Cisco Review
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
A firewall. So ultimately it's just preventing and allowing access as needed.
Pros
- For us, to power the whole system does scaling quite a bit. So we can definitely have a lot of room to grow if needed. The device can support a lot of way more than we need right now, but in the future, if we need more it seems to be a big pro of that. Also the support of Cisco, knowing that it's backed by Cisco definitely is good. You guys are the largest players in the market
Cons
- 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
Return on Investment
- 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.