We performed a comparison between Cisco Defense Orchestrator and FireMon Security Manager based on real PeerSpot user reviews.
Find out in this report how the two Firewall Security Management solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.
"We have quite a few Active Stone by pairs. If they fail over... I'll see that there's a change on it and I'll have a look. The only change on it is that now this one is the standby, it took over the active role. I can go into that firewall and find out what happened... and troubleshoot based on that. That's pretty cool too."
"I like the upgrade feature. That is pretty valuable to me because I have dual ASAs and when I go through CDO it does it for me pretty well. It's all done in the back-end and I don't really have to be involved. I just initiate, pick the image, and I pick when I want it done and it just does it, whether I have a single ASA or have a dual ASA."
"If our server is blocked, this solution shows us why it is blocked and allows us to update the network routing."
"The most valuable feature is that you can push one policy or one rule out to several devices at a time."
"The initial setup was straightforward. We spun up the VM onsite. We generated the key that it needed to talk to the Cloud Orchestrator. After that, as I started adding devices, it was relatively quick and easy."
"The bulk changes feature is definitely the most valuable."
"For this product, they are very uncharacteristically interested in resolving whatever issue the customer reports. They're really attentive, and they address whatever we bring up as quickly as they can. That's been a very positive aspect of the product."
"If we have a firewall go down, I can hop into CDO, pull the latest configuration off and apply it. That's really good. It helps save time."
"It provides us with a single pane of glass for our on-prem environment, to see configuration. We have not implemented into the cloud yet. We can search for an object group and see where it lives on any firewall in the enterprise or find security rules, no matter what firewall they're on."
"The most valuable feature is the reporting capability because everything that we do is a result of our being able to query a report, based on our environment and our PCI compliance efforts."
"For the cleanup of firewall rules, it performs really well for us. We utilize it in our regular rule cleanup tasks, several times a year. FireMon is our primary tool when doing that, either by going through its out-of-the-box compliance rules or using it to search for certain things in our rules that we want to prune from our firewalls."
"Vendor agnostic when it comes to integrating with other product."
"The most valuable feature is the Firewall reviews for our company compliance."
"It gives us the ability to go to one place to look for potential firewall rules that are inappropriate, or which don't meet compliance. Instead of manually searching hundreds of firewalls for a policy, we can go to this one location and find the rules which are now out of compliance."
"The most valuable features are Policy Optimizer and Firewall Manager for different brands of firewall."
"The firewall assessment feature is great."
"There could be some slight improvements to navigation. In some of the navigation you've got to go back to be able to get into where you need to be once you've made a change. If I make a change, I've then got to go back to submit and send the change."
"They need to work on the user interface. It needs to be improved to make it more user-friendly."
"It would be a better product if it incorporated device control for third-party products easily."
"I'd like CDO to be the one-stop-shop where we could do all the configurations easily. It would be nice, for ASA upgrades, if we could do them from a central repository and not have to reach out to Cisco. That would be a definite plus."
"The main thing that would useful for us would the logging and monitoring. I have to check it out, to get the beta, because I don't have access to them... I wanted CDO to be a central place so where I could do everything but right now I don't think that's possible. I really don't want to go back and forth between this and FMC. Maybe the logging portion, when I look at it, will give me some similarities."
"Cisco Defense Orchestrator can improve by providing more support for third-party security components."
"We had some MX devices that were blocking Windows Update from happening. We found out it was a Meraki issue, but it would have been nice if it had been flagged for us: "Hey, these updates are failing because the MX is blocking it." It wasn't a huge problem, but there was a loss of our time as well as the fact that the updates didn't get pushed out... It would have been nice if CDO had let us know that that was an issue."
"They can centralize all products and provide a correlation about an incident and the response. They can also provide an on-premises solution. Currently, Cisco Defense Orchestrator is just for cloud deployments, not for on-premises deployments. Customers have to manage it on the cloud. We are based in Vietnam, and most of the customers here prefer to have on-premises deployments. Customers, especially from banking and government sectors, do not prefer to do anything on the cloud. Some of the small enterprises use the cloud."
"When it comes to documentation, they need to start putting together a basic command manual. With Cisco, you can look up a command and it gives you examples of three or four different ways that command can be used. It tells you how to put it into the GUI and the CLI. FireMon does need to start doing that."
"Some of the core functionality in our environment doesn't seem to work. We will get buggy code releases. They need to work on their Q&A of every code release."
"It comes as a Linux appliance on a server and we're not a Linux shop, we're more of a Windows shop. It would be great if they could automate or integrate the backups into it and other things through their GUI interface, just to make the management of Linux a little more transparent."
"Some of the things that you want to do in FireMon are not exactly straightforward, like creating certain reports or controls. Some of the functions could be a little more user-friendly, such as creating certain filters."
"We've had recurring issues managing FireMon's internal backups. Sometimes, the space allocated for the backup is full, and there is no process where it deletes files that are older than I certain date. It's just waiting for the storage to get full and then it's cleaned up. It isn't something that creates serious issues for us."
"The AWS integration is still not mature for us to use. It is just not ready for our use case for AWS connectivity. Therefore, it does not provide us with a single pane of glass for our cloud environments, because we can't manage our cloud environment with the tool."
"We have had some stability issues that are affecting operations. We rely heavily on this solution and if it isn't working then we have to create rules manually."
"The training for configuring new users or operators is confusing because the UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement."
Earn 20 points
Cisco Defense Orchestrator is ranked 14th in Firewall Security Management while FireMon Security Manager is ranked 4th in Firewall Security Management with 53 reviews. Cisco Defense Orchestrator is rated 8.2, while FireMon Security Manager is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Defense Orchestrator writes "Provides visibility into entire infrastructure and bulk changes save time and resources". On the other hand, the top reviewer of FireMon Security Manager writes "Makes compliance much easier compared to doing it manually, and automates policy changes across environments". Cisco Defense Orchestrator is most compared with Palo Alto Networks Panorama, AlgoSec, Tufin Orchestration Suite, Azure Firewall Manager and Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, whereas FireMon Security Manager is most compared with Tufin Orchestration Suite, AlgoSec, Skybox Security Suite, Palo Alto Networks Panorama and ManageEngine Firewall Analyzer. See our Cisco Defense Orchestrator vs. FireMon Security Manager report.
See our list of best Firewall Security Management vendors.
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