Cisco is a long-time leader in delivering state-of-the-art firewalls for the widest possible variety of deployments. Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) represent a modern firewall solution that marshals dedicated hardware, cloud services, and next-generation intrusion protection system (NGIPS) to block, identify, and mitigate cyber attacks without manual intervention. Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE-certified firewall experts can assist you to plan and carry out a smooth migration to Firepower firewalls from Cisco's legacy ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500, or PIX firewalls and help you integrate Firepower firewalls with Cisco's security services to create and centrally control IT environments that include local offices, data centers, and cloud resources. Progent's firewall consultants can also help you to maintain and debug legacy Cisco security appliances. Progent's certified network security experts can assist you with policy creation driven by leading best practices in order to build a consistent and effective security profile across all your networked endpoints anywhere.

Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewall Appliances
Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) deliver a major performance boost over Cisco's popular ASA 5500-X firewalls and offer unified management and automation of advanced cybersecurity capabilities such as application visibility and control, next-generation intrusion protection (NGIPS) with risk prioritization, advanced malware protection (AMP), DDoS mitigation, and multi-node sandboxing. For more information about Cisco's Firepower family of Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs), visit Cisco Firepower Series firewalls consulting expertise.

Cisco Firepower 4100 Series Firewalls Consulting

Cisco's ASA 5500-X and Legacy Firewalls
Cisco's ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500 Series, and PIX 500 firewall appliances offer integrated firewall, IPsec VPN, and IPS services in compact single-box packages, delivering a broad range of features to meet the security needs of organizations from small businesses to enterprises and ISPs. 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 advanced administration tools based on Cisco's industry-leading firewall products.

Cisco's ASA 5500 Series and PIX 500 firewall appliances have arrived at end-of-life but are still widely deployed in smaller organizations and in a few enterprise data centers. The ASA 5500-X Series Next-Generation Firewalls represent substantially more bang for the buck and have supplanted Cisco's ASA 5500 and PIX families of firewalls for new deployments. Still, Cisco's older model firewall appliances, if carefully maintained, can deliver a high degree of protection by supplying multiple services 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 support Firepower Services, based on Sourcefire's Snort product, which is the market's most deployed intrusion protection system. Firepower services provide powerful new features including advanced malware protection (AMP), URL filtering, dynamic threat analytics, and security automation.

Progent's Cisco-certified infrastructure consultants can help you to support and troubleshoot older ASA 5500 and PIX 500 firewall appliances and can also assist you to design and implement a smooth upgrade to Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series firewalls with Firepower Services. Progent can also help you to plan, deploy, tune, administer and troubleshoot new firewall solutions based on Cisco's current ASA 5500-X firewalls with Firepower Services. Progent's firewall consultants can also help you to migrate from your Cisco ASA 5500-X Series solution to Cisco's Firepower NGFWs Firewalls.

Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series Firewalls
Cisco's comprehensive line of ASA 5500-X security appliances features an improved substitute for every rack-mountable unit in the older ASA 5500 generation of firewalls. Each ASA 5500-X firewall targets the same environment as the corresponding previous models, which gives most ample room for picking a solution that aligns with their security requirements and IT budgets. All ASA 5500-X firewalls build on Cisco's proven stateful-inspection firewall technology and all incorporate 64-bit hardware with multicore CPUs and are capable of running Cisco's powerful security services. All models in Cisco's ASA 5500-X family deliver consistent protection across any mix of physical, virtual, and cloud deployments.

Cisco ASA 5500-X Firepower Consultants

For more information about ASA 5500-X security appliances, Firepower services, and Progent's consulting for ASA firewalls, go to Cisco Firepower configuration and debugging expertise

Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X Firewalls
Cisco ASA 5500-X firewalls work with software or hardware modules that enable Firepower Services, which offer layered protection against advanced attacks. Firepower Services are based on innovative technology acquired by Cisco from Sourcefire. Major features of Firepower Services for ASA firewalls include:

  • Layered defense against familiar and new threats
  • Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) that uses big data to find and remediate intrusions
  • A Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS) that provides contextual analysis that looks at users, infrastructure, software applications, and content to discover attacks that incorporate simultaneous approaches
  • High-resolution Application Visibility and Control (AVC that is aware of thousands of apps and can automatically launch standard and custom IPS policies depending on the severity of risk
Cisco Firepower Configuration Expertise

Firepower Services for Cisco ASA 5500-X firewalls provide advanced multi-layered protection

Simpler implementations of ASA 5500-X firewalls can be effectively managed using Cisco's on-device Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) Adaptive Security Device Manager, a web-based tool which is provided with all ASA 5500-X models. ASDM includes a convenient web console for deploying, managing, and debugging ASA 5500-X firewalls and service modules.

For multi-device and multi-site environments, ASA 5500-X appliances with Firepower can be managed with Firepower Management Center, implemented as one or several physical or virtual devices. Cisco's Firepower Management Center offers unified firewall management, Application Visibility and Control (AVC, advanced IPS, URL filtering, and Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection. Due to frequent rebranding after Cisco's purchase of Sourcefire Defense Center, Cisco's Firepower Management Center has been offered under several names including Defense Center, Cisco Firesight Defense Center, and Cisco Firesight Management Center.

Firepower Management Center Consulting

Cisco Firepower Management Center unifies event and policy control for Firepower firewalls

Firepower Management Center offers features beyond those available with Cisco's on-box ASDM tool. Additional capabilities include expanded context awareness, Advanced Malware Protection with remediation for client devices, a dashboard that offers real-time network infrastructure visualization, automated policy tuning based on risk assessment of attacks, comprehensive IPS, custom app detectors for Application Visibility and Control (AVC), customized health notifications, improved reporting options, and application interfaces for host input and database access. Hardware-dependent capabilities such as clustering, stacking, switching, routing, VPN, and NAT must be handled via the on-box ASDM or the ASA 5500-X CLI.

Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewalls
Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewalls build on technology behind Cisco's PIX 500 family firewall, the IPS 4200 family Intrusion Prevention System, and the VPN 3000 model concentrator. These solutions enable the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances Firewall product line to offer a firewall that defends against the broadest variety of threats. Cisco ASA Firewalls provide program protection, network containment and control, and clean VPN connectivity throughout the entire product portfolio. This broad scope of security allows defense of any network section, including the most typical threat vectors such as remote sites, locally-connected internal users, and remote access Virtual Private Networks.

ASA 5500 Consulting Services and Troubleshooting
The scalable design of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series enables you to add features via security service modules (SSMs) and cards. These user-installable enhancements give you the ability to add Intrusion Protection and content protection services such as filtering virus, worms, and phishing attacks and executing file and web filtering. In addition to allowing you to respond quickly to the latest risk vectors, the extensible design of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series also protects your hardware investment by increasing the life of your firewalls. The Cisco ASA 5500 family also protects your investment in IT team training by supporting the rich library of PIX security management tools and protocols including the Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager system, protected command-line interface (CLI) availability, verbose syslog, and SNMP.

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series firewalls provide a high-level of application security via intelligent, application-aware inspection engines that examine network flows at Layers 4-7. This produces a safer environment including Web, voice, and 3G-mobile wireless services. To defend networks against application-layer assaults and to offer better policing of the programs and protocols utilized in their networks, these inspection engines incorporate extensive application and protocol knowledge and rely on protection enforcement technologies that include anomaly detection and application and protocol state monitoring. Also included are assault sensing and remediation techniques such as application and protocol command filters and content verification. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) firewall inspection engines also deliver management of instant messaging and tunneling applications, enabling businesses to enforce usage policies and free up network bandwidth for crucial business processes.

For more details about Progent's support services for Cisco's ASA 5500 security appliances, visit ASA 5500 firewalls configuration and troubleshooting consulting.

PIX Security Appliance Series
Based around a hardened, purpose-built operating system that offers a wealth of protection services, Cisco PIX security appliances provide excellent protection and have received Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4 status and ICSA Firewall and IP Security qualification. PIX firewall appliances provide protection for a broad range of Voice over IP and other multimedia conventions including H.323 Version 4, SIP, SCCP, Real-Time Streaming Protocol, and Media Gateway Control Protocol, enabling organizations to protect installations of a wide array of contemporary and next-generation Voice over IP and mixed-media applications.

PIX Security Experts
PIX security appliances feature a variety of configuration, tracking, and troubleshooting features, giving businesses the flexibility to utilize the techniques that most closely match their requirements. Administrative solutions include common, policy-based administration tools, integrated web-accessible administration, and support for remote-monitoring standards such as SNMP and syslog. The integrated ASDM system offers a world-class Web-based management solution that greatly streamlines the installation, ongoing modification, and monitoring of a single PIX firewall without the need of any extra utility other than an ordinary Web browser and Java applet to be installed on a manager's computer.

Administrators can also remotely set up, monitor, and analyze Cisco PIX firewall appliances using a command-line interface. Secure CLI interface access is possible using several techniques including SSHv2 Protocol, Telnet through IP Security (IPsec), and out-of-band via a console port. PIX firewall appliances also have dependable auto-update features, a set of revolutionary secure remote-management options that ensure firewall settings and software images are kept up to date.

For more information about Progent's consulting services for Cisco PIX 500 firewalls, visit PIX 500 firewalls integration and debugging support.

Progent's Migration Consulting Services for Cisco Firewalls
Because Cisco has stopped offering the PIX and ASA 5500 families of firewalls, many businesses are concerned about depending on a critical infrastructure component that might no longer be supported. Cisco ASA 5500-X and Firepower NGFW Series firewalls have the advantage of being new products and also bring several functions and financial benefits in comparison to PIX 500 firewalls. These benefits include significantly higher performance, optional SSL VPN capability, and an expandable architecture that guards your investment by allowing you to add new security services whenever you require them. Progent's CCIE-certified experts can assist you to assess the strategic case for upgrading from PIX 500 or Cisco ASA 5500 firewalls, create a migration process that allows for a fast and seamless upgrade, help your IT staff to set up new ASA 5500-x Series or Firepower Series firewalls, and provide online, consulting, and technical support services.

Additional Ways Progent Can Assist You with Cisco ASA and PIX Security Appliances
Cisco Firepower NGFW Series, ASA 5500 Series, and PIX family firewalls provide a wealth of setup, monitoring, and troubleshooting features which give you the ability to set up these security appliances to match your business needs. Progent's CCIE certified network experts can show you how to design an efficient infrastructure that includes Cisco firewall technology and that offers advanced security, fault tolerance, throughput, and recoverability. Progent's GISA and CISSP-ISSP-certified information security engineers can help your business to create a security policy appropriate for your environment and can configure your PIX or ASA firewall to enforce your security strategy. Progent's risk evaluation experts can assess the effectiveness of your current firewall solution and help determine the security of your entire IS environment. Progent's Technical Response Center can deliver urgent remote troubleshooting for Cisco products and offer fast access to a Cisco CCIE expert.

To find out additional details concerning Progent's professional expertise for Cisco technology, 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:

To get in touch with Progent about technical support for Cisco products, phone 1-800-993-9400 or go to Contact Progent.



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