Cisco introduced what it is calling the first “threat-focused Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW),” providing the full contextual awareness and dynamic controls needed to automatically assess threats, correlate intelligence, and optimize defenses to protect all networks.
The new solution integrates the Cisco ASA 5500 Series firewall with application control, and the Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention Systems (NGIPS) and Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) from Sourcefire. The idea is to provide an adaptive, threat-focused NGFW that delivers superior, multi-layered protection, extending its capabilities far beyond legacy NGFW solutions before, during and after an attack.
Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services top features include:
- 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 organizations with better protection, while also reducing operating costs and complexity. This new solution simplifies an organization’s security architecture and reduces its network footprint with fewer security devices to manage and deploy and ability to license subscriptions to extend functionality.
“Now more than ever, organizations need to be able to implement dynamic controls to manage the pace of change of their environments and address security incidents. Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services is a major step forward for the NGFW market, empowering customers to deepen their protection from the data center, through the network, to the endpoint with the agility to identify, understand, and stop advanced threats in real-time and retrospectively,” stated Christopher Young, senior vice president, security business group, Cisco.
In 2013, Cisco acquired Sourcefire for approximately $2.7 billion.
Sourcefire, which was based in Columbia, Maryland, was founded in 2001 by Martin Roesch, author of open source Snort, the world’s most widely deployed intrusion detection and prevention technology. The company claims nearly 4 million downloads to date. Sourcefire’s intrusion prevention solutions are based on Snort.
