Cisco Systems, has recently unveiled the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) 5500 Series, an innovative family of multi-function security appliances that help stop attacks before they spread through the network. Cisco ASA 5500 Series controls network and application traffic, delivers flexible Virtual Private Network (VPN) connectivity, and reduces the overall deployment, operations costs and complexity that would otherwise be associated with this level of comprehensive security.
A key component of the recently announced Adaptive Threat Defence (ATD) phase of the Cisco Self-Defending Network (SDN) security strategy, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series includes the Cisco ASA 5510, Cisco ASA 5520, and Cisco ASA 5540 products. The family is designed to span from small and medium sized businesses to large enterprises, and is purpose built for concurrent services scalability and unified management. This enables high-performance and simultaneous operation of multiple security services without added operational complexity.
The ASA 5500 Series also offers a powerful set of VPN services that offer remote access IPSec and SSL VPN capabilities as well as Quality of Service (QoS) enabled site-to-site IPSec services. These products are also rich in IP integration, and are designed to deliver QoS, routing, IPv6, and multicast support thus allowing insertion into the network without disrupting legitimate traffic and applications.
“The traditional deployment of security services results in product "silos" and forces organizations to trade-off between operational efficiency and holistic security," said Ghazi Atallah, General Manager, Cisco Systems Middle East. "The integration of multiple technologies in the ASA 5500 solves the problem of multi-device security management, and makes it operationally and economically feasible to deploy comprehensive security services to more network locations."
The Cisco ASA 5500 Series delivers advanced adaptive threat defence services including Anti-X defences, Application security, and Network containment and control that are designed to provide unified and thorough protection of business-critical resources. It provides customers with network-based Anti-X defences for worm and virus mitigation, spyware or adware protection, network traffic micro-inspection, hacker and intrusion prevention, and Denial of Service (DoS) prevention, all with on-device security event correlation
The Application security services available on the Cisco ASA 5500 series provide advanced application inspection and control for dynamic and reliable protection of networked business applications. These services include control of bandwidth-intensive peer-to-peer (P2P) services, Web URL access controls, protection and integrity validation of core business applications like database services, and numerous application-specific protections for Voice over IP (VoIP) and multimedia services.
The Cisco ASA 5500 Series also offers Network containment and control services that provide precise control and segmentation of users, application access and network traffic flows. Cisco ASA 5500 delivers economic and operational efficiencies to customer’s security deployments. These include services extensibility delivered through software and hardware modules, platform standardization across multiple locations, simplified operations through a common management and monitoring service across security services and simplified troubleshooting and fault isolation. Its services profile enables site and function-specific customisation, which enables customers to standardize on the Cisco ASA 5500 Series for many security uses within their network.
Customers choosing the Cisco ASA 5500 Series can also take advantage of the Cisco Incident Readiness and Response Services, which assess the current state of threat preparedness, and design processes and procedures to detect, contain and minimize network attacks. Cisco is also announcing MySDN, a free web resource that is available from late May that will provide intelligence on vulnerabilities, breaking threats, signatures and mitigation strategies. As part of the Cisco lifecycle portfolio of security services, these new services, in conjunction with Cisco’s portfolio of security products, provide a system-level approach to securing the network.
