus easy to use. Deployment of multiple nodes is also incredibly easy and flexible. You can easily add or remove nodes as you wish.
We do have to occasionally reboot the servers when they get low on memory, but we're also a few versions behind. Availability has generally been pretty good though with no major outages in the time that we've had it implemented.
Support has been available 24*7. It also depends on criticality but support is available. Also, the right expertise from the team helps in identifying the issue quickly and this helps in less production downtime if required. The ticket is resolved with RCA.
Cisco support is second to none, both in terms of how you access support but also the knowledge of the individual support teams. If you focus on one technology and provide "manufacturer support" then you can rest assured that you are accessing Cisco's top individuals. I feel like this is a USP for Cisco support.
I did participate in the implementation of Cisco ISE and while there were times when it was confusing and we had a lot of trial and error, overall the experience was fine.
1) No limit to labeling schema. 2) Ease of creating maps with respect to zone, environment, subnets, etc. 3) Ease of creating policies and publishing the same. 4) Deception 5) Integration with monitoring tool (grafana) 6) Changes in the agent can be considered if there are legacy systems, time-consuming but can be achieved with the right information.
I think all give some visibility of device monitoring and management, but Cisco Identity Services Engine gives a good way to manage more details about the device in a centralized way that gives a wider range of monitoring and control than the other softwares individually. I don't think Cisco Identity Services Engine eliminates the need for these other software as of now, but there is potential for Cisco Identity Services Engine to be able to take over more of these roles.
It's fully customised and comprehensive. only thing is you need to know what you want. Proper research and planning would save lots of time and effort .
I don't know about negatives because we haven't seen it right now, but positive impact is one is the roadmap we have. And now since we are going ahead with doing the deployment of Cisco ISE, we see that we are getting closure to, so at the end of the day, we have to make sure that operationally we stay excellent. So that's where operational excellence comes in. Cisco ISE is basically addressing that for us. Right now we are in a situation if there is a WIFI issue or if there is an authentication issue, it gets really difficult to isolate the problem. But with Cisco ISE , this functionality is going to come in. So we believe that it would be a good ROI.
