Cisco IT Consulting Firm

Cisco's PIX family firewalls and Cisco ASA 5500 Series adaptive security appliances combine comprehensive firewall, intrusion defense, and Virtual Private Network features in a cost-effective, one-cabinet format. Both device families deliver powerful client and program policy enforcement, mutlivector attack protection, and secure connectivity services. The enhanced intelligence sharing of consolidated security services in a single platform provides users deploying these aggregated firewalls the benefits of enhanced security, lower cost of ownership, and smaller maintenance expense.

Cisco PIX security appliances and the ASA 5500 family join Cisco IOS Firewall, the FWSM for Cisco Catalyst 6500 switches, and Cisco 7600 family routers as parts of Cisco's flexible, self-contained firewall line. Based on a scalable, building-block platform, each device is designed with a specific array of options to deliver more efficient security to a variety of network environments. These products can be individually installed to protect certain facets of a connectivity infrastructure, or can be grouped for a layered, protection-in-depth strategy based on the architecture best practices outlined in the Cisco SAFE framework. Completing the integrated firewall solutions, Cisco provides a complete security management product portfolio, spanning Cisco security device and IOS security features and built-in appliance managers, to self-contained management applications, helping to make sure that customers can effectively manage their Cisco protection solution purchases.

Cisco PIX Firewalls
The top-selling Cisco PIX firewalls deliver robust policy support, multi-source invasion defense, and safe connectivity features in affordable, easy-to-deploy modules. These purpose-built appliances offer a wealth of built-in protection and connectivity capabilities including advanced process-aware firewall features, industry-leading VoIP and multimedia protection, robust multi-site and remote-access IP Security (IPSec) VPN connectivity, excellent resiliency, intelligent networking services, and flexible administration options. The Cisco PIX Security Appliance Series family spans small plug-and-go appliances for small offices and at home offices to stackable high-bandwidth appliances with greater investment protection for enterprise and ISP environments, PIX Security Appliance Series provide high levels of protection, performance, and availability for network environments of all sizes.

Cisco PIX security appliances offer a wealth of setup, monitoring, and troubleshooting features, providing businesses the flexibility to utilize the methods that best meet their requirements. Administrative solutions cover the gamut from common, policy-based management tools to integrated Web-based management to compatibility with remote-monitoring standards like Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and syslog. The integrated Adaptive Security Device Manager system provides a powerful Web-based management platform that significantly streamlines the installation, ongoing configuration, and monitoring of a single Cisco PIX firewall without requiring any additional software other than a standard Web browser and Java applet to be running on an administrator's computer. IT managers can furthermore remotely set up, track, and troubleshoot PIX firewalls using a CLI interface. Secure command-line interface access is available using several techniques, such as Secure Shell (SSHv2) Protocol, Telnet through IP Security, and out-of-band via a console port. PIX firewalls also have robust auto-update features, a collection of advanced protected remote-management services that ensure security configurations and software images are kept up to date. Also, Cisco PIX security appliances are supported by several setup and tracking utilities available from Cisco AVVID (Architecture for Voice, Video and Integrated Data) partners.

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series Firewalls
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances 5500 Series Firewalls are purpose-built solutions that bring together market-proven, industry-leading protection and VPN support plus a new generation, adaptive design. The result is a robust, versatile network security solution better able to defend small and midsize company and larger networks and, at the same time, lower the total deployment and operations costs associated with this new degree of protection.

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances 5500 Series firewalls deliver strong application security via smart, application-aware inspection processes that analyze network flows at Layers 4-7. This produces a better protected network including Web, voice, and 3G-mobile wireless access. To protect networks from application-layer attacks and to give businesses more control over the applications and protocols utilized in their networks, these inspection engines integrate extensive application and protocol knowledgebases and employ protection enforcement technologies such as anomaly detection and state monitoring. Also incorporated are attack sensing and mitigation techniques such as application/protocol command filtering and content verification. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series firewall inspection engines also deliver control over instant messaging and tunneling applications, allowing organizations to police usage policies and free up bandwidth for important business processes.

While increasing security, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series firewalls also decrease deployment and support expenses. By offering extensive Virtual Private Network and security services, the Cisco ASA firewall can be used as the single device for a multitude of environments, enabling platform standardization. The Cisco ASA firewall can be deployed as a converged threat-prevention device at a central location by taking advantage of its access control, application inspection, and malware remediation capabilities. The Cisco ASA firewall can also be used as a dedicated remote connectivity device using its VPN capabilities. Alternatively, the Cisco ASA firewall performs capably inside the network for inter-office access management and to defend against worms, viruses, and other malicious code inside users might unwittingly introduce into the environment. For small company and branch office environments, the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances firewall serves as an all-in-one platform offering complete threat defense and VPN functionality while suiting the cost structure and performance demands of these situations. This adaptive single-platform, multiple-use approach reduces the number of devices that need to be deployed and maintained while offering a standard operating and administrative system across all deployments. This architecture streamlines the education of setup, tracking, support, and protection staff. To further reduce operations costs, Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series firewalls are also highly network conscious, allowing these devices to integrate gracefully into the environment without disrupting legitimate data flow and applications.

How Progent's Consultants Can Help Your Business with Cisco PIX and ASA Firewalls
Cisco PIX family firewalls and ASA Series adaptive security appliances provide a wealth of setup, tracking, and troubleshooting features that give you the flexibility to set up these security appliances to meet your company's needs. Progent's CISA authorized security experts can assist you to develop a security policy appropriate for your business and can configure your security appliance to support your security policy. Progent's CISA-qualified information security auditing engineers and GIAC-qualified IT security experts can assess the strength of your current firewall solution and help determine the security of your whole IT environment. Progent also can analyze your PIX or ASA firewall either remotely and on premise, and can train your in-house network support personnel to configure and support your security appliances.

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