This blog has been authored by Forrester Consulting

Cisco commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study to examine the value that Secure Firewall customers could achieve by deploying Secure Firewall, Firewall Management Center, and optionally SecureX. We spoke with ten decision-makers from eight customer organizations about the benefits, costs, risks, and flexibility of their investment in these Cisco Security solutions. We used their data and profiles to build a composite organization and a financial model of their reported benefits and costs. This composite organization has roughly $5B in annual revenue and 16,000 employees, that had deployed 34 ASA-based firewalls and 68 early generation Firewall Threat Defense (FTD)-based firewalls before the investment in Cisco Secure Firewall.

The composite organization and interviewees’ organizations shared similar challenges in their network environments that drove their investments in Cisco Secure Firewall, including:

• Limited visibility into their network security environments from a lack of integration, unified management, and policy consistency,
• High time costs to implement and manage firewalls from the inability to push policies and updates to multiple devices at once,
• Poor network performance evidence by repeated rebooting and packet loss at times of high network demand, and
• Vendor management headaches from following a best-of-breed strategy.

After deploying Cisco Secure Firewall, Firewall Management Center, and SecureX, the composite and interviewees’ organizations experienced:

Firewall management efficiency from the centralized management of firewalls via a single pane of glass that enabled the deployment and updating of policies to multiple devices at once. The composite organization was able to reduce 55 hours of labor per firewall compared to deploying and creating policies for a traditional firewall. It also reduced the time to update firewalls quarterly by 90% and update firewall policies daily by 95%. When compared to early generation FTD-based firewalls, the composite saves 80% of the time previously spent deploying policies. Virtual firewall policies are also updated 80% faster.

Improvements to security workflows from consolidating firewall and threat data into one place, where indicators of compromise (IOC) and blocked intrusions can be tracked or up-leveled coherently to a SIEM. Cisco Secure Firewall and Firewall Management Center save the composite’s security teams 49% of the time previously spent on investigations and 83% of the time previously spent responding to threats. SecureX reduces these figures by an additional 77%, for a total savings of up to 90% for security workflows with all three solutions.

Reduced risk of a material breach and productivity loss from improving threat visibility across the full network environment, improving the automation of blocking functions, and the new ability to detect and block threats at the application layer. The composite was able to reduce the risk of a breach compared to ASA-based firewalls by 90% and the risk of a breach compared to early generation FTD firewalls by 15%. Employees impacted by breaches were able to recover 70% of their lost productivity. SecureX helped to reduce the risk of a material breach by an additional 23% for the composite organization and those customers with SecureX deployed.

Customer organizations were also able to boost employee productivity from better network performance and reduce their technology costs by decommissioning prior solutions, the quantification for which can be found in the full study.

After accounting for initial and recurring costs, risk-adjusting for realistic and conservative estimates, we found that and investment in Cisco Secure Firewall and Firewall Management Center could produce a 195% ROI, $12.29M net present value, and 10-month payback period over three years.

For more information on the full March 2022 case study, The Forrester Total Economic Impact of Cisco Secure Firewall, please visit https://www.cisco.com/go/firewallTEI.

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