Cisco is a perennial front-runner in delivering state-of-the-art firewall appliances for the widest possible variety of deployments. Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls provide a modern firewall solution that combines sophisticated hardware, cloud services, and machine learning to block, discover, and respond to cyber attacks without manual intervention. Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE-certified firewall consultants can assist you to design and carry out an efficient upgrade to Cisco Firepower firewalls from Cisco's from ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500, or PIX firewalls and help you enhance Firepower appliances with Cisco's subscription-based security services to create and centrally control network environments that span branch offices, data centers, and cloud resources. Progent's firewall consultants can also assist you to maintain and debug legacy Cisco firewalls. Progent's certified cybersecurity experts can assist you with policy creation driven by industry best practices so you can build a consistent security profile that applies to all your endpoints anywhere.

Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls
Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) provide a significant performance improvement over Cisco's popular ASA 5500-X security appliances and offer unified management and automation of modern security features like application visibility and control (AVC), next-generation intrusion protection with intelligent prioritization of risks, advanced malware protection, URL filtering, and sandboxing. For details about Cisco's Firepower portfolio of Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs), refer to Firepower firewalls integration services.

Cisco Firepower 4100 Series Firewalls Consulting

Cisco's ASA 5500-X and Legacy Firewalls
Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series, ASA 5500, and PIX firewalls offer combined firewall, VPN, and intrusion prevention system capabilities in compact single-box packages, delivering a broad range of features to match the security and compliance requirements of organizations ranging from small and mid-size businesses to enterprises and Internet service providers. Cisco's ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500 Series, and PIX 500 firewall appliances allow network security staffs to protect their network perimeter and offer secure remote connectivity while using powerful administration tools built on Cisco's world-class firewall products.

Cisco's ASA 5500 Series and PIX firewall appliances have reached end-of-life but remain commonly deployed in smaller businesses and in some enterprise data centers. Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series Next-Generation Firewalls deliver substantially more bang for the buck and have superseded Cisco's ASA 5500 and PIX families of firewalls for new installations. However, Cisco's older model firewall appliances, if properly maintained, can deliver a high level of protection by supplying multiple features including firewall, VPN tunneling, and IPS.

Following Cisco's purchase of Sourcefire, the entire line of Cisco ASA 5500-X devices can be provisioned to enable Firepower Services, based on Sourcefire's Snort technology, which is the world's most popular network 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 CCIE-certified infrastructure consultants can help your organization to support and troubleshoot legacy ASA 5500 Series and PIX 500 firewall appliances and can also help you to plan and carry out a smooth migration to Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series firewalls with Firepower Services. Progent can also help you to plan, configure, optimize, administer and debug new firewall ecosystems based on Cisco's latest ASA 5500-X models with Firepower. Progent can also help you to upgrade from your Cisco ASA 5500-X Series solution to Cisco's latest Firepower Next Generation Firewalls (NGFWs).

Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series Firewalls
Cisco's comprehensive line of ASA 5500-X security appliances includes an improved replacement for every rack-mountable unit in the previous ASA 5500 series of firewalls. Each ASA 5500-X model is suited for the same market as the associated previous models, which gives most plenty of choice for picking a solution that meets their security requirements and IT budgets. All ASA 5500-X firewalls build on Cisco's tested stateful-inspection firewall technology and all incorporate 64-bit hardware with multicore CPUs and support Cisco's powerful protection services. All devices in Cisco's ASA 5500-X product line provide dependable protection across any combination of physical, virtual, and cloud deployments.

Cisco ASA 5500-X Firepower Consultants

For more information about ASA 5500-X firewalls, Cisco Firepower services, and Progent's support for Cisco ASA security appliances, go to Firepower integration and troubleshooting expertise

Cisco's Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X Firewalls
Cisco ASA 5500-X firewalls work with software or physical modules that enable Firepower Services, which provide layered protection against multi-vector threats. Cisco's Firepower Services are based on technology adopted by Cisco from Sourcefire. Key features of Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X firewalls include:

  • Layered defense against familiar and zero-day attacks
  • Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection that uses big data techniques to find and remediate intrusions
  • Cisco's Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System that performs contextual analysis that looks at clients, network infrastructure, software applications, and content to detect attacks that incorporate multiple vectors
  • High-resolution Application Visibility and Control that is aware of thousands of apps and can automatically activate standard and custom IPS policies depending on the degree of threats
Cisco Firepower Integration Expertise

Firepower Services for ASA firewalls provide multi-layered security

Simpler deployments of ASA firewalls can be effectively administered using Cisco's on-box Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) Adaptive Security Device Manager, a web-based utility provided with all ASA 5500-X versions. ASDM provides an easy-to-use web console for configuring, managing, and debugging ASA 5500-X firewalls and service modules.

For more complex environments, ASA 5500-X appliances with Firepower can be administered with Firepower Management Center, implemented as one or more physical or virtual appliances. Cisco's Firepower Management Center provides unified firewall management, Application Visibility and Control, enhanced IPS, URL filtering, and Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection (AMP). Due to ongoing rebranding after Cisco's purchase of Sourcefire Defense Center, Cisco's Firepower Management Center has been delivered under several names including Cisco Defense Center, Cisco Firesight Defense Center, and Cisco Firesight Management Center.

Firepower Management Center Experts

Firepower Management Center centralizes event and policy management for Firepower firewalls

Cisco's Firepower Management Center provides features unavailable with Cisco's on-box ASDM utility. Extra features include expanded context awareness, Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection with mitigation for client devices, a dashboard that offers dynamic network infrastructure visualization, automated policy tuning based on impact assessment of attacks, comprehensive IPS, custom application detectors for Application Visibility and Control, customized health notifications, improved reporting features, and application interfaces for host input and database access. Hardware-dependent features such as clustering, stacking, switching, routing, VPN, and NAT must be managed using Cisco's ASA 5500-X on-box ASDM or the ASA command line interface.

Cisco ASA 5500 Family of Firewalls
Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewalls build on engineering developed for the Cisco PIX 500 family firewall, Cisco's IPS 4200 Series Intrusion Prevention System, and the Cisco VPN 3000 family concentrator. These solutions converge on the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series Firewall product line to deliver a platform that defends against the widest variety of attacks. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances 5500 Series Firewalls provide program security, network containment, and clean Virtual Private Network functionality throughout Cisco's product portfolio. This breadth of protection allows defense of any network area, which includes the most common threat vectors such as remote sites, LAN-attached internal users, and remote connected Virtual Private Networks.

ASA 5500 Series Consulting Services and Troubleshooting
The scalable architecture of the ASA 5500 family allows you to add more features by installing security service modules and cards. These easy-to-install enhancements give you the ability to add Intrusion Protection and content protection functions such as blocking virus, spyware, and phishing attacks and performing data and URL filtering. Beside allowing you to react quickly to the latest risk environments, the extensible design of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series also leverages your capital investment by increasing the useful life of your security appliances. The ASA 5500 Series also leverages your investment in IT team education by supporting the rich set of PIX management utilities and protocols including the Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) system, secure command-line interface access, verbose syslog, and SNMP.

Cisco ASA firewalls deliver robust application security via intelligent, application-aware inspection engines that examine network flows at Layers 4-7. The result is a safer environment covering Web, voice, and 3G-mobile wireless services. To defend against application-layer assaults and to offer stronger policing of the applications and protocols used in their networks, Cisco's inspection engines incorporate extensive application and protocol knowledgebases and rely on security enforcement solutions that include protocol anomaly detection and state tracking. Also included are attack sensing and mitigation technology including application and protocol command filtering and content verification. Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series firewall inspection engines also provide management of IM and peer-to-peer file sharing, enabling businesses to police usage policies and preserve network bandwidth for crucial business processes.

For additional information about Progent's support services for ASA 5500 firewalls, see ASA 5500 series firewalls configuration and troubleshooting consulting.

PIX Security Appliance Series
Built around a tested, purpose-built operating system that offers a wealth of protection features, PIX firewall appliances offer a high level of protection and have earned Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 4 status and ICSA Labs Firewall and IPsec certification. PIX firewall appliances provide security for a wide array of VoIP and other multimedia standards such as H.323 Version 4, SIP, SCCP, Real-Time Streaming Protocol, and MGCP, enabling organizations to safeguard installations of a wide range of current and upcoming VoIP and mixed-media applications.

PIX Firewalls Help
PIX security appliances offer a wealth of setup, monitoring, and troubleshooting options, giving IT managers the versatility to utilize the methods that most closely match their needs. Management options include centralized, policy-based management utilities, integrated web-accessible management, and support for remote-tracking protocols like Simple Network Management Protocol and syslog. The integrated ASDM system provides a world-class Web-based control solution that greatly streamlines the installation, in-place modification, and tracking of a single PIX security appliance without the need of any extra utility beyond a standard Web browser and Java applet to be running on a manager's PC.

IT managers can also remotely configure, monitor, and analyze Cisco PIX security appliances using a command-line interface (CLI). Secure command-line interface (CLI) communication is available using a number of methods including Secure Shell (SSHv2) Protocol, Telnet through IP Security, and out-of-band via a console port. Cisco PIX security appliances also include robust automatic-update features, a set of advanced secure remote-administration options that make sure that firewall configurations and software images are always current.

For additional details about Progent's support services for PIX security appliances, go to PIX firewalls integration and debugging services.

Progent's Migration Support Services for Cisco Firewalls
Since Cisco has ceased selling the PIX and ASA 5500 product lines, many companies are uncomfortable with depending on a key security component that may no longer be supported by Cisco. ASA 5500-X and Firepower NGFW Series security appliances have the benefit of being new products and also offer several functions and economic benefits in comparison to PIX 500 devices. These benefits include significantly higher throughput, optional SSL VPN capability, and a modular design that protects your investment by allowing you to self-install more security services whenever you require them. Progent's Cisco experts can help you to assess the business case for moving from PIX or ASA 5500 firewalls, create a migration plan that allows for a quick and seamless upgrade, help you to install new ASA 5500-x Series or Firepower Series firewalls, and offer remote training, consulting, and technical support services.

Additional Ways Progent Can Help You with Cisco ASA and PIX Security Appliances
Cisco Firepower Series, ASA Series, and PIX firewalls provide a wealth of setup, monitoring, and troubleshooting features that give you the ability to deploy these firewalls to align optimally with your company's needs. Progent's CCIE authorized network professionals can assist you to design a cost-effective infrastructure that incorporates Cisco firewalls and that offers advanced protection, resilience, throughput, and manageability. Progent's GISA and CISM-premier information security consultants can help your business to develop a security policy that makes sense for your business and can set up your PIX or ASA firewall to support your security policies. Progent's security assessment engineers can evaluate the strength of your existing firewall solution and audit the security of your entire information system environment. Progent's Technical Response Center can provide emergency online technical support for Cisco technology and offer fast access to a Cisco expert.

To find out more information concerning Progent's engineering expertise for Cisco solutions, select a topic:

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 engineering assistance for Cisco products, call 1-800-993-9400 or see Contact Progent.



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