Cisco Firewalls: Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition for the Enterprise
Threats to today's networks continue to grow, with attacks coming from both outside and within corporate networks. These threats can have devastating effects, ranging from business disruption due to a network outage, financial risk resulting from information loss, or liability issues stemming from information tampering. Meanwhile, businesses are striving to improve their profitability and competitiveness through continued business process optimisation and automation, leading to increased connectivity with their business partners and customers. These applications offer many benefits, but can also introduce a variety of risks, if not secured properly. Using the world-class Cisco firewalls, Cisco system security and networking services provided by the Cisco® ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition, businesses can securely deploy mission-critical applications and networks in a highly reliable manner, while benefiting from the significant investment protection and lower operational costs offered by this unique, modular solution.
Challenge
The information assets and applications traveling on today's networks are the lifeblood of the modern enterprise. As businesses continue to optimise their processes and streamline their operations for improved profitability and competitiveness, their networks become increasingly more complex and interconnected. Now, as businesses depend on these networks as mission-critical infrastructure, the security and reliability challenges businesses face continue to grow.
Examples of threats to today's business networks include:
Unauthorized Network Access
As businesses increase internal network connectivity and collaboration with new customers and business partners, they need to effectively increase internal network security to maintain control of their vital assets and preserve their competitive edge to limit corporate liability. New applications can increase business automation and collaboration, but can also open dangerous security holes, if not secured properly.
Employee Internet Monitoring
Employee internet monitoring is a much needed service for most companies. Businesses need to effectively control the use of applications, such as peer-to-peer file sharing and instant messaging, which plague many unsuspecting organisations. To improve employee productivity and reduce the costs associated with Internet connectivity often file sharing security solutions and the ability to control instant messaging are imperative.
Unplanned Network Downtime
Businesses need highly reliable networks that help ensure continuous operations to maximise productivity, including support for planned and unplanned maintenance upgrades. These networks must be able to defend against threats such as Internet-based denial of service attacks or internal sabotage from disgruntled employees or contractors.
Solution - Cisco Firewalls
The Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition enables businesses to securely deploy mission-critical applications and networks in a highly reliable manner, while providing significant investment protection and lower operational costs through its unique, modular design. Businesses can protect their networks from unauthorized access using the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition's robust policy enforcement services. These services combine with market-leading VPN services to enable businesses to securely extend their networks across low-cost Internet connections to business partners, remote sites, and mobile workers. This flexible solution can adapt as an organization's needs evolve along with the ever-changing security threat landscape, giving businesses the ability to easily integrate market-leading intrusion prevention, antivirus, antispam, antispyware, URL filtering, and other advanced content security services for additional layers of protection. Combined with Cisco management and monitoring application solutions, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition provides world-class security with lower operational costs.
Capabilities of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition include:
Network System Security - Cisco Pix
Building upon the market-proven capabilities of the Cisco PIX® Family of security appliances, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series provides a wide range of services to secure modern network environments. Flexible policy capabilities prevent unauthorized access to network resources or vital corporate information. Network system security and advanced application control capabilities help businesses effectively control the use of peer-to-peer file sharing, instant messaging, and other non-corporate applications-thus improving employee productivity and reducing wasted Internet bandwidth.
Firewall security: Cisco VPN 3000
Building upon the market-proven VPN capabilities of the Cisco VPN 3000 Series Concentrator, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition provides secure site-to-site and remote-user access to corporate networks and services. This solution offers businesses maximum flexibility for secure connectivity by combining support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and IP Security (IPSec) VPN capabilities into a single, best-in-class solution. Using the services offered by the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition, businesses can enforce identity-based firewall security and networking policies to all network traffic, thus enabling businesses to tailor-fit access privileges for every group of employees, contractors, and business partners.
Cisco Firewall: Adaptive design
The Cisco Firewall ASA 5500 Series Edition can adapt as businesses needs change through its unique, modular design. Businesses can easily expand the number of security services offered by adding a high-performance, purpose-built Cisco ASA 5500 Series security services module, such as the Advanced Inspection and Prevention Security Services Module (AIP-SSM) for advanced intrusion prevention services, or the Content Security and Control Security Services Module (CSC-SSM) for advanced antivirus, antispam, and other content security services.
Intelligent Networking Services
Building on more than 20 years of Cisco networking leadership and innovation, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition delivers a wide range of intelligent networking services for seamless integration into today's diverse network environments. Businesses can maximize network uptime and throughput by taking advantage of the many resiliency and scalability services this solution has to offer, such Active/Active high availability, "zero-downtime software upgrades," and integrated VPN clustering and load balancing.
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems - Easy deployment and management: Cisco systems provide a management and monitoring suite, which enables large-scale deployment and operation of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition. Cisco systems provide a complete solution, covering management and monitoring. Also included with the solution is Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM), which provides a powerful, yet easy-to-use browser-based management and monitoring interface for individual security appliances.
Cisco Systems: Business Benefits
The Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition provides the security and connectivity services that helps your business with:
Controlled access to corporate resources-Prevents unauthorized access to applications or information assets by providing businesses with fine-grain identity- or network-based access control. Integrates with popular user authentication services such as Microsoft Active Directory, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Kerberos, and RSA SecurID.
Secure deployment of new applications-Enables businesses to safely deploy new applications by providing advanced application-layer security services for a wide range of popular applications, including Web-based applications, e-mail, voice over IP (VoIP), video, and multimedia applications. Hides corporate network addresses from the Internet for an additional layer of protection from attack.
Secure remote access to corporate network-Provides both SSL- and IPSec-based methods of threat-protected VPN connectivity to remote sites, business partners, and mobile workers.
Business resiliency-Prevents disruption of mission-critical applications and services due to security breaches by implementing world-class firewall, VPN, and networking technologies.
Cisco Firewalls: Architecture
The Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition is the focal point of a complete solution for secure network access. Tight integration with Cisco management and monitoring systems enables organizations to deploy and maintain a security solution that protects mission-critical applications and information assets (Figure 1).
Cisco Systems: Primary Components
Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition Provides a wide range of security and networking services at locations across the enterprise.
Cisco Firewall Management
Cisco Security Manager provides an enterprise-grade management infrastructure for large-scale deployments of Cisco security technologies.
Cisco Connect Monitoring
Cisco Security Monitoring, Analysis, and Response System (Cisco Security MARS) provides real-time monitoring and incident response capabilities, enabling businesses to get the most value from the security and networking services of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition.
Figure 1. Solution Architecture
Cisco Firewalls: Complementary Solutions
The Cisco® ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliance is a modular platform that provides the next generation of security and VPN services for small and medium-sized business and enterprise applications. The comprehensive portfolio of services within the Cisco ASA 5500 Series enables customization for location-specific needs through its four tailored package product editions: the Firewall, VPN, IPS, and Content Security Editions.
These packages enable superior protection by providing the right services for the right location. At the same time, they enable standardization on the Cisco ASA 5500 Series platform to reduce costs in management, training, and sparing. Finally, each Edition simplifies design and deployment by providing pre-packaged location-specific security solutions.
Figure 2. Complementary Solutions
