Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center vs. Skybox Security

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

For any customer that has a complex network environment spanning globally, skybox helps manage firewall policy compliance for many vendors quite easy. It has a variety of security and network vendors that it is compatible with in its database.

• 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

• Change tracking
• Configuration compliance
• Network map

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

• It doesn't support and integrate with Microsoft Azure
• The pricing is quite high compared to others
• There are a lot of bugs in the solution
• The implementation is not that easy and takes a long time, it needs to be more automated.

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

It is user friendly and quite easy to use. It centralizes all info in one portal and generates good reports to help you visualize and assess your change management decision

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

The support team needs to be improved especially in their response and awareness about recent bugs in their solution. For example, sometimes they are not aware about how to integrate specific vendors like Microsoft Azure and they still don't have answers to it until now.

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

Skybox performs better than Tufin and RedSeal and while AlgoSec performs as well, it requires far more manual configuration and customization than Skybox

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

• Reduces cost in terms of time and money to spend in remediation activity.
• Improve the network topology and then it's possibile to reduce cost of network/security appliances where they're not necessary.
• The cost of the solution is not trivial when the number of network appliances is big.

Incentivized