Recently at $WORK, we had to come up with budget proposals for next year. We knew that we were going to outgrow our current Checkpoint UTM appliances by holiday next year, so we had to buy new hardware. We just had to decide which hardware. While I'm capable of building a Linux/*BSD firewall on my own, I frankly don't have the time to mess around with updates and compliance documentation. We need an appliance, and for our needs, Cisco and CheckPoint are about the only options for us. We switched to the UTM appliances from a pair of Cisco ASA 5500's a few years ago. However, after examining the pros and cons of both, I recommended we switch back to the ASA platform next year. Read on for my decision making process explained.
