Cisco Wins Award for Being a Market Leader in Network Firewalls
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I have to admit that I was happy to see this award. #itsabouttime
You might wonder why since Telcion is a purveyor of many best-in-class solutions from Cisco. The truth is, Cisco firewalls were a lackluster product for several years and were getting their tail kicked by competitors. You’ll notice that I’m being very specific here in talking only about firewalls. Cisco’s overall security portfolio is very comprehensive and full of excellent products and services. But the firewalls, well, they were just so-so.
Let’s talk this through and what it means for you today.
For a long time, Cisco firewalls were the #1 product on the market – both in sales and technical capabilities. But as we started the shift to next generation products that had the ability to analyze packets in real time and make immediate decisions on whether certain streams of data were a threat or not, Cisco started to fall behind. And not because they didn’t have products that could do the job, but because these products had outdated user interfaces, were difficult to configure, and full of bugs. I know because our company had to support these solutions for several years and our security engineers spent hundreds of hours troubleshooting issues that shouldn’t have existed.
Cisco bought a couple of companies to enhance their feature set as well, which eventually led to the redesigned Firepower series which is what is offered today. Firepower, in its current version, is a powerful product. But the road to get there was not an easy one.
Often, when a vendor is updating their portfolio of products, it’s a transition. Sometimes that transition is smooth, and other times it can be pretty rough. The latter was the case with Cisco and their firewall products. As they made the transition from Cisco ASA firewalls to the FirePower solution, we had to deal with software that didn’t work right, along with multiple iterations of hardware before we got the right blend. The problem you may experience is deciding if you should bail on a particular product, or just hang tight until the vendor gets it right.
I’ve been betting on Cisco technology for well over 20 years now and what I have learned is that Cisco is an outstanding manufacturer overall. But they do have hiccups from time to time, and they have the resources required to overcome those obstacles. It just takes time. The key question is whether I buy into their overall strategy or not. If I do, then usually I’ll hang on. Even though I must admit in the firewall realm it got pretty difficult for a while.
What helped me stick with it is the fact that I believe Cisco has the most comprehensive security strategy on the market. So even though the firewall component was not what it needed to be for a time, the rest of the products and services that encompass the whole strategy were excellent. These include Cisco Umbrella for cloud DNS security, DUO for multi-factor authentication, Secure Endpoints for real-time desktop security, and TALOS – the most comprehensive real-time repository of security threats available not to mention the thousands of security engineers employed to monitor this data and make it available to all of the products in the portfolio. No other vendor can match these unique capabilities, put them together in a single portfolio of products, and have them managed and correlated through a single dashboard called Cisco SecureX.
Choosing what vendor to work with on a particular technology need can often be daunting. There are a lot of choices out there. Although Cisco may not be perfect or #1 all the time, I have found that they have more resources and most often get it right. I have far less confidence in other vendors’ ability to deliver consistently over time.
If you’ve been hanging on by a thread with Cisco firewalls, it’s time to take another look and know that the current technology available is winning awards. Couple that with Cisco’s overall security strategy and you have a winning set of solutions that will protect and secure your network better than any other. It takes a multi-layered approach to win with security, and Cisco delivers.
This post was contributed by Lance Reid, our CEO. Lance has worked in the technology industry for over 25 years. He became a Cisco Certified Internetworking Expert (CCIE) in Collaboration in 2005 and has been serving on Cisco's SMB Advisory Board since 2013.
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