Cisco Secure IPS vs. Snort

For scenarios, I described before, like when you have centralized administration and several locations, and the majority of those locations have the same size/requirements, Firepower is well suited. Easy to maintain, relatively cheap to buy. For scenarios too small, like small sales offices like ours, I don't think Firepower could fit, basically because you'll need to invest a certain amount of money to buy, license and deploy.

Incentivized

If a colleague was looking to tighten down their network I can easily recommend Snort to them. It gives you some more peace of mind knowing that its always scanning traffic for malicious looking code. Even things your major firewalls and security hardware might miss, Snort has picked up. Its an easy recommendation for me.

Incentivized

• You will get more visibility in your network.
• Very fast performance
• Easy to detect and prevent the suspicious activities.
• Easy to export report[s]
• Daily security updates
• Efficacy
• Very low cost
• Cisco Threat Intelligence Director
• A lot of Cisco documentation available

Incentivized

• The threat intelligence from Cisco TALOS is unparalleled. This is grafted into the Sourcefire application which greatly improves security visibility. With this there are a lot of groups that you can use for white listing or blacklisting, knowing its being updated in the background without additional work from you.
• Flexible. Instead of putting a traditional firewall inline you can put a source fire appliance (or firewall with sourcefire on-board) to not only block/allow traffic, but if you insights into it, and do some forms of threat scoring.
• In depth information. Sometimes a bit overwhelming, but you are able to do more than just see alerts, you can view the full information and packets that lead to the conclusion, though the conclusion is prepared in advance for you.

Incentivized

• The performance is not always as good as you'd want. Some operations take the better part of a minute (drilling down in traffics analysis).
• Deploying or upgrading the FirePower software to the ASA firewalls takes a long time and deployment might fail without a clear reason.

Incentivized

• There are plenty of false positives in the logs, but no problems noticed related to them.

We are in the middle of outsourcing and may not be able to keep this product.

Incentivized

Very easy to navigate GUI in the FMC and very effective at performing the intending duties.

Incentivized

We didn't have any major issues that let us need support. Only, for this reason, I think Cisco Firepower deserves the rating. Even for small issues, the partner that helped us during the project could solve it quickly. There are also tons of documents and other online resources to help maintain, administer and support the product.

Incentivized

We were using the Suricate IDS but it is very difficult to configure and manage so we replace it with Cisco Secure IPS. It gives us all the advanced security features and more control over our network.

Incentivized

Snort was chosen mainly for the ease and cost. With Snort we was able to set up in a matter of minutes without any professional services needed. If you are used to packet tracing the old fashion way, this is the product for you.

Incentivized

• Has made it much easier to determine when incidents have occurred
• Has been effective in reducing false positives and making solution management more efficient and cost effective

Incentivized

• The Sourcefire deployment has been very good at actively blocking threats that would have potentially caused loss or compromise.
• It has given us great visibility to our network.

Incentivized