Cisco IOS Security Reviews

The main purpose of Cisco IOS Security is for our data center. It connects each node and user to the network.

The most valuable feature of Cisco IOS Security is posturing.

Cisco IOS Security could improve by having more compatibility with other Cisco solutions.

I have been using Cisco IOS Security for approximately three years.

Cisco IOS Security is a stable solution.

The scalability of Cisco IOS Security is good. I can increase and decrease elements when needed.

We have approximately 45,000 people that can use the solution. Additionally, We have approximately 1,000 IT managers, technicians, and other users who directly use this solution.

The support from Cisco IOS Security was very helpful.

I rate the support from Cisco IOS Security a four out of ten.

I previously used another similar solution.

I can do all the implementation of the solutions through the Cisco DNA Center. I can manage the Cisco IOS Security configuration. The whole process can be complex. Additionally, when we cannot connect to the internet we need to do manual configuration.

The full setup can take a couple of hours. However, initially, it took to use a couple of weeks.

We did the implementation of Cisco IOS Security in-house.

We have two service engineers that are involved in the deployment and maintenance of the solution. They have the appropriate training needed to support the solution.

I rate Cisco IOS Security an eight out of ten.

We can use iOS security for a variety of security features. We can use it to run DPM. We run encrypted data and can use it for zone-based firewalls, to a zone-based firewall.

I use VPN solutions such as site-to-site or user-site VPN, and some do not require a firewall.

It is less expensive than alternative firewalls.

While Cisco IOS Security is stable and scalable, I would like to see it improved to be even better.

I have been working with Cisco IOS Security for three months.

I use version 12.4 and I use 15 and above for the router.

Cisco IOS Security is very stable.

Cisco IOS Security is a scalable solution.

We have approximately 50 users.

We have not contacted technical support.

I don't have any critical issues, and I haven't had any open technical tickets with support. Everything is fine, but I work in security with multi-media solutions. We haven't had any problems.

The installation is straightforward. It's easy, we didn't have any problems with the installation of Cisco IOS Security.

I have three or four technical teams to help me work on publishing.

Cisco IOS Security requires a license.

With Cisco, we have a variety of licenses. They have smart licenses that can be provided for one year, two years, three years, five years, and seven years. Alternatively, they have perpetual licenses available. I am working with a perpetual license, but not a smart license.

Before we can use any security feature on the Cisco router, we must first purchase an iOS security license.

Yes, I would recommend this solution. It is more stable and less expensive than other firewalls. In some cases, it saves money for the project or the companies that work with it.

I would rate Cisco IOS Security an eight out of ten.

The solution is used for enterprise and NAC connectivity.

This kind of technology has the advantage of being very flexible to any size organization. It is a cornerstone as a part of the basic network infrastructure.

It can be used as a simple switch to connect your network devices with security features embedded - such as port security, for example. This allows companies to limit to a fixed address per port, avoiding external or malicious assets for accessing the network.

For example, if you have a retail business, and you have a lot of small stores spread nationwide, you just need to connect some cameras and sales points to the network. iOS security solutions allow you to have a secure LAN and you could add a secure WAN connection through your Internet provider with LTE links as backups. You can set up on-demand VPN connections from store to store for voice/video calls, or do inventory queries direct to the HQ database.

As a Cisco partner/reseller, security has been a concern for many years. Cisco has a security concept that begins right when you try to connect to the network. Security is a complete system and is not just put on security devices at the perimeter or between tiers inside a data center.

iOS on routers is a mature solution, allowing easy setup of a traditional ISAKMP V1 or V2 VPN, and a very mature proprietary VPN flavor called DMVPN. DMVPN allows on-demand VPN establishment with minimal setup configuration and creates a pseudo full mesh avoiding bottlenecks. 

Cisco Technical Assistance Center works on a follow-the-sun concept and gives real 24x7 customer support, which is a great advantage when you have a service contract with them.

The best features include the Auto Secure script, port security, spanning-tree root and loop guard, 802.1x, DMVPN, GET VPN, SD-Access, and Secure SD-WAN.

The software offers plenty of security solutions that can work in the most sophisticated enterprise but also works well for small/mid-range enterprises.

A simple switch is able to run basic security as port security, limiting the MAC addresses allowed on a port, or by running a script you can set up ACL and some control plane policies to protect control and management planes and basic DoS protection.

The same software is able to work with sophisticated security options going from the basic 802.1x to MACSEC, NAC, and trustsec, and can be integrated with automation tools in order to do auto onboarding tasks (for wired devices), profiling, and more interesting security tasks.

It allows for easy traditional ISAKMP V1 or V2 VPN setups and has a very mature proprietary VPN flavor called DMVPN. DMVPN allows on-demand VPN establishment with minimal setup configuration involved and creates a pseudo full mesh (avoiding bottlenecks as a hub-spoke topology does). Dynamic VPN establishment allows spoke-to-spoke traffic flow on-demand, optimizing VoIP/SIP calls setting up direct tunnels among spokes, reducing latency compared with a hub/spoke topology.

Switch and router iOS can be automated and orchestrated with secure SD-WAN and SD-Access Cisco solutions. Having the iOS software is relevant for small and large enterprises; it works fine for all size networks.

There are the usual bugs that are inherent to some software upgrades. Sometimes this provides some unexpected issues, however, it happens with all brands all the time.

Some additional features could be improved. For example, the licensing for DNA environments could be better. In some countries, the end-user does not want to go to orchestration/automation environments. They just want to have a small network for their small budget and they never will go to these environments. They consider it unfair that they have to pay for a license/subscription that will never be used.

I've used the solution for ten or more years.

It is very stable.

The product is very scalable.

Technical support is great.

Positive

My customers have used other brands that just gave connectivity and did not offer security over LAN switches. The VPN scheme was limited to site-to-site over hub-and-spoke topologies.

The initial setup is straightforward.

We are the vendor team that handles implementations.

Cisco is not a cost-effective brand, however, in the end, you get what you pay for. Regarding licensing, some customers will not use automation/orchestration environments and do not like to pay a subscription for something they will never use.

We are a reseller and Cisco IOS Security is one of the network security products that we offer to our clients. The primary use case is securing connectivity between sites. Examples of this are between a site and a data center, or a site and a cloud provider.

DMVPN as a technology, not necessarily for security, has allowed my customers to be more agile in their connectivity, without having to rely on a hub-and-spoke topology. Rather, they can leverage a full mesh topology, which is essentially SD-WAN.

IPsec allows us to overlay that, which means we can obfuscate the underlying infrastructure, whatever the transports are. Whether it is a secure private transport like MPLS or just public internet, we can commoditize the underlying transports and trust that everything is secured from prying eyes. 

What I have used the most and received the most benefit from is the IPsec technology. It overlays on DMVPN tunnels and being able to secure these object-based tunnels is good because they perform significantly better than traditional IPsec tunnels.

With respect to user-friendliness, it is a command-line interface and those with such experience will get along just fine, whereas others may struggle. My expectation is that it will remain a primarily command-line-based technology.

The biggest annoyance is probably the quality control of the code. They have to make sure that they are better at vetting bugs and software issues before they release code to the general public.

I have been working with this product for the past ten years.

It is not the most stable system that I have worked with.

I don't think that scalability is much of an issue.

Our clients are small enterprise-level organizations, typically between 1,000 and 5,000 knowledge workers.

The technical support is pretty good and I would rate them an eight out of ten. If anything, they should work on their response times for critical cases.

I would say that 80% of my experience is with Cisco products.

The initial setup is fairly complex, although it depends on the feature sets that you're looking for. Cisco IOM is probably the most complex part of it because it involves setting up all of the QoS policies, performance-routing policies, and performance-routing domains.

From a DMVPN over IPsec perspective, it is pretty straightforward.

Price is certainly something that the IOS technology has fallen behind the competition on.

My advice for anybody who is implementing this product is to ensure that they don't overlook the technical overhead that is required to get it set up and keep it running. From an SD-WAN perspective, there are more user-friendly options out there, so they are going to have their own shortcomings. However, if you're going down the route of a Cisco command-line-based solution then make sure that you're prepared to have the staff on hand to manage it or instead, have a trusted partner that you work with and has the expertise to manage it.

From a feature-set perspective, as long as Cisco continues down the path of combining features from its products onto the unified platform, it will have all the features you need.

It's a good product and it does exactly what it's intended to do, but there and stability issues and the price is expensive.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Our primary use is just as a firewall. That is pretty much it.  

We are able to filter a lot of traffic. The is especially effective when a lot of the traffic is in layer 7 — the internet aspect of security for application services.  

I think the multi-layered approach is valuable. Just the fact that it covers everything on the LSA (Local Security Authority) right up to layer 7, in-depth packet analysis, and all that. It covers everything we need it to without looking to secondary solutions.  

I think the user interface for IOS Security needs to be improved.  

I think the signature updates and all the other critical definitions need to be updated more frequently.  

We have only been using IOS (Internetwork Operating System) Security since about 2016. So we have worked with it for about four years.  

The stability of the product is okay. There were not really any bugs or glitches that I can remember.  

The scalability aspect of it is that it is one of those products where you have to incorporate additional hardware. It is a vertical scale, so you add on the boxes you need and bond them together. Of course, it costs more to scale that way than something that would be a software upgrade. You have got to pay to scale and to get more features.  

Our clients are generally small to medium-sized businesses. Cisco IOS is a pretty good fit for that range of clients.  

I have used the Cisco technical support and they were okay. Rating them out of ten, I would give them an eight or nine-out-of-ten. They have a pretty good system with decent response time and accuracy. They are good overall and in comparison to other services. They offer 24/7 service, which is a benefit.  

I was actually using Cisco products more in the past and use them as a consultant. Right now, Sophos is the only one I have been using. It just came about through one of those situations where we were able to partner up with Sophos. That is really the reason for the change.  

Setup and installation are pretty much straightforward. Comparing the installation to Fortinet or Sophos they are all the same.  

The pricing for IOS Security is okay. It is competitive. It costs more when you have got the need to pay for more features. You have to buy more boxes and tie them together to upgrade to the next level.  

I have used Fortinet in the past too as well as Sophos and other Cisco products. They are all similar and if you know how to use them they are virtually all the same.  

The advice that I would give to others looking into implementing this product is that I think they need to do their benchmarking. They should do due diligence beforehand in terms of their traffic.  

On a scale from one to ten (where one is the worst and ten is the best), I would rate this product overall as about an eight-out-of-ten. I do not know how they could realistically improve on that much. You never keep up with the hackers, they are always a step ahead of us when it comes to security.  

The product is quite mature. Cisco is well known within the industry.

The solution's most valuable aspect is that it is extremely integrated. The product basically comes with the firewall features including IPS, URL filtering, malware, et cetera. The integrated features are great.

The functionalities of the product are pretty good.

Cisco has always been a premium product. There's a lot of other entry-level solutions. This is more robust.

The solution offers a good mix of features. You can always add more modules as you need to if you need even more features.

The pricing of the solution can be improved. It's not cheap. It's quite expensive.

The company needs to make its solution more affordable to make it more accessible to larger markets. Otherwise, it's seen as an enterprise-level solution that small or medium-sized organizations can't afford and therefore they won't even look at it.

I've been using the solution for quite a long time. It's been ten or 15 years. I have well over a decade of experience under my belt.

The solution is stable. We find Cisco to be very reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. There aren't bugs or glitches that disrupt its performance. It's good. There's never been an issue.

The solution can scale. It's designed more as an enterprise-level solution, so it's good for larger companies.

The customer support is great. We're quite satisfied with the level of service Cisco provides. They're knowledgeable and responsive.

Overall, we find that they have the best technical support in the business. Their support is quite competent in terms of their technical skills, more so than other competitors. If you face any issues, you can call them at any time and get the answers you need to resolve whatever is going on.

I've used a variety of other solutions. I've used Check Point, Palo Alto, and Juniper as well.

We primarily like Cisco due to the fact that their technical support is great. By far, it's the best I've ever seen.

The solution's initial setup is very straightforward. It's not complex at all.

The solution's costs are quite high. It's a turn-off in terms of actually using it. It's more of an enterprise-level solution. It's not ideal for smaller organizations as the cost to run it would be out of their budgeting capabilities.

We use a few different Cisco solutions. 

We're a Cisco partner. We have a business relationship with the company.

We're dealing with the latest version of this particular solution.

I'd rate the solution seven out of ten. 

The value for money it should be there. Which means good features, good functioning things are there, but they need to make it more affordable for big market. If they were able to price the solution to make it more affordable for more clients that may not be enterprise-level, they've have a bigger footprint.

Cisco IOS Security has many good features, but compared to other solutions, it has a more user-friendly interface with steps to apply and manage rules. Another good part of the solution is that it's more straightforward.

An area for improvement in Cisco IOS Security is the performance because it's not as stable sometimes. There's also some latency in the solution, which could be improved. Cisco IOS Security integrates with other solutions, but you'll encounter many errors after integration, so this is another area for improvement.

I'd like to see enhanced performance and a simplified setup in the next version of Cisco IOS Security.

I've been working with Cisco IOS Security for more than five years.

Cisco IOS Security isn't as stable.

Cisco IOS Security isn't as scalable, but it's okay. It's suitable for enterprise companies.

The technical support for Cisco IOS Security is very good. The support team responds every time.

Setting up Cisco IOS Security wasn't very easy because it's not a standalone solution. The setup requires merging rules and integration with other solutions, which could take some time.

The pricing for Cisco IOS Security is reasonable compared to other Cisco products.

I'm working with Cisco products such as firewalls, ISE, routers, data centers, FTD, and most of the Cisco technologies. I have experience with Cisco IOS Security as well.

My company is a partner and reseller of Cisco products.

My customers, particularly enterprise customers, use Cisco IOS Security.

My advice to others looking into implementing Cisco IOS Security is to do a POC first. It would help to be careful about performance, latency, and management issues with Cisco IOS Security.

I'd rate Cisco IOS Security as seven out of ten.

The most valuable features of Cisco IOS Security are the plenty of functionality it provides, many people are IT certified the usage, and the user interface is good.

Cisco IOS Security could improve its security features. There are competitors that have some additional security features, such as Fortinet FortiGate. Additionally, there should be better synchronization with Cisco IOS Security and other vendors, and improved AI features would be beneficial.

I have been using Cisco IOS Security for over 20 years.

Cisco IOS Security is stable.

The scalability of Cisco IOS Security is good.

The technical support from Cisco IOS Security is of an average level. They had some difficulties.

I rate the support from Cisco IOS Security a four out of five.

Cisco IOS Security price could be reduced, it is more expensive than many of the other solutions, such as Sophos and Fortinet FortiGate.

This solution has some advantages over competitors, but it has weaknesses too.

I rate Cisco IOS Security an eight out of ten.

We primarily use the product as a security solution within our company.

Overall, the devices are very good and reliable.

The product is easy to use.

It's quite a stable solution.

The installation process is easy.

Technical support has always been very good.

It's a good device yet it's not a market leader. There are better options for customers to choose from.

There could be a bit more functions on offer that could make it easier to use.

We have used the solution for four years. It's been a while. We have a bit of experience with it at this point. 

The stability is great and the performance is good. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. it doesn't crash or freeze. 

We have about 2,000 users on the product currently.

Cisco technical support is the best in the world. They are very helpful and responsive and we are always satisfied with the amount of assistance we get.

Previous to this solution, we did not use anything else.

It's straightforward to set up. The product isn't too complex in terms of implementation. It takes about two days to deploy everything. 

You only need two people for installation. We have two technicians for the installation of the product and two engineers for managing the product.

We handle the implementation ourselves in-house. We don't need outside consultants or integrators. 

We pay a yearly subscription for signatures and stuff for the filtering, debugging inspection.

We did not evaluate anything before we started using Cisco. We didn't evaluate other options.

We always use two versions behind the latest version. We do not use the latest version typically.

I'd rate the solution at a six out of ten.

I wouldn't recommend the solution to other users or organizations at this time.

We are using Cisco IOS Security for endpoint security. For example, spyware, firewall, database and application protection.

I have been using the solution for approximately 10 years.

The solution is stable.

We have found the solution to be scalable.

We have approximately 20 customers using this solution.

The technical is excellent.

The installation is straightforward.

We have two engineers that do the implementation and maintenance of the solution.

The price of the solution should be cheaper, and the license is purchase annually.

I recommend this solution to others and advise them to use the latest version.

I rate Cisco IOS Security an eight out of ten.