Cisco Unveils Next-Generation Firewall

By Claire Cleveland

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Cisco has unveiled what it’s calling the industry’s first threat-focused, next-generation firewall (NFGW) – Cisco ASA with FirePOWER. The IT giant says the firewall provides the full contextual awareness and dynamic controls needed to automatically assess threats, correlate intelligence, and optimize defenses to protect all networks.

The NGFW integrates the Cisco ASA 5500 Series firewall with application control with Sourcefire’s Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention Systems (NGIPS) and Advanced Malware Protection (AMP). Cisco says that provides an integrated threat defense across the entire attack continuum – before, during and after an attack.

Cisco ASA with FirePOWER provides  dashboards and drill-down reports of discovered hosts, suspect applications, threats and indicators of compromise.

“In today’s climate of industrialized hacking and sophisticated cybercrime gangs, we’ve entered an era in which legacy NGFW solutions are not enough to thwart attackers,” said Christopher Young, senior vice president, security business group, Cisco. “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.”