Cisco is a perennial leader in developing state-of-the-art firewall appliances for the widest possible variety of deployments. Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls represent an advanced firewall solution that marshals dedicated hardware, cloud-based services, and next-generation intrusion protection system (NGIPS) to anticipate, discover, and mitigate cyber attacks automatically. Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE firewall consultants can help you to design and execute a smooth upgrade to Firepower firewalls from Cisco's legacy ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500, or PIX firewalls and show you how to enhance Firepower appliances with Cisco's subscription-based security services to create and centrally manage IT environments that include branch offices, data centers, and cloud resources. Progent's firewall consultants can also help you to maintain and debug older-generation Cisco firewalls. Progent's certified cybersecurity experts can help you with policy creation and tuning based on leading best practices so you can build a consistent and effective cybersecurity profile that applies to all your networked devices anywhere.

Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewall Appliances
Cisco's Firepower NGFWs Firewalls provide a significant performance boost compared to Cisco's previous-generation ASA 5500-X firewalls and include centralized management of modern security features like application visibility and control, next-generation intrusion protection (NGIPS) with intelligent prioritization of risks, advanced malware protection (AMP), distributed denial of service (DDoS) mitigation, and multi-node sandboxing. For more information about Cisco's Firepower line of Next Generation Firewalls, visit Firepower firewalls consulting experts.

Cisco Firepower 4100 Series Firewalls Consulting

Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series and Legacy Firewalls
Cisco's ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500 Series, and PIX firewalls offer combined firewall, VPN, and intrusion prevention system services in compact single-box packages, delivering a broad array of features to meet the security and compliance requirements of organizations from small and mid-size businesses to enterprises and Internet service providers. Cisco's ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500 Series, and PIX firewall appliances enable IT security teams to protect their network edge and provide secure offsite and mobile access while using powerful administration tools built on Cisco's industry-leading firewall products.

Cisco's ASA 5500 and PIX 500 firewalls have arrived at end-of-life (EOL) but remain commonly used in smaller businesses and in a few larger data centers. The ASA 5500-X Next-Generation Firewalls deliver substantially more value and have supplanted Cisco's ASA 5500 and PIX lines of firewalls for new deployments. However, Cisco's older model firewall appliances, if properly maintained, continue to offer a high degree of security by supplying a variety of features such as firewall, Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections, and IPS.

Since Cisco's purchase of Sourcefire, the entire family of Cisco ASA 5500-X devices can be provisioned to support Firepower Services, based on Sourcefire's Snort product, which is the world's most deployed intrusion protection system. Firepower services provide enhanced capabilities including advanced malware protection (AMP), URL filtering, real-time threat analytics, and security automation.

Progent's Cisco-premier infrastructure consultants can assist your organization to maintain and troubleshoot older ASA 5500 Series and PIX firewalls and can also assist you to plan and carry out an efficient upgrade to Cisco's ASA 5500-X firewalls with Firepower Services. Progent can also assist you to plan, configure, optimize, manage and troubleshoot new firewall solutions based on Cisco's latest ASA 5500-X firewalls with Firepower. Progent can also assist your organization to upgrade from your Cisco ASA 5500-X solution to Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls.

Cisco's ASA 5500-X Firewall Product Family
Cisco's comprehensive line of ASA 5500-X security appliances features an enhanced substitute for every rack-mountable model in the previous ASA 5500 series of firewalls. Each ASA 5500-X firewall targets the identical market as the corresponding previous models, which gives most ample room for picking a firewall that aligns with their security requirements and budgets. All ASA 5500-X firewalls build on Cisco's proven stateful-inspection firewall technology and all include purpose-built 64-bit hardware with multicore CPUs and are capable of running Cisco's powerful protection services. All models in Cisco's ASA 5500-X family provide dependable security across any mix of physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

Cisco ASA 5500-X Firepower Consultants

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

Cisco's Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X Firewalls
Cisco ASA 5500-X firewalls accept either software or hardware modules that support Firepower Services, which provide layered defense against multi-vector attacks. Cisco's Firepower Services are powered by technology adopted by Cisco from Sourcefire. Major capabilities of Firepower Services for ASA firewalls include:

  • Multi-layer defense against familiar and zero-day attacks
  • Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) that utilizes big data to find and mitigate intrusions
  • A Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System that performs contextual analysis that covers users, network infrastructure, apps, and content to discover threats that use multiple vectors
  • High-resolution Application Visibility and Control that is familiar with thousands of applications and can automatically activate standard and customized IPS policies based on the degree of threats
Cisco Firepower Configuration Consultants

Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X firewalls offer multi-layered protection

Simpler deployments of Cisco ASA 5500-X firewalls can be efficiently administered via Cisco's on-box Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) Adaptive Security Device Manager, a web utility which is provided with all ASA 5500-X models. ASDM provides a simple web dashboard for configuring, managing, and troubleshooting ASA 5500-X devices and service modules.

For more complex environments, ASA 5500-X firewalls with Firepower can be managed with Firepower Management Center, implemented as one or several physical or virtual appliances. Firepower Management Center offers centralized firewall management, Application Visibility and Control (AVC, advanced IPS, URL filtering, and Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection. Due to frequent rebranding since Cisco's acquisition of Sourcefire Defense Center, Firepower Management Center has been delivered under various names that include Cisco Defense Center, Cisco Firesight Defense Center, and Cisco Firesight Management Center.

Cisco Firepower Management Center Experts

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

Firepower Management Center provides capabilities beyond those available with Cisco's on-box Adaptive Security Device Manager tool. Additional features include expanded context awareness, Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) with remediation for client devices, a dashboard that offers real-time infrastructure visualization, automated policy tuning driven by risk assessment of attacks, comprehensive IPS, custom app detectors for Application Visibility and Control, customized health notifications, enhanced reporting options, and application interfaces for host input and database access. Hardware-dependent features like clustering, stacking, switching, routing, VPN, and NAT must be managed using the on-device ASDM or the ASA CLI.

Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewalls
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series Firewalls leverage technology behind the Cisco PIX 500 Series firewall, the IPS 4200 sensor, and the VPN 3000 model concentrator. These solutions converge on the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall product line to deliver a platform that stops the widest range of attacks. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) Firewalls provide program protection, network containment, and clean VPN connectivity throughout Cisco's product portfolio. This breadth of security enables the guarding of any network area, which includes the most common attack conduits like remote sites, locally-connected inside users, and remote access Virtual Private Networks.

Cisco ASA 5500 Series Consulting Services and Technical Support
The scalable design of the ASA 5500 Series enables you to add more security services by installing security service modules (SSMs) and cards. These easy-to-install options provide the option of adding Intrusion Protection and content protection services like filtering virus, spyware, and phishing assaults and executing file and URL screening. In addition to enabling your IT staff to react quickly to new risk environments, the expandable design of the ASA 5500 Series also leverages your capital investment by increasing the useful life of your security appliances. The Cisco ASA 5500 family also leverages your investment in IT staff training by supporting the rich library of PIX 500 security management tools and protocols such as the Cisco ASDM system, secure command-line interface availability, verbose syslog, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) firewalls deliver robust application security through intelligent, application-sensitive inspection processes that analyze traffic at Layers 4-7. This produces a more secure environment including Web, voice, and mobile wireless connectivity. To protect networks against application-layer assaults and to provide better control over the programs and protocols used in their networks, Cisco's inspection engines integrate broad application and protocol knowledge and employ security enforcement technologies that include anomaly detection and state monitoring. Also incorporated are attack detection and remediation technology including application and protocol command filtering and URL deobfuscation. Cisco ASA 5500 Series firewall inspection engines also deliver management of instant messaging and tunneling applications, enabling organizations to police usage policies and recover bandwidth for crucial business processes.

For additional details about Progent's consulting services for ASA 5500 firewalls, visit ASA 5500 series firewalls configuration and debugging services.

Cisco PIX Security Appliance Series
Based upon a hardened, specialized operating system that offers rich security services, Cisco PIX security appliances offer excellent protection and have earned Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4 status and ICSA Labs Firewall and IP Security qualification. PIX firewall appliances offer protection for a wide range of VoIP and other mixed-media conventions including H.323 v. 4, SIP, SCCP, Real-Time Streaming Protocol, and Media Gateway Control Protocol (MGCP), enabling businesses to safeguard installations of a broad array of current and upcoming IP voice and video applications.

PIX Security Help
Cisco PIX firewall appliances feature a wealth of configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting options, giving IT managers the versatility to use the techniques that most closely meet their requirements. Management solutions include common, policy-based administration utilities, integrated web-accessible administration, and compatibility with remote-monitoring standards like Simple Network Management Protocol and syslog. The integrated Adaptive Security Device Manager system offers a powerful Web-accessible management solution that significantly streamlines the deployment, in-place modification, and monitoring of a specific PIX firewall without the need of any additional utility other than a standard Web browser and Java plug-in to be installed on an administrator's PC.

Administrators can furthermore remotely set up, monitor, and troubleshoot PIX firewall appliances using a command-line interface (CLI). Safe CLI interface access is available through several methods such as Secure Shell (SSHv2) Protocol, Telnet through IPsec, and out-of-band through a console port. Cisco PIX security appliances also include dependable automatic-update features, a collection of revolutionary secure remote-administration options that make sure that security settings and software images are always current.

For additional details about Progent's support services for Cisco PIX 500 security appliances, see PIX firewalls configuration and troubleshooting support.

Progent's Migration Consulting for Cisco Firewalls
Because Cisco has stopped offering the PIX 500 and ASA 5500 product lines, many businesses are concerned about relying on a critical infrastructure component that might stop being supported. Cisco ASA 5500-X and Firepower Series firewalls have the advantage of being current devices and also offer several technical and financial benefits in comparison to PIX 500 firewalls. These benefits include substantially better performance, optional SSL VPN support, and an expandable architecture that protects your investment by allowing you to add more security features whenever you require them. Progent's Cisco certified experts can assist you to assess the business value of for upgrading from PIX 500 or ASA 5500 security appliances, design a migration plan that permits a fast and seamless upgrade, assist your IT staff to deploy new ASA 5500-x or Firepower Series firewalls, and offer online, consulting, and troubleshooting services.

Additional Ways Progent Can Assist You with Cisco Firewalls
Cisco Firepower NGFW Series, ASA Series, and PIX family firewalls provide an array of configuration, tracking, and troubleshooting features that give you the flexibility to configure these firewalls to match your company's requirements. Progent's CCIE authorized network consultants can show you how to build an efficient network infrastructure that includes Cisco firewalls and that offers world-class security, resilience, throughput, and recoverability. Progent's CISA and CISSP-ISSP-certified IS security consultants can assist your business to develop a security policy that makes sense for your business and can configure your PIX or ASA firewall to enforce your security policies. Progent's security evaluation consultants can assess the strength of your current firewall deployment and audit the security of your entire information system environment. Progent's Technical Response Center (TRC) can deliver emergency online technical support for Cisco technology and offer quick access to a Cisco CCIE network engineer.

To find out more details about 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:

To ask Progent about professional support for Cisco technology, phone 1-800-993-9400 or see Contact Progent.



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