Cisco is a long-time leader in delivering state-of-the-art firewall appliances for the broadest possible variety of deployments. Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) represent a modern firewall solution that marshals dedicated hardware, cloud-based services, and next-generation intrusion protection system (NGIPS) to block, discover, and respond to threats without manual intervention. Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE-certified firewall experts can assist your organization to design and carry out a smooth migration to Firepower firewalls from Cisco's legacy ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500, or PIX firewalls and help you enhance Firepower appliances with Cisco's cloud-based services to build and centrally control IT ecosystems that include branch offices, data centers, private clouds and public clouds. Progent's firewall consultants can also assist you to maintain and debug legacy Cisco security appliances. Progent's certified cybersecurity consultants can assist you with policy creation and tuning based on industry best practices in order to build a consistent and effective security posture across all your networked devices at any location.
Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewall Appliances
Cisco's Firepower NGFWs Firewalls deliver a significant performance boost compared to Cisco's previous-generation ASA 5500-X firewalls and offer centralized management and automation of advanced cybersecurity capabilities like application visibility and control (AVC), next-generation intrusion protection (NGIPS) with intelligent prioritization of risks, advanced malware protection (AMP), URL filtering, and multi-node sandboxing. For details about Cisco's Firepower portfolio of Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs), refer to Cisco Firepower firewalls consulting services.
Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series and Legacy Firewalls
Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series, ASA 5500, and PIX firewalls offer combined firewall, VPN, and IPS services in compact single-box packages, delivering a wide array of features to match the security and compliance requirements of organizations ranging from small businesses to enterprises and Internet service providers. Cisco's ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500, and PIX firewall appliances enable IT security teams to defend their network edge and provide secure offsite and mobile access while using powerful management mechanisms built on Cisco's world-class firewall technology.
Cisco's ASA 5500 and PIX 500 firewall appliances have arrived at end-of-life (EOL) status but remain widely used in smaller organizations and in a few enterprise data centers. The ASA 5500-X Next-Generation Firewalls represent substantially more bang for the buck and have superseded Cisco's ASA 5500 and PIX lines of firewalls for new installations. However, Cisco's older model firewalls, if carefully maintained, can deliver a high level of protection by providing a variety of features including firewall, Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections, and IPS.
Since Cisco's acquisition of Sourcefire, the whole line of ASA 5500-X devices can be provisioned to enable Firepower Services, based on Sourcefire's Snort product, which is the market's most popular intrusion protection system (IPS). Firepower services bring enhanced capabilities including advanced malware protection (AMP), URL filtering, dynamic threat analytics, and security automation.
Progent's Cisco CCIE-certified network consultants can assist you to maintain and troubleshoot legacy ASA 5500 Series and PIX firewall appliances and can also help you to design and implement an efficient migration to Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series firewalls with Firepower Services. Progent can also assist you to design, configure, tune, administer and debug new firewall solutions built on Cisco's latest ASA 5500-X firewalls with Firepower. Progent's firewall consultants can also assist your organization to migrate from your Cisco ASA 5500-X deployment to Cisco's latest Firepower Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs).
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 unit in the previous ASA 5500 generation of devices. Each ASA 5500-X firewall targets the identical environment as the associated earlier models, which gives small and midsize businesses ample choice for picking a firewall that aligns with their security requirements and IT budgets. All ASA 5500-X firewalls are based on Cisco's tested stateful-inspection firewall technology and all incorporate 64-bit hardware with multicore processors and support Cisco's powerful protection services. All devices in Cisco's ASA 5500-X product line provide dependable protection across any combination of physical, virtual, and cloud deployments.
For additional information about Cisco's ASA 5500-X firewalls, Cisco Firepower services, and Progent's support for Cisco ASA 5500-X security appliances, visit Firepower integration and troubleshooting expertise
Cisco's Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X Firewalls
Cisco ASA 5500-X security appliances accept either software or hardware modules that support Cisco's Firepower Services, which provide layered defense against multi-vector attacks. Firepower Services are based on innovative technology acquired by Cisco from Sourcefire. Key features of Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X security appliances include:
Simpler implementations of ASA 5500-X firewalls can be efficiently managed using Cisco's on-device Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) Adaptive Security Device Manager, a web-based utility included with all ASA 5500-X models. ASDM includes a simple web dashboard for deploying, managing, and troubleshooting ASA 5500-X firewalls and service modules.
For more complex environments, ASA 5500-X appliances with Firepower Services can be managed with Firepower Management Center, implemented as one or more physical or virtual devices. Firepower Management Center provides unified firewall management, Application Visibility and Control (AVC, enhanced IPS, URL filtering, and Advanced Malware Protection. Because of frequent rebranding since Cisco's acquisition of Sourcefire Defense Center, Firepower Management Center has been offered under various names including Cisco Defense Center, FireSIGHT Defense Center, and FireSIGHT Management Center.
Firepower Management Center offers features unavailable with Cisco's on-device Adaptive Security Device Manager tool. Extra capabilities include expanded context awareness, Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection with remediation for client devices, a console that provides real-time network infrastructure visualization, automated policy tuning driven by risk assessment of attacks, advanced IPS, custom app detectors for Application Visibility and Control, customized health notifications, enhanced reporting options, and APIs for host input and databases. Hardware-dependent capabilities such as clustering, stacking, switching, routing, VPN, and NAT must be handled via Cisco's ASA 5500-X on-device ASDM or the ASA command line interface.
Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances
Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewalls leverage technology behind the Cisco PIX 500 firewall, Cisco's IPS 4200 Series sensor, and the Cisco VPN 3000 family concentrator. These technologies enable the Cisco ASA Firewall family to offer a platform that defends against the widest variety of attacks. Cisco ASA Firewalls deliver application security, network containment and control, and safe VPN connectivity throughout Cisco's product line. This breadth of protection allows the guarding of any network section, which includes the most typical threat vectors like remote locations, LAN-connected internal users, and remote connected Virtual Private Networks.
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) firewalls deliver robust application security through intelligent, application-sensitive inspection processes that analyze traffic at Layers 4-7. This produces a better protected network including Web, voice, and mobile wireless connectivity. To defend networks against application-layer attacks and to provide better control over the applications and protocols used in their environments, these inspection engines incorporate broad application and protocol knowledgebases and rely on protection enforcement solutions such as anomaly sensing and state monitoring. Also incorporated are attack sensing and mitigation technology such as application/protocol command filters and content verification. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series firewall inspection engines also provide management of IM and tunneling applications, allowing organizations to police usage policies and conserve bandwidth for important business processes.
For additional information about Progent's consulting services for Cisco's ASA 5500 security appliances, see ASA 5500 firewalls integration and debugging support.
Cisco PIX Security Appliance Series
Based upon a tested, specialized OS that delivers rich protection services, Cisco PIX firewalls offer excellent protection and have been awarded EAL 4 status and ICSA Firewall and IP Security (IPsec) certification. Cisco PIX security appliances provide protection for a wide range of Voice over IP and additional mixed-media conventions including H.323 v. 4, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), Cisco Skinny Client Control Protocol, Real-Time Streaming Protocol, and MGCP, enabling businesses to safeguard installations of a broad array of current and next-generation IP voice and multimedia applications.
IT managers can furthermore remotely configure, monitor, and analyze Cisco PIX security appliances via a command-line interface. Secure command-line interface (CLI) access is available through several techniques such as Secure Shell (SSHv2) Protocol, Telnet through IP Security (IPsec), and out-of-band via a console port. Cisco PIX firewall appliances also have dependable automatic-update capabilities, a set of advanced protected remote-administration services that ensure firewall configurations and software images are kept current.
For additional information about Progent's consulting services for PIX 500 security appliances, go to PIX 500 firewalls integration and debugging consulting.
Progent's Migration Support for Cisco Firewalls
Since Cisco has stopped selling the PIX 500 and ASA 5500 families of firewalls, many businesses are concerned about depending on a critical security mechanism that may stop being supported. Cisco ASA 5500-X and Firepower Series firewalls offer the advantage of being new products and also offer several technical and financial advantages in comparison to PIX 500 devices. These advantages include significantly higher throughput, optional Secure Sockets Layer VPN capability, and an expandable architecture that guards your investment by enabling you to add new security services whenever you require them. Progent's Cisco certified experts can help your company to determine the strategic value of for upgrading from PIX 500 or ASA 5500 security appliances, design a migration plan that allows for a quick and non-disruptive changeover, assist your IT staff to configure new ASA 5500-x or Firepower NGFW Series firewalls, and offer online, consulting, and troubleshooting services.
Additional Ways Progent Can Assist Your Business with Cisco ASA and PIX Firewalls
Cisco's Firepower Series, ASA Series, and PIX security appliances provide a wealth of setup, tracking, and analysis options that give you the ability to set up these security appliances to match your company's needs. Progent's CCIE authorized network experts can assist you to configure and support a cost-effective infrastructure that includes Cisco firewall technology and that offers world-class protection, resilience, throughput, and manageability. Progent's GISA and CISSP-ISSP-certified IS security consultants can assist you to develop a security policy that makes sense for your business and can configure your PIX or ASA firewall to enforce your security strategy. Progent's security assessment professionals can assess the strength of your current firewall solution and validate the overall security of your entire IT environment. Progent's Help Desk support team can provide emergency online technical support for Cisco products and can give you quick access to a Cisco CCIE expert.
To find out more information about Progent's engineering support for Cisco solutions, pick a subject:
Integration of Cisco and Third-party Firewall 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:
If you wish to contact Progent about professional support for Cisco products, phone