Cisco delivers new security solutions

Cisco introduced a set of security solutions designed to fortify data centers against the threats they face in moving toward more consolidated and virtualized environments, while also enabling businesses to take advantage of new cloud-based models.

Collectively, the offerings extend data center and security professionals’ power to enforce end-to-end security for high-capacity data centers and mobile workforces. The offerings include new highly scalable software for the world’s most widely deployed firewall, the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) line; virtualized ASA for multitenant environments; a data-center-grade intrusion prevention system (IPS); and new improvements to the Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client to meet the stringent requirements of a more mobile and productive workforce.

Operating under the principle that security must be integrated across the network to ensure protection of unified data centers, Cisco believes network policies must be unified across physical and virtual worlds, intra-virtual machine communication should be secured, and access to applications by wired and mobile clients must be protected. This security approach has become imperative as customers look to make the migration to cloud and a more flexible device-agnostic corporate culture. Cisco’s latest product developments support such an approach.

Cisco ASA 9.0 Platform:

• Delivers data-center-caliber performance, scaling to 320 Gbps of firewall and 60 Gbps IPS throughput, and 1 million connections per second and 50 million concurrent connections, delivering eight times the performance density of competing solutions.
• Delivers pay-as-you-grow scale as application and VM traffic increases, eliminating the need for costly chassis investment. Scaling is achieved through clustering technology, which allows IT to manage a stack of ASAs as a single logical device.
• Provides context-awareness for next-generation visibility and control. Supports TrustSec security group tags and identity-based firewall capabilities to provide enhanced visibility for more granular policy enforcement. Provides multitenant security to support cloud computing use cases.
• Integrates with Cisco Cloud Web security (formerly ScanSafe) to enable deep content scanning with little to no impact on ASA performance.
• Delivers enhanced, highly secure remote access capabilities by supporting IPv6 connections with minimal performance impact and Next Generation Encryption capabilities, including NSA “Suite B” set of cryptographic algorithms.

Cisco ASA 1000V:

• ASA firewall built specifically for multitenant virtual and cloud environments. Unlike competitive offerings, it goes beyond merely offering the current physical ASA in a VM to provide superior flexibility and more efficient use of resources.
• A single ASA 1000V instance can protect many workloads with different security policies across multiple ESX hosts, reducing deployment complexity and improving scalability in heterogeneous environments.
• Protects the tenant edge and enables highly secure segmentation for consistent, end-to-end security across physical, virtual and public/private cloud environments using a proven firewall.
• Built on the industry-leading Cisco Nexus® 1000V Series switch and complements the Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) for end-to-end security for virtual and cloud infrastructures.

Cisco IPS 4500 Series:

• Delivers the highest-performance density in the industry: 10 gigabits per second (Gbps) per rack unit, for ultra-efficient application protection in the data center.
• Purpose-built for the data center, it protects critical data center resources in a compact 2RU form factor, delivering superior IPS performance density.
• Enables easy insertion of IPS into a wide range of networks and ensures interoperability with existing network elements.
• Drives effective mitigation decisions via a context-aware IPS implementation that incorporates network reputation.
• Builds on the most widely deployed IPS technology in the market providing comprehensive, proven attack protection.