Cisco Network Consulting Firm

Cisco is a perennial leader in delivering state-of-the-art firewalls for the widest possible variety of environments. Cisco's Firepower NGFWs Firewalls provide a modern firewall platform that marshals sophisticated hardware, cloud-based services, and next-generation intrusion protection system (NGIPS) to anticipate, discover, and respond to cyber attacks automatically. Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE firewall experts can help your organization to plan and carry out an efficient migration to Firepower firewalls from Cisco's legacy ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500, or PIX appliances and help you enhance Firepower firewalls with Cisco's subscription-based security services to create and centrally manage network environments that span branch offices, data centers, private clouds and public clouds. Progent can also help you to manage and debug older-generation Cisco security appliances. Progent's certified cybersecurity consultants can assist you with policy creation and tuning based on industry best practices in order to establish a consistent security posture that applies to all your endpoints at any location.

Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewall Appliances
Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) provide a significant performance improvement over Cisco's popular ASA 5500-X security appliances and offer centralized management of modern security capabilities like application visibility, next-generation intrusion protection with risk prioritization, advanced malware protection (AMP), URL filtering, and multi-node sandboxing. For details about Cisco's Firepower family of NGFWs Firewalls, refer to Cisco Firepower firewalls integration services.

Cisco's ASA 5500-X and Legacy Firewalls
Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series, ASA 5500 Series, and PIX 500 firewalls provide combined firewall, IPsec VPN, and IPS capabilities in compact single-box devices, delivering a wide array of features to meet the security and compliance requirements of companies ranging from small and mid-size businesses to enterprises and ISPs. Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series, ASA 5500 Series, and PIX firewalls allow IT security teams to defend their network perimeter and offer safe remote access while using powerful administration tools built on Cisco's world-class firewall products.

Cisco's ASA 5500 and PIX 500 firewall appliances have arrived at end-of-life but are still widely used in smaller businesses and in some enterprise networks. Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series Next-Generation Firewalls represent significantly more bang for the buck and have supplanted the ASA 5500 and PIX 500 families of firewalls for new deployments. Still, Cisco's legacy firewall appliances, if carefully maintained, can offer a high degree of security by providing multiple services including firewall, VPN tunneling, and IPS.

After Cisco's acquisition of Sourcefire, the entire family of Cisco ASA 5500-X firewalls can be provisioned to support Firepower Services, built on Sourcefire's Snort product, which is the world's most popular network intrusion protection system. Firepower services provide powerful new capabilities including advanced malware protection (AMP), URL filtering, dynamic threat analytics, and automation.

Progent's Cisco-certified infrastructure consultants can assist your organization to support and troubleshoot older ASA 5500 Series and PIX 500 firewalls and can also assist you to plan and implement an efficient upgrade to Cisco's ASA 5500-X firewalls with Firepower. Progent can also help you to design, deploy, tune, administer and debug new firewall ecosystems built on Cisco's latest ASA 5500-X models with Firepower Services. Progent can also help your organization to upgrade from your Cisco ASA 5500-X Series solution to Cisco's latest Firepower Next Generation Firewalls.

Cisco's ASA 5500-X Firewall Product Family
Cisco's comprehensive family of ASA 5500-X firewalls includes an enhanced replacement for every rack-mountable model in the older ASA 5500 generation of firewalls. Each ASA 5500-X firewall targets the same market as the corresponding previous models, which gives small and midsize businesses ample choice for selecting a solution that aligns with their security needs and budgets. All ASA 5500-X firewalls are based on Cisco's proven stateful-inspection firewall technology and all include 64-bit hardware with multicore processors and support Cisco's advanced protection services. All models in Cisco's ASA 5500-X product line deliver consistent security across any mix of physical, virtual, and cloud deployments.

For more details about Cisco's ASA 5500-X security appliances, Firepower services, and Progent's support for ASA security appliances, visit Cisco Firepower integration and debugging consulting

Cisco's Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X Security Appliances
Cisco ASA 5500-X firewalls accept software or hardware modules that enable Firepower Services, which offer layered protection against multi-vector attacks. Cisco's Firepower Services are based on technology adopted by Cisco from Sourcefire. Key capabilities of Firepower Services for ASA security appliances include:

• Layered defense against familiar and zero-day threats
• Advanced Malware Protection that uses big data techniques to find and remediate security breaches
• A Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS) that performs contextual analysis that looks at users, network infrastructure, apps, and content to detect threats that use simultaneous approaches
• Fine-grained Application Visibility and Control (AVC that is aware of thousands of applications and can automatically activate standard and customized IPS policies based on the severity of threats

Simpler implementations of Cisco ASA firewalls can be efficiently administered via Cisco's on-device Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) Adaptive Security Device Manager, a web-based utility which is provided with all ASA 5500-X models. ASDM includes an easy-to-use web console for deploying, managing, and troubleshooting ASA 5500-X appliances and service modules.

For multi-device and multi-site environments, ASA 5500-X firewalls with Firepower can be administered using Cisco's Firepower Management Center, available as one or several physical units or virtual appliances. Firepower Management Center offers centralized firewall management, Application Visibility and Control (AVC, enhanced IPS, URL filtering, and Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection (AMP). Due to ongoing rebranding since Cisco's acquisition of Sourcefire Defense Center, Firepower Management Center has been offered under several names including Defense Center, FireSIGHT Defense Center, and FireSIGHT Management Center.

Cisco's Firepower Management Center provides capabilities beyond those available with Cisco's on-device ASDM utility. Additional features include greater context awareness, Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection with remediation for client devices, a console that provides real-time infrastructure visualization, automated policy tuning based on risk evaluation of threats, advanced IPS, custom application discovery for Application Visibility and Control, customized health notifications, enhanced reporting features, and APIs for host input and databases. Hardware-dependent features like clustering, stacking, switching, routing, VPN, and NAT must be managed using either the on-box ASDM or the ASA 5500-X CLI.

Cisco ASA 5500 Family of Adaptive Security Appliances
Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewalls leverage engineering developed for the PIX 500 Series firewall, the IPS 4200 Series Intrusion Prevention System, and Cisco's VPN 3000 Series concentrator. These solutions enable the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances 5500 Series Firewall product line to offer a platform that defends against the widest variety of threats. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances 5500 Series Firewalls provide application security, network containment, and safe Virtual Private Network functionality across the entire product portfolio. This breadth of protection enables the guarding of any network section, including the most typical threat vectors like remote locations, locally-connected inside users, and remote access Virtual Private Networks.

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances firewalls deliver robust application protection through intelligent, application-aware inspection engines that analyze network flows at Layers 4-7. The result is a better protected environment covering Web, voice, and mobile wireless services. To defend networks against application-layer attacks and to provide better control over the applications and protocols utilized in their environments, these inspection engines incorporate broad application and protocol knowledgebases and employ protection enforcement technologies such as anomaly sensing and state monitoring. Also incorporated are assault detection and remediation technology such as application/protocol command filtering and content verification. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) firewall inspection engines also deliver control over IM and tunneling applications, enabling organizations to enforce usage policies and preserve bandwidth for important business applications.

For additional details about Progent's consulting services for ASA 5500 security appliances, go to ASA 5500 firewalls integration and troubleshooting services.

Cisco PIX Firewall Appliances
Based upon a tested, purpose-built software platform that offers rich security features, Cisco PIX security appliances provide excellent protection and have been awarded Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4 status and ICSA Labs Firewall and IPsec qualification. PIX firewall appliances offer protection for a broad array of VoIP and other multimedia standards including H.323 v. 4, Session Initiation Protocol, SCCP, Real-Time Streaming Protocol, and MGCP, enabling organizations to protect deployments of a broad array of current and next-generation IP voice and video applications.

Administrators can furthermore remotely configure, monitor, and analyze Cisco PIX security appliances using a command-line interface (CLI). Safe command-line interface access is available through a number of techniques such as Secure Shell (SSHv2) Protocol, Telnet over IP Security (IPsec), and out-of-band through a console port. PIX security appliances also include robust automatic-update features, a set of advanced secure remote-management options that ensure firewall settings and software images are kept current.

For more information about Progent's support services for Cisco PIX 500 firewalls, go to PIX 500 firewalls configuration and debugging support.

Progent's Migration Consulting Services for Cisco Firewalls
Because Cisco has ceased selling the PIX and ASA 5500 families of firewalls, many companies are concerned about depending on a key security mechanism that may no longer be supported. Cisco ASA 5500-X and Firepower Series firewalls have the benefit of being new devices and also offer a number of functions and economic benefits in comparison to PIX firewalls. These benefits include substantially higher performance, optional Secure Sockets Layer VPN support, and an expandable architecture that protects your investment by allowing you to self-install new security services whenever you need them. Progent's Cisco network engineers can help you to determine the business value of for upgrading from PIX or Cisco ASA 5500 security appliances, create a migration process that allows for a fast and non-disruptive changeover, help you to deploy new ASA 5500-x Series or Firepower Series firewalls, and provide online, consulting, and technical support services.

Other Ways Progent Can Help Your Business with Cisco Firewalls
Cisco's Firepower NGFW Series, ASA 5500 Series, and PIX firewalls provide an array of configuration, tracking, and troubleshooting options that offer you the flexibility to configure these security appliances to match your business requirements. Progent's CCIE authorized network experts can help you to build a cost-effective infrastructure that includes Cisco firewalls and that offers advanced security, fault tolerance, throughput, and recoverability. Progent's CISA and CISM-certified information security experts can help you to develop a security policy that makes sense for your environment and can set up your firewall to support your security strategy. Progent's risk assessment consultants can evaluate the effectiveness of your current firewall solution and audit the overall security of your entire IT environment. Progent's Help Desk Call Center can provide emergency remote troubleshooting for Cisco technology and offer fast access to a Cisco expert.

To learn additional information about Progent's engineering assistance for Cisco products, pick a subject:

• Introduction to Cisco Expertise
• Fast and Affordable Remote Support from a Cisco CCIE Network Engineer
• Cisco Routers Consulting Support
• Cisco Wireless Consulting Expertise
• Cisco Aironet Wireless APs Engineering Services
• Cisco Small Business 100, 300 and 500 WiFi APs Engineering Help
• Cisco Catalyst 802.11ax Wireless APs Planning, Deployment and Troubleshooting Support
• Cisco WiFi Controllers Experts
• Meraki Wireless APs Design Expertise
• Cisco Unified Communications Manager (CUCM or Unified CM) and Cisco CallManager Consulting and Technical Support
• Cisco Voice over IP (VoIP) Phones and IP Video Desktop Phones Consulting Services and Wireless VoIP Phone Integration
• Cisco Jabber Configuration and Troubleshooting Expertise
• Catalyst Switches Engineering Services
• Cisco Nexus Switches Support and Troubleshooting Expertise
• Cisco Meraki MS Switches Consulting and Support Services
• Cisco Security and VPN Setup and Troubleshooting Help
• SIP and CUBE Infrastructure Solutions: SIP PSTN Trunks and Cisco CUBE Integration Consulting
• Cisco Duo MFA Two-factor Authentication Services for At-Home Workers
• Design Expertise for Cisco-based Datacenters and Colocation Centers
• Network Design Services for Internet Service Providers
• Unified Cloud-based and Hybrid Management Solutions for Cisco Environments

Integration of Cisco and Third-party Security Technology
Progent offers expertise in firewall and VPN products from all major vendors and can help you integrate Cisco technology with additional security solutions to help you build a cost-effective network infrastructure that provides a level of security and flexibility appropriate for your business. Third-party firewall and VPN support services available from Progent include:

• Check Point Software Consulting
• Watchguard Consulting
• Juniper Networks NetScreen and SSG Firewall Consulting
• SonicWall Consulting
• Symantec Raptor Consulting

If you wish to contact Progent about professional help for Cisco networking, phone 1-800-993-9400 or see Contact Progent.