Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software vs. CrowdSec

We moved our operations entirely to the cloud a few years ago. We loved the stability and scalability of the ASA and wanted to, somehow, keep using it. We discovered that ASA was available in the cloud as well and it was branded ASAv. We tested it and noticed that it was equally robust and a perfect fit for us. During the entire migration period, we used ASAv for cloud operations and put a lot of load on it. ASAv performed very well and gave us an easy transition from on-prem to the cloud.

Incentivized

Since I've only used CrowdSec in a homelab/small-medium sized business setup, that's really the only market I can safely recommend it and say it's well suited for, because I don't know how much it would cost to run it in an enterprise environment. I've heard some pricing and how they plan on rolling out a subscription model, but it's still in talks. Either way, if you have publicly exposed web applications hosted locally or on a virtual private server, then CrowdSec should be part of every virtual machine and/or network. Even with the lmited number of filter you get out of the free subscription, it provides a nice layer of constantly updated data,

Incentivized

• How we can manage: ASDM the GUI is so much easier to manage it even for a new guy also.
• Traffic handling capacity
• More secure and the different features it gives.
• Support from the TAC team or from the community manages to handle issues very efficiently.

Incentivized

• Provides great integrations with tools you already use, such as fail2ban, Cloudflare, WordPress, NGINX, Linux Firewalls, etc.
• Lightweight agents can run on individual servers and report to a main security engine so that if there's an attack on one server and a block is implemented, the entire network can be protected
• There are a lot of ways to receive alerts and store logs
• CrowdSec Central API is a nice way to manage everything externally

Incentivized

• The Java based ASDM can botch commands and isn't compatible on some more locked down systems.
• Monitoring. Really the same complaint as above, the monitoring available through the ASDM is crappy at best. A much better solution is to send the logs and mirror packets to a SEIM, but that can create issues of its own when looking for realtime analysis.
• Compatibility across other ASA models. ASA 5520s don't play well with 5525X which don't play well with older 5510s. Each is great on it's own, but it's next to impossible to logically stack them or have them as layers of firewalls in an infrastructure.
• Lack of cloud based management. The Cisco Meraki security devices do this well, but the ASAs are still behind in this regard.

Incentivized

• Getting CrowdSec to run on OPNsense can be a challenge, but that's also a limitation of the OS
• You can only subscribe to a couple of feeds before paying an unknown amount of money that's part of their "Enterprise" package. So, there could be better transparency.

Incentivized

To be honest there has been now great products out in the market compared to Cisco ASA. I beleieve Cisco has to do a lot of improvement in this area. The other defeiniete factors is the cost when it comes to renewals which is always a premium on Cisco products

Incentivized

I generally have not noticed the outages, however since it's a machine it can malfunction, we need to implement the firewall infrastructure in such a way that it is highly available with device failure, region failure etc. Else any solution will be having the issues if they are not build with resiliency.

Incentivized

The support is usually very good and gets back to you very quickly. However I had some instances of when two engineers will give me wildly different answers to what I thought was a simple question. Overall however I do rate the support highly and they are generally always very good.

Incentivized

It was quite a good one, how ever requires an expertise to deploy hence the SMB segment would be finding it difficult to implement this product. The one good reason is that there are lot of ASA certified engineers in compared to the other certified engineers. Hence this resembles positively on the deployment as you have quite a lot of experienced engineer on your deployment

Incentivized

Cisco has made it easy to buy, set up, and manage all of our firewalls with the central FirePower Management Center. All licensing is done via one license portal too. Tech support is standardized for all ASA devices and like support engineers who know the different models to provide timely help for any issues. Cisco Talos is a premier could platform which scours the internet looking for threats and develops protections for the ASA's and as such provides zero second coverage when it best can detect global issues.

Incentivized

• I know a customer who is still using a Pix[.]
• The 5510 is still being used in one of our setups, and still doing its job this is a lot of Return on Investment.
• We have managed to turn around projects quickly because most of our engineers understand this firewall very well. We deploy them in a matter of minutes[.]

Incentivized

• It flat-out blocks malicious IPs from accessing any PC on my network.
• It's free-tier makes this a no brainer to implement

Incentivized