Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center vs. Opinnate Network Security Policy Manager

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

Generating audit reports were taking days just before using Opinnate NSPM, now it takes a few minutes.

• 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

• 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

• Revision Compare Results could be exported in pdf

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

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

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

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

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

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

• 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