We performed a comparison between Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center 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."Scalability is not an issue as long as you are able to buy additional licenses. Ten percent of our customers use Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center, and we have large accounts with 50% of their end users behind this firewall."
"The most valuable feature of the Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is the UTM."
"The applied policy inside the firewall is good."
"The most valuable features are the Virtual Private Network and the Electronic Control Lists."
"My clients have never contacted me with any issues, so I believe the solution is stable."
"The solution has a great UI and a policy deployment mechanism, and all the configuration is easily manageable for the firewalls."
"It is a stable solution. Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."
"I like its system management and filtering options as a layer seven firewall."
"The Security Manager part of FireMon... gives me an eye on everything that's out there, everything that I cannot see. Because I'm not a network admin, I cannot go to a firewall itself, but at least I have FireMon so that I can go in and view everything that I want to view. And I can eliminate whatever I see that is wrong,"
"The most valuable feature is that everything is recorded in the historical logs, including the firewall rules, headcounts, object-level usage, and the rule documentation. The rule certification details are also there, which means that someone can be held accountable for a specific firewall rule."
"What I like about FireMon is the ability to track changes made by network engineers on the network."
"In one report, FireMon tells us there are, say, 1,000 rules that can be taken out and it gives us the ability to disable those for a year and to track when we made our changes. After a year, we can go back and eliminate the rules, to bring the configuration down to an almost human-readable level."
"Policy test, access path analysis, and change reports."
"It is the single place where we go to review all of our firewall changes. The solution makes it easier for us to track all the changes made. It is a central place where we can look at all the firewall rules, because we have three different firewall vendors. It save us time and creates efficiencies by looking at the general picture."
"The most valuable feature is the Firewall reviews for our company compliance."
"Firewall auditing is very important. We also use the solution for rule traffic analysis, traffic flow discovery and hidden/shadow rules within over 100 firewalls spanning five different brands."
"The product's setup could be easier."
"The initial setup is a bit complex."
"The IOS and the deploy option could be improved."
"Cisco firewalls use old ESR or a Linux system, and there are problems with encryption. When we switch on encryption, the throughput goes down."
"I had a challenging time trying to size the firewall on the cloud. Maybe the information is there, but I couldn't find it easily. Usually, it depends on the cloud provider itself, whether you use AWS or Azure. These guys give you the information, so this part is not as detailed."
"It takes five to seven minutes to push one policy."
"Areas for improvement include pricing points and the range of products available at any given time."
"The solution should improve the user interface."
"I ran a report and FireMon suggested that certain tools were not used. When I removed them, while it didn't bring our environment down completely, a lot of our environment started malfunctioning. Our backup system did not work, nor did other things that involve internal and external communication. We are not comfortable with what it did."
"Its reporting can be improved. I am the only one who works a lot with it, and I am having problems in terms of reporting. In the case of Palo Alto, I'm okay with it, but with some of the Cisco devices, such as routers, when I provide the reports to other teams for review, they always say that the hit count is incorrect. So, I was struggling for a long time to work with them. When working with other teams, they have a lot of questions about reporting, such as how it reports, and we are still struggling with that."
"The initial setup can take some time, including connecting it and configuring it. It's not something that is easy for anybody to do. There is time and energy required because of the number of systems you have to configure to get it to work properly."
"We have not used the Policy Planner but even so, we have identified areas of improvement with it during our testing. For example, it could be better when it comes to ease of integration or ease of policy automation. Another problem is that there is a console where it has too many options and is not very straightforward. Essentially, controlling it could be made more seamless."
"The stability has been fairly decent, but there have been a few issues. My coworker has had some issues in the past where he has had to work with support."
"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."
"FireMon could be easier to use and flexibility regarding reporting could be improved."
"The training for configuring new users or operators is confusing because the UI is not user-friendly and has room for improvement."
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Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is ranked 7th in Firewall Security Management with 19 reviews while FireMon Security Manager is ranked 4th in Firewall Security Management with 53 reviews. Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center is rated 8.0, while FireMon Security Manager is rated 8.2. The top reviewer of Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center writes "A stable and reasonably priced product that protects organizations from malware". 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 Secure Firewall Management Center is most compared with AWS Firewall Manager, Palo Alto Networks Panorama and Cisco Defense Orchestrator, whereas FireMon Security Manager is most compared with Tufin Orchestration Suite, AlgoSec, Skybox Security Suite, Palo Alto Networks Panorama and AWS Firewall Manager. See our Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center vs. FireMon Security Manager report.
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