CipherEngine Competitive Analysis

While several companies claim their products have the same benefits as CipherEngine™, none of them are able to offer the scalability, functionality and ease of use that comes with CipherEngine.

For example, Cisco claims that their "GET" solution offers the same benefits as CipherEngine, but upon closer examination it is apparent that it takes several of their solutions to compare to CipherEngine (GET, DMVPN, mSEC and IPSec—point-to-point and GRE—together). Even then, their "solutions" fall short of the functionality of CipherEngine. This side-by-side comparison gives a clear indication of how CipherEngine stacks up against the competition.

Key considerations:
Scalability:
CipherEngine scales from small to enterprise-wide networks on any type or topology. Again, GET is limited to full mesh Layer 3 networks.

Implementation Type:
Managed Service Providers are extremely hesitant to "touch the router" at the customer edge. CipherEngine is not router based and therefore can be easily implemented by the provider without impacting their network availability. GET is router based, thus forcing the provider to risk a downgrade in availability and reliability or install a second router behind the first router, increasing both complexity and cost.

Management Ability:
CipherEngine is simple to manage and deploy, infinitely more flexible and capable, and is a much lower cost solution. Like most of their “solutions”, GET is management intensive.

Topology:
CipherEngine works over any network topology and is completely agnostic to the customer's network design. In contrast, GET works only in a routed, fully meshed Layer 3 network. If a customer wants to build a hub-and-spoke, partial mesh or redundant point-to-point architecture, they will have to use additional complex security technologies.

Transparency:
CipherEngine is completely transparent to the network. On the other hand, GET is router based and in most cases will require customers to upgrade existing hardware, software and memory.

Installation:
CipherEngine can be installed very quickly and easily. Although GET is a simpler approach relative to past offerings, it is still limited to Layer 3 full mesh deployments with only a single policy and key. In addition, currently their solution is only available on the "T", or test train, for Cisco IOS and is not currently in production at customer sites.

Side-by-Side Comparison

	CipherEngine™	GET	DMVPN	IPSec(p2p/GRE)
When to use	Any time over any existing infrastructure or topology	Limited to Mesh Networks	Limited to Hub-and-Spoke	Point-to-Point connections
What it does	CipherEngine encrypts everything	Provides encryption over full Mesh, and nothing more	Provides security for Hub-and-Spoke	Encrypts a single pipe
Scale	Any scale Any topology	Any scale Mesh	High-scale Hub-and-Spoke Low-scale Mesh	High-scale Hub-and-Spoke for IPSec Low-scale for GRE
Deployment	Purpose built appliance, embedded H/W or S/W	Router-based only	Router-based only	Router-based only
Full Mesh	Yes	Yes	No	No
Hub and Spoke	Yes	No	Yes	No
Point-to-Point	Yes	No	No	Yes
Multicast	Yes	Yes	No-treats traffic as unicast	No-treats traffic as unicast
Dynamic Routing	Yes	Yes	Yes, with extra work/complexity	Yes, in special situations and with extra work
Topology	Any	Mesh only	Hub-and-Spoke only	Point-to-Point
L3/MPLS support	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
L2/Metro Ethernet support	Yes	No	No	No
Throughput	up to 10Gbps	300Mbps max	Gigabit	Gigabit
Operational Maintenance impact	Transparent-low touch	Upgrade Intensive-High touch	Upgrade Intensive-High touch	Upgrade Intensive-High touch
Management Requirements	Lowest	Low for Mesh, but higher than CipherEngine	Extremely High	Extremely High
Cost	Relatively low	Requires upgrades across the network (HW, SW and memory)	May need HW, SW or memory upgrades	May need HW, SW or memory upgrades
Availability	Available now with installed customers	GET is available only on the IOS "T" train and will not be available on a production level for several months	Released	Released

Bottom Line
CipherEngine from CipherOptics is the only truly scalable, high-speed, low-latency network-wide encryption solution. While competitors may have solutions that compete with portions of CipherEngine’s functionality, only CipherEngine gives you full functionality and allows you to encrypt everything; regardless of network topology, design, scope, speed or scale.