The Cisco Firepower® 1000 Series for small to medium-size businesses and branch offices is a family of four threat-focused Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) security platforms designed to deliver business resiliency through superior threat defense. The vendor provides that they offers exceptional sustained performance when advanced threat functions are enabled. The 1000 Series’ throughput range addresses use cases from the small office, home office, remote branch office to the Internet edge. The…
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Zscaler Internet Access
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Zscaler Internet Access™ (ZIA) is a secure web gateway (SWG), delivering cloud native cyberthreat protection and zero trust access to the internet and SaaS apps.
Cisco Firepower 1000 Series is best and required for every organization. It will give you more control [over] incoming and outgoing traffic and more visibility on user traffic. Sandbox is one of the best features [that] provides you [with] deep-level packet scans and gives you multilayered security. It can stop any malware attack on your organization. The support of Cisco is very fast and lots of documentation are available on the Cisco website.
Zscaler Internet Access has extremely powerful category selection and it is very easy to create your own destinations for inspection and policy exceptions (SSL exception specifically). It is also very affordable and just as powerful (if not more) than some of the other solutions I have used in the past to achieve internet security.
My organization is all Cisco and wants to stay in the Cisco life cycle, Firepower 1000 series is great for small to medium-size office.
Very robust enterprise-grade security solution with updated threat features to handle any current and upcoming threats. The solution is backed by Cisco to ensure constant security updates. Integrated AnyConnect remote client VPN is a big plus to allow for secure remote workers access. Easier to set up a site to site VPN due to the large user base and case studies published on integrating to other manufacturer solutions.
The depth that Cloud App control policies can go into. Being able to control individual actions within an application, more than just all or nothing access.
The UX/UI design makes it really easy to navigate the portal.
Understanding how cloud app/url control policy gets evaluated and creating/editing existing policy is extremely straightforward.
It is quite good, robust and reliable but not always so easy to manage and configure. The tools could be improved and the price is not low for an entry level firewall
While Zscaler Internet Access (ZIA) delivers critical value in cloud security and RBI compliance, I rate renewal likelihood 7/10 due to evolving needs versus platform limitations. Below is my rationale:
Firepowers are secure, reliable, central management and configuration is easy and they fit in well with our existing Cisco infrastructure. Good feature set and support. Good management and control with chassis manager and central control with additional Firepower Management Centre.
The application is easy to install and configure on all Windows devices. To troubleshoot any internet issue, we can easily collect all the relevant logs from Zscaler and check the exact issue. The only problem is with the uninstall, as a dedicated crew needs to provide the password.
Great performance even on the lower end model of the series. You can push a lot of traffic through these devices without much performance impact. If you decide you want to inspect encrypted traffic however, you may take a big hit on the cpu and memory of the box, but they still manage to keep up even with all the bells and whistles turned on.
Where's the 0 option... It sucks if you do not have an active Cisco contract. From my experience, trying to get the original batch of encryption licenses added was a nightmare and without it the firewalls are not secure. Just include basic security by default and don't require a registration.
Zscaler's ZIA support is quick and knowledgable. They respond within 1-2 hours of you submitting your ticket. They are very thorough and are typically ready to jump on a live troubleshooting session. Our ZIA platform and how we use is it unique so at times tickets can be open for weeks but we alway get quality support compared to other unrelated product support in our enterprise
We use both devices for different purposes. Both have their benefits, which we try to bring to best use in our environment. This makes it hard to compare them. All I can say for sure is, that they work quite well as a team, each leveling out the others flaws.
Zscaler Internet Access is most akin to ZPA - we bought both at the same time to handle all traffic internally and externally. In terms of quality - I would make the statement that Zscaler Internet Access is a simpler product but that's also cause there are no App Connectors involved in that process.
This product has kept hackers, malware, and viruses at bay for large hospitals and small alike. Very valuable data can reside behind this so long as it is set up correctly.
The value is great with SnortV3. Very versatile if you need a hybrid scenario with Multi-Cloud support.
Has allowed us to remove other products that were suboptimal
Saved us money overall by stacking it with other Zscaler products
Created a more secure work environment for our users through intelligent internet policies that are not needlessly restrictive while still maintaining security best practices
