The popular Cisco ASA VPN took the silver award in our 2008 Product Leadership awards for remote access and VPNs. The Cisco ASA VPN scored well among users surveyed for authentication support, with almost 85% rating it good or excellent in that category. Seventy-eight percent of users surveyed also gave the product a good or excellent score both for its ability to integrate with existing platforms and applications and for breadth/variety of applications and devices covered. (These ratings take into account people who may also have been using the Cisco VPN Concentrator, which has since been announced end-of-life.)

According to Cisco, the ASA 5500 Series Appliances integrate firewall, unified communications security, SSL and IPsec VPN, intrusion prevention, and content security services in a modular product family.

One survey participant wrote, "Our Cisco VPN appliances have worked flawlessly from Day 1. We're very happy with them -- very good performance, no trouble using the product." Others praised the ASA, saying they were "happy with the capabilities and reliability," that it "has provided nonstop availability and security," and that "it performs as expected."

Some versions of the ASA received mild criticism for usage difficulty, especially on the client side. A survey participant said: "With a wide range of end users, this takes a lot of handholding to get it running properly." Another wrote that the ASA "has occasional problem when a user switches among networks."