Cisco is a long-time leader in delivering state-of-the-art firewalls for the broadest possible range of deployments. Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) represent a modern cybersecurity solution that marshals dedicated hardware, cloud services, and machine learning to anticipate, identify, and mitigate cyber attacks automatically. Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE-certified firewall consultants can help you to design and carry out a smooth upgrade to Cisco Firepower firewalls from Cisco's from ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500, or PIX appliances and help you enhance Firepower appliances with Cisco's cloud-based services to build and centrally control network ecosystems that span local offices, data centers, private clouds and public clouds. Progent's firewall consultants can also help you to maintain and troubleshoot older-generation Cisco security appliances. Progent's certified network security experts can assist you with policy creation based on leading best practices so you can build a consistent and effective cybersecurity profile that applies to all your networked endpoints at any location.

Cisco's Firepower NGFW Firewalls
Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) provide a major performance boost compared to Cisco's popular ASA 5500-X security appliances and offer centralized control of advanced cybersecurity features such as application visibility, next-generation intrusion protection (NGIPS) with intelligent prioritization of risks, advanced malware protection, distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, and sandboxing. For more information about Cisco's Firepower line of Next Generation Firewalls, visit Firepower Series firewalls consulting expertise.

Cisco Firepower 4100 Series Firewalls Consulting

Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series and Legacy Firewalls
Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series, ASA 5500 Series, and PIX 500 firewalls provide combined firewall, IPsec VPN, and IPS capabilities in compact single-box devices, delivering a wide range of features to match the security needs of organizations from small and mid-size businesses to enterprises and ISPs. Cisco's ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500, and PIX firewalls allow IT security teams to defend their network edge and provide secure offsite and mobile connectivity while using powerful management tools based on Cisco's industry-leading firewall technology.

Cisco's ASA 5500 Series and PIX 500 firewalls have arrived at end-of-life (EOL) status but are still commonly used in smaller businesses as well as in a few enterprise networks. The ASA 5500-X Next-Generation Firewalls deliver substantially more bang for the buck and have superseded the ASA 5500 and PIX 500 lines of firewalls for new installations. However, Cisco's older model firewall appliances, if carefully managed, continue to offer a high degree of protection by supplying multiple features such as stateful firewall, Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections, and IPS.

Following Cisco's purchase of Sourcefire, the entire family of ASA 5500-X firewalls can be configured to support Firepower Services, based on Sourcefire's Snort technology, which is the market's most deployed network intrusion protection system. Firepower services bring enhanced capabilities such as advanced malware protection (AMP), URL filtering, real-time threat analytics, and security automation.

Progent's Cisco-certified infrastructure consultants can help you to maintain and troubleshoot legacy ASA 5500 and PIX 500 firewalls and can also help you to design and carry out an efficient upgrade to Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series firewalls with Firepower Services. Progent can also help you to design, deploy, tune, manage and debug new firewall solutions built on Cisco's current ASA 5500-X firewalls with Firepower. Progent's firewall consultants can also assist your organization to upgrade from your Cisco ASA 5500-X Series solution to Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls.

Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series Firewalls
Cisco's extensive family of ASA 5500-X firewalls includes an improved replacement for every rack-mountable unit in the older ASA 5500 series of devices. Each ASA 5500-X model is suited for the identical environment as the associated previous models, which offers most ample room for picking a firewall that meets their security needs and budgets. All ASA 5500-X firewalls build on Cisco's proven stateful-inspection firewall technology and all incorporate purpose-built 64-bit hardware with multicore processors and support Cisco's advanced protection services. All models in Cisco's ASA 5500-X product line deliver consistent protection across any combination of physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

Cisco ASA 5500-X Firepower Consultants

For more details about ASA 5500-X firewalls, Cisco Firepower services, and Progent's support for Cisco ASA 5500-X firewalls, visit Firepower integration and troubleshooting expertise

Cisco's Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X Security Appliances
Cisco ASA 5500-X firewalls accept software or physical modules that enable Cisco's Firepower Services, which offer layered protection against multi-vector attacks. Firepower Services are based on technology adopted by Cisco from Sourcefire. Major features of Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X security appliances include:

  • Layered defense against familiar and zero-day threats
  • Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection that utilizes big data techniques to find and mitigate intrusions
  • Cisco's Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System (NGIPS) that provides contextual analysis that covers clients, infrastructure, software applications, and content to detect threats that use multiple vectors
  • Fine-grained Application Visibility and Control (AVC that is familiar with thousands of apps and can automatically launch both standard and custom IPS policies depending on the degree of risk
Cisco Firepower Integration Expertise

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

Smaller implementations of ASA 5500-X firewalls can be efficiently managed via 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 versions. ASDM includes an easy-to-use web dashboard for configuring, managing, and troubleshooting ASA 5500-X appliances and service modules.

For more complex deployments, ASA 5500-X appliances with Firepower Services can be administered with Firepower Management Center, available as one or several physical units or virtual appliances. Firepower Management Center offers centralized firewall management, Application Visibility and Control, enhanced IPS, URL filtering, and Advanced Malware Protection. Because of frequent rebranding since Cisco's purchase of Sourcefire Defense Center, Cisco's Firepower Management Center has been delivered under various names including Defense Center, FireSIGHT Defense Center, and Cisco Firesight Management Center.

Firepower Management Center Consultants

Firepower Management Center unifies event and policy control for Cisco Firepower firewall appliances

Cisco's Firepower Management Center provides features unavailable with Cisco's on-box ASDM utility. Extra capabilities include expanded context awareness, Advanced Malware Protection with mitigation for user devices, a dashboard that offers real-time network visualization, automated policy tuning based on risk assessment of threats, advanced IPS, custom app discovery for Application Visibility and Control (AVC), customized health notifications, improved reporting options, and APIs for host input and databases. Hardware-dependent options like clustering, stacking, switching, routing, VPN, and NAT must be managed via the on-device ASDM or the ASA 5500-X command line interface.

Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances Firewalls leverage engineering behind Cisco's PIX 500 Series firewall, the IPS 4200 family Intrusion Prevention System, and the Cisco VPN 3000 Series concentrator. These solutions converge on the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series Firewall product line to offer a platform that defends against the widest variety of attacks. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances 5500 Series Firewalls deliver program protection, local containment and control, and clean VPN functionality throughout Cisco's product portfolio. This breadth of security allows the guarding of any network section, including the most typical threat conduits such as remote sites, LAN-connected inside users, and remote connected VPNs.

ASA 5500 Series Consulting Services and Troubleshooting
The expandable design of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series enables you to add more security services via service modules and cards. These easy-to-install enhancements provide the option of adding IPS and content protection functions such as blocking virus, spyware, and phishing attacks and executing file and web screening. In addition to allowing you to react rapidly to the latest threat environments, the extensible architecture of the Cisco ASA 5500 family also protects your capital investment by prolonging the useful life of your security appliances. The ASA 5500 Series also protects your investment in administrative staff training by utilizing the rich set of PIX 500 management tools and protocols such as the Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager system, secure command-line interface availability, syslog, and Simple Network Management Protocol.

Cisco ASA 5500 Series firewalls deliver a high-level of application security through intelligent, application-aware inspection processes that examine traffic at Layers 4-7. This results in a better protected network including Web, voice, and mobile wireless services. To defend against application-layer assaults and to provide stronger policing of the applications and protocols used in their environments, these inspection engines incorporate extensive application and protocol knowledge and employ protection enforcement solutions that include protocol anomaly sensing and state monitoring. Also included are assault detection and mitigation techniques including application/protocol command filtering and URL deobfuscation. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series firewall inspection engines also provide management of IM and peer-to-peer file sharing, enabling organizations to police usage policies and preserve bandwidth for crucial business processes.

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

Cisco PIX Firewall Appliances
Based upon a tested, specialized operating system that offers rich protection features, PIX security appliances offer excellent protection and have earned EAL 4 status and ICSA Firewall and IP Security qualification. PIX firewalls provide protection for a wide array of VoIP and other mixed-media standards including H.323 v. 4, Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), SCCP, Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), and Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP), enabling businesses to protect deployments of a broad array of contemporary and next-generation VoIP and video applications.

PIX Firewalls Support
PIX security appliances feature a variety of setup, monitoring, and troubleshooting options, providing IT managers the flexibility to utilize the methods that most closely match their requirements. Management options include centralized, policy-based management tools, integrated web-accessible administration, and compatibility with remote-tracking protocols like Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and syslog. The integrated Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) system provides a powerful Web-accessible control platform that significantly streamlines the installation, ongoing modification, and tracking of a specific Cisco PIX firewall without requiring any additional software other than an ordinary Web browser and Java plug-in to be installed on a manager's computer.

Administrators can furthermore remotely configure, monitor, and analyze Cisco PIX firewall appliances using a command-line interface (CLI). Secure command-line interface (CLI) communication is possible using several methods such as Secure Shell (SSHv2) Protocol, Telnet through IPsec, and out-of-band through a console port. PIX firewall appliances also have robust auto-update capabilities, a collection of revolutionary protected remote-management services that ensure firewall settings and software images are kept current.

For additional information about Progent's support services for PIX 500 firewalls, go to PIX firewalls configuration and troubleshooting support.

Progent's Migration Consulting Services for Cisco Firewalls
Because Cisco has ceased offering the PIX and ASA 5500 product lines, many companies are concerned about relying on a key infrastructure mechanism that may stop being supported. ASA 5500-X and Firepower NGFW Series security appliances have the benefit of being current devices and also offer a number of functions and economic advantages in comparison to PIX 500 firewalls. These advantages include significantly higher throughput, optional Secure Sockets Layer tunneling support, and an expandable architecture that protects your investment by enabling you to add new security features when and if you require them. Progent's CCIE-certified network engineers can help your company to assess the business value of for moving from PIX or ASA 5500 security appliances, create a migration process that permits a fast and non-disruptive changeover, help your IT staff to set up new ASA 5500-x or Firepower NGFW Series firewalls, and offer remote training, consulting, and technical support services.

Additional Ways Progent Can Assist You with Cisco Firewalls
Cisco Firepower Series, ASA Series, and PIX family security appliances incorporate a wealth of configuration, tracking, and troubleshooting features that offer you the flexibility to deploy these security appliances to match your company's needs. Progent's CCIE certified network consultants can show you how to configure and support a cost-effective network infrastructure that incorporates Cisco firewall technology and that offers world-class protection, resilience, throughput, and manageability. Progent's GISA and CISM-certified IS security engineers can assist your business to develop a security policy that makes sense for your environment and can set up your security appliance to enforce your security policies. Progent's risk evaluation professionals can evaluate the strength of your current firewall deployment and audit the overall security of your entire IS environment. Progent's Technical Response Center can provide emergency remote troubleshooting for Cisco products and offer quick access to a Cisco network engineer.

To learn more details concerning Progent's professional assistance for Cisco technology, select 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:

In order to get in touch with Progent about consulting expertise for Cisco products, phone 1-800-993-9400 or go to Contact Progent.



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