key advantages of cisco 1220cx Over fortinet firewalls

[samimsa]

Hello ,

Our company is embarking on a new project to install firewalls across hundreds of RTU Scada System sites. Currently, our infrastructure is predominantly Cisco, including switches and routers. There is a debate within our team: one group supports the adoption of Fortinet, while another, advocates for staying with Cisco and considering the 1220CX model.

Given the scale of this deployment and the integration with our existing Cisco infrastructure, we want to ensure we make the best choice. Could you please provide detailed insights on the specific advantages that the Cisco 1220CX offers over Fortinet, especially in terms of compatibility, security, scalability, and overall network management?

Your detailed and accurate responses will be invaluable as we consider this significant purchase. Thank you!"

[akilgore]

Hello Samimsa,

Thanks for reaching out. Below is a response to each of the functional areas you mentioned.

Compatibility

The 2024 Forrester Wave report for OT placed Cisco in the Leaders quadrant for our overall security portfolio, including Secure Firewall. One of the most common integrations we see for OT environments is extending SGT enforcement to the firewall through the use of dynamic objects, which allow the firewall to persistently sync updates to SGTs without a policy deployment. Another common OT integration is importing CyberVision host data for use in access control, which can also be synced without policy deployment.

Security

Cisco Talos is the largest non-government threat intelligence unit in the world. Talos performs threat research into OT specific threat actors and vulnerabilities, and identifies zero days specific to OT products. Coverage for zero day vulnerabilities identified by Talos are released immediately, before the vulnerability information is known to the public.

Scalability

Our 1200 series offers very high performance with low cost and a small form factor. The NetSec Open report found that Cisco performs consistently in line with our datasheets, while some of our competitors underperform their datasheet numbers.

Network Management

Our Firewall Management Center provides policy management and log aggregation for large scale OT deployments like the one you've described. We also have templates that can be used to easily deploy consistent configuration across a large number of firewalls.

Please let me know if you need clarification on any of the points above. If you need a deeper dive, you can also ask your account team to contact me and I can sync with them on presentation resources.