Cisco offers the Firepower 2100 Series NGFW, designed to allow businesses to gain resiliency through superior security with sustained performance. The Firepower 2100 Series has a dual multicore CPU architecture that optimizes firewall, cryptographic, and threat inspection functions simultaneously, to achieve security doesn’t come at the expense of network performance.
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WatchGuard Network Security
Score 8.6 out of 10
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WatchGuard Network Security is a network security and firewall software. WatchGuard includes secure Wi-Fi, multi-factor authentication, and network intelligence products and services designed for SMB’s.
The Cisco [Firepower] 2100 [Series] is an easy sell for anyone looking. You already know Cisco excels in the security department, but now that firepower lives right on the box and inline with the rest of the firewall data flow you can save yourself a lot of time and headaches. Unless you cant quite afford Cisco's 2100 line, there's not much reason to go with the competition.
Watchguard is well suited for small businesses without significantly complex networks and infrastructure. WatchGuard firewalls perform well on IPv4 networks and offer basic security features that match other vendors that target the small business market. WatchGuard firewalls are less appropriate for mid-sized business and larger. There is limited IPv6 support, and the firmware often lacks some or all of more advanced features that businesses that size often need.
Career-wise very familiar with the ASAs, you know, the previous gen firewalls, Pyxis, ASAs, the CHA. As far as being intuitive, those seem to be far more intuitive to learn and figure out what the features and changes and config management, all that stuff is. With Firepower, it's a learning curve and I feel like I have quite a bit of experience with it, and so does my team, but feels like it's not as intuitive, and trying to make changes just always seems harder for some reason. We've gone to some Cisco security training and all that, but even then it's just harder to work with. The other big thing is, and this is a big gripe of mine, I suppose, that on any other firewall, when we have various different manufacturers, if you make a change, you know, a simple change object, object name gets changed or object is deleted or whatever the simplest of change is, it gets implemented instantly.
With the Firepower system, you have to deploy the change and it'll take about six or seven minutes for the change to actually take, which is insanely different than any other platform where that change is instantaneous. So let's say if I'm making seven different changes for a troubleshooting job I don't know which one of the seven is gonna fix it, I do one by one by one. I'm like, oh, let me try one change, one second, change, third change, four changes. It's going to take seven deploys. And seven deploys mean it's gonna take an hour of just deploy time. So that is a big, big gripe
I'm giving this note to WatchGuard Network Security due to its ease of daily support (after acquiring necessary knowledge in the solution), which allows agility in configuration changes, its integration of several reliable security features (such as SSL VPN, VPN Virtual Interfaces between companies, and others) and functional and stability in operation, with no downtime in the equipment due to problems or malfunctions
Although it might take some time to figure out, we have been able to use WatchGuard's online reference library and tech support to create/implement/modify all of our filtering rules and exceptions needed. There really has not been a shortcoming other than perhaps a learning curve.
Availability has always been a strong point of this product, it is rare that watchguard does not have a solution for customers' network monitoring needs.
The performance of WatchGuard Network Security is very good, in the years that we have used the solution we have only had a single error and Watchguard itself was able to solve it. Furthermore, when purchasing any product, the partner always evaluates the capacity of the solution to recommend the most appropriate product for our needs.
For something that is considered business critical they should be far more responsive. Security isn't something to take lightly in today's work environment and so long as its working you are happy. But when it doesn't and you need that professional assistance, they weren't always there and I ultimately resolved my issues with the help of Google.
We participate to a in person training and the three days of learning was really useful and complete to gain skill to solve the major part of the problem we encounter during our life. And more the in person training give us the opportunity to create a network with other WatchGuard partner.
I had my key information for setting up the firewall, and they assisted me in finding the settings and appropriate places to enter data. They also helped troubleshoot when I didn't understand some of their feature concepts, and we got it running.
I think the solutions are comparable, but the cloud management piece is critical for MSPs these days. We need to be able to schedule and push out updates as soon as they are stable and ready. Insurance companies and government regulations mandate this.
This product is very scalable since previously everything related to Watchguard was on premises but that has now changed with the inclusion of watchguard cloud. Now the product has evolved to have full control of firewalls at the cloud level.
It's keeping threats out like a firewall should. Definitely cost wise it is at a higher cost center than other alternatives. Especially when it comes to licensing. Cisco is generally the higher, for perhaps, definitely for good reason, right? I mean, definitely positive impact as far as working as it should that's at cost.
at least 3-5X a year (that I know of), this device has single-handedly prevented members of our staff from inadvertently connecting to services they did not intend and could have resulted in security disruption
although you can never rule out human-behaviour-engineered threat, it's helpful to know that our network has a higher level, enterprise-class control and monitoring behind it
any time our network might be showing signs of abnormal performance, the WatchGuard control panel is the first place I turn to help identify the level of concern. It can quickly set my mind at ease and help to identify the specific device that might be out of compliance
