Cisco today unveiled its next generation firewall (NGFW) that protect enterprises and organisations against advanced threats. This new threat-focused firewall has its roots in Sourcefire technology, which Cisco acquired last year.
And now company has integrated its new firewall with Sourcefire’s technologies namely Next Generation Intrusion Prevention Systems (NGIPS) and Advanced Malware Protection (AMP).
Beside, Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services offer full contextual awareness and dynamic controls needed to automatically asses threat, correlate intelligence and optimise defences to protect all networks.
According to Stephen Dane, Managing Director – Security, Cisco APJ, the defense mechanism becomes more complex with rise in the number of security products or boxes as they work in mostly in silos and reduces visibility at large.
“Most of the NGFWs available today are focused on policy and application control; however these NGFWs don’t provide security beyond application control. But the today’s threat landscape demands more than just application control,” said Dane.
However, Cisco’s new NGFW is built on three key aspects – visibility driven, threat-focused and platform based. The visibility aspect provides full contextual awareness of users, mobile devices, clients-side apps, virtual machine-to-machine communications, vulnerabilities, threats, URLs and other factors.
It uses network related data in contextual manner and has integrated NGIPS and AMP to provide deeper insight into threats. That actually helps in enhancing protection against range of attacks, known and unknown.
Being a platform based solution, it allows enterprises to easily integrate with existing infrastructure and security devices. This helps in reducing network complexities, cost, maintenance and overall manageability.
“In today’s climate of industralised hacking and sophisticated cybercrime, we have entered an era in which legacy NGFW solutions are not enough to thwart attackers. Now more than ever, organisations need to be able to implement dynamic controls to mange the pace of change of their environments and address security incidents,” said Christopher Young, Senior Vice President – Security Business Group, Cisco.
“Cisco ASA with FirePower Services is a major step forward for the NGFW market, empowering customers to deepen their protection from the data centre, through the network to the endpoint with the agility to identify, understand and stop advanced threats in real-time and retrospectively,” added Young.