Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center vs. FireMon

Cisco Secure FMC is great for managing firewalls, but not so great for troubleshooting firewalls. It makes setting up VPNs between devices easy, and makes creating ACLs a breeze, but it is tough to grasp how to actually view the troubleshooting logs. The Connection Events tab doesn't always show all the information you need either, so troubleshooting specific events requires some more detective work.

Incentivized

FireMon is best used in a large environment (for example, I have >100
firewalls in my environment). It's best used when trying to improve
security posture and showing changes in firewall security over time. It
might not be the best choice for smaller environments or those that aren't concerned about security management.

Incentivized

• Great protection and security against the multiple digital virus attacks.
• Provides detailed logs to track any threat and helps to secure the network promptly.
• VPN service for remote access of important organizational applications.
• Best management tool for controlling data and bandwidth resources.

Incentivized

• PCI Reporting - After identifying which firewalls and rulesets are in scope, producing a report artifact to satisfy PCI requirements on Firewall reviews is literally a two-click operation.
• Storing Rule Metadata - FireMon stores metadata (prefilled fields, standard fields, and custom fields) for each rule in each policy which is valuable for context during firewall reviews in particular
• API - FireMon exposes most if not all of its functionality via REST API

Incentivized

• Areas like Computer Security need a console to view events.
• The different support areas would be greatly benefited if they managed to have consoles and alerts that told them where to mitigate the risks.
• The scope of areas such as Monitoring and Dispatch have a broad vision with tools such as applying the necessary filters for your environment.

Incentivized

• Some features could be added to the existing functionality which include NAT rules usage
• Rule expiration normalization from firewalls rather than entering them in rule documentation
• .csv exports of the files from the firewall pane only gives usage for 30 days by default and that should be increased

Incentivized

We are very satisfied with SecureX and it's adaptive, active nature in protecting or data and systems. It's easy to administer, update, review notifications and update when necessary. Cisco's security practice fits into our needs and continues to evolve as global cyber events change. SecureX is easy to migrate to new cisco gear as we upgrade to newer models when supports ends on older gear. Enabling fast ROI during these capital expenditure projects.

Incentivized

Once all the customization has been completed, the business is starting to see the return on investment. The visibility it provides into the network gear that is owned by other IT groups is immeasurable and has allowed us to apply standards across the board. The only thing I have concern with is their support documentation.

Incentivized

Overall usability is an eight for me because it is easy to manage the firewall policies and monitor the devices' health. The configurations are all done in the GUI which makes it more convenient and hassle free. You can also see the devices' health and the progress of the task thru its taskbar.

Incentivized

It save me time and I'm able to have the review - review the rule independently with using my time.

Incentivized

Since moving to Cisco secure management center from firepower management center we've had no application issues, outages or any other problems. It's always been there for us and always provides us the necessary protection and notification when we need it. Been very happy with all of our Cisco systems over our tenure to date.

Incentivized

FireMon has been relatively stable overall. However, there have been a handful of times where we had issues with the console. For example, we couldn't update which devices to include in a security assessment. The initial suggestion from support was to just reboot it. It seems like there weren't many other options available such as to restart services before going to the extreme of a complete reboot.

Incentivized

I'm not sure we have the largest implementation of FireMon out there but we do have a few 1000 devices being probed by FireMon. Overall, the system's performance has been rock solid. The console refreshes quickly and reports are generated within an expected timeframe.

Incentivized

We have the direct support of the manufacturer through its service channels, the attention is 24/7, and the response time is acceptable. The support for this tool is almost nil. It all depends on the level of implementation is carried out so that it can fail and request collaboration. Anyway, the manufacturer backs the entire Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC series appliances) solution.

Incentivized

FireMon technical support is awesome! They respond quickly to our requests and they are well trained and very knowledgeable about the tool. Some issues have to be referred to the development team, but technical support largely provides solutions for any issues that we may have.

Incentivized

Cisco secure firewall management center is easy to install, moderate to setup in conjunction with firewall hardware, and administration of policy changes afterwards is pretty straight forward. And flexible to add more advanced security configurations as needed. Cisco support website is pretty good for researching how to documentation too. Cisco secure firewall management center enables integration to SecureX - the cloud security protection service. And AMP which protects packet flow with real time analysis. Cisco secure fmc is the evolved name for cisco firepower management center so for those customers who have firepower this is a simple migration.

Incentivized

Implementation is fairly simple. Most issues can be resolved by referencing manuals.

Incentivized

Palo Alto Panorama is more user-friendly and provided faster policy deployment compared to Cisco FMC. Panorama is more stable compared to Cisco FMC. Cisco FMC is better when compared to CheckPoint Smart Console. Configuration and troubleshooting in CheckPoint Smart Console are more complicated and are not as user-friendly as it is in Cisco FMC

I has worked with AlgoSec and while they are very similar product, I find the FireMon is easier to understand and get rolling with. While both require some learning, FireMon is by far the easier one. Once you have an understanding of how things are arranged and labeled you can easily import firewalls and begin to work on them to improve them

Incentivized

Firemon Is easily scalable and maintainable with any size team. Although it requires some tech debt, it is well worth the time to invest to ensure compliance is visible and reports are accurate. Although our environment is very large we do not fully utilize the scalability of the Firemon product.

Incentivized

• We are able to more easily manage the firewalls and their rules via the UI versus relying on an MSP.
• We were not aware of the site-to-site capability limitations when purchasing, so we had to purchase additional hardware to repair that issue at the time.
• The API does make it easy to build multiple rules, objects, etc. in bulk, and we have used it quite a lot. This prevents tedious and typo-prone tasks from occurring on the regular.
• Multiple cases have been required for issues with the firewalls and the management center.

Incentivized

• It helps us save us time in determining what change was made and by whom.
• Real time alerting is a great convenience in helping us know if something went wrong, we can immediately review the last report to determine what has changed.
• Allows us to determine what rules are not used and if said rules are still required.

Incentivized