Cisco unveils threat-focused next-generation firewall

Cisco introduced a threat-focused Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW). Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services provides the full contextual awareness and dynamic controls needed to automatically assess threats, correlate intelligence, and optimize defenses to protect all networks.

Until now, NGFWs have focused on policy and application control and have been unable to address advanced and zero-day attacks. Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services changes this, taking a visibility-driven, threat-focused and platform-based approach:

Visibility-driven – Delivering full contextual awareness of users, mobile devices, client-side apps, virtual machine‐to-machine communications, vulnerabilities, threats, URLs, and other important telemetry. Its enterprise-class management capabilities provide users with dashboards and drill-down reports of discovered hosts, suspect applications, threats, and Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) for comprehensive visibility.

Threat-focused – Incorporating leading NGIPS for comprehensive protection from known and advanced threats, as well as AMP to combat against zero-day and persistent attacks. Big data analytics, continuous analysis and Cisco Collective Security Intelligence (CSI) work together to provide detection, blocking, tracking, analysis, and remediation capabilities to protect against the full spectrum of attacks, known and unknown.

Platform‐based – Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services combines proven firewall functionality and application control, leading NGIPS capability, and advanced breach detection and remediation in a single device. The integration provides organisations with better protection, while also reducing operating costs and complexity. This new solution simplifies an organisation’s security architecture and reduces its network footprint with fewer security devices to manage and deploy and ability to license subscriptions to extend functionality.

Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services visibility and continuous analysis to detect advanced, multi-vector threats and streamlines and automates response for both known and unknown malware. It also offers holistic, actionable IoCs that speed threat investigation and retrospective remediation, along with integrated incident response scoping and automated detection policy updates.

All of these innovations are supported by an enterprise-class stateful firewall, VPN, advanced clustering and granular application-layer and risk-based controls that evoke tailored NGIPS threat detection policies to optimise security effectiveness.

Open source security integration with Snort, OpenAppID and ClamAV further allows customers to easily customize security to address new or specific threats and applications as quickly as possible.