Cisco is a long-time leader in delivering state-of-the-art firewall appliances for the widest possible variety of environments. Cisco's Firepower NGFWs Firewalls provide a modern firewall platform that combines sophisticated hardware, cloud services, and machine learning to block, identify, and respond to cyber attacks without manual intervention. Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE firewall experts can assist your organization to design and execute an efficient upgrade to Cisco Firepower firewalls from Cisco's from ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500, or PIX firewalls and help you integrate Firepower appliances with Cisco's subscription-based security services to build and centrally manage IT ecosystems that span local offices, data centers, private clouds and public clouds. Progent can also assist you to manage and troubleshoot legacy Cisco security appliances. Progent's certified network security consultants can help you with policy creation based on industry best practices so you can build a consistent security posture across all your endpoints at any location.

Cisco's Firepower Next Generation Firewall Appliances
Cisco's Firepower NGFWs Firewalls provide a significant performance improvement compared to Cisco's previous-generation ASA 5500-X security appliances and offer centralized management of modern cybersecurity capabilities like application visibility and control (AVC), next-generation intrusion protection 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, refer to Cisco Firepower firewalls integration 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 firewall appliances provide integrated firewall, VPN, and intrusion prevention system (IPS) services in single-box devices, delivering a broad array of features to meet the security requirements of companies ranging from small and mid-size businesses to enterprises and ISPs. Cisco's ASA 5500-X, ASA 5500, and PIX 500 firewall appliances enable network security teams to protect their network perimeter and offer secure offsite and mobile access while using powerful management tools built on Cisco's industry-leading firewall products.

Cisco's ASA 5500 Series and PIX 500 firewall appliances have reached end-of-life but are still commonly used in small and mid-size businesses and in a few enterprise data centers. The ASA 5500-X Next-Generation Firewalls represent substantially more bang for the buck and have supplanted the ASA 5500 and PIX 500 families of firewalls for new deployments. Still, Cisco's older model firewall appliances, if properly managed, continue to offer a high level of protection by supplying a variety of services including firewall, Virtual Private Network (VPN) connections, and IPS.

Since Cisco's purchase of Sourcefire, the entire family of Cisco ASA 5500-X firewalls can be configured to enable Firepower Services, built on Sourcefire's Snort technology, which is the market's most popular network intrusion protection system. Firepower services bring powerful new capabilities such as advanced malware protection (AMP), URL filtering, dynamic threat analytics, and security automation.

Progent's Cisco-certified network engineers can help your organization to support and debug legacy ASA 5500 Series and PIX firewalls and can also help you to design and implement a smooth upgrade to Cisco's ASA 5500-X firewalls with Firepower. Progent can also help you to design, configure, optimize, manage and troubleshoot new firewall solutions built on Cisco's latest ASA 5500-X models with Firepower Services. Progent can also help you to migrate from your Cisco ASA 5500-X solution to Cisco's latest Firepower Next Generation Firewalls.

Cisco's ASA 5500-X Series Firewalls
Cisco's extensive family of ASA 5500-X security appliances features an enhanced replacement for each rack-mountable model in the previous ASA 5500 series of firewalls. Each ASA 5500-X model targets the same market as the associated previous models, which offers small and midsize businesses plenty of room for selecting a solution that meets their security requirements and IT budgets. All ASA 5500-X firewalls are based on Cisco's tested stateful-inspection firewall technology and all include 64-bit hardware with multicore CPUs and are capable of running Cisco's advanced protection services. All devices in Cisco's ASA 5500-X family provide dependable security across any mix of physical, virtual, and cloud deployments.

Cisco ASA 5500-X Firepower Consultants

For more details about Cisco's ASA 5500-X firewalls, Firepower services, and Progent's consulting for ASA security appliances, see Cisco Firepower integration and debugging expertise

Cisco's Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X Firewalls
Cisco ASA 5500-X security appliances work with either software or hardware modules that enable Cisco's Firepower Services, which offer layered defense against multi-vector attacks. Firepower Services are based on technology adopted by Cisco from Sourcefire. Major capabilities of Firepower Services for ASA 5500-X security appliances include:

  • Layered defense against both familiar and zero-day attacks
  • Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) that utilizes big data to discover and mitigate intrusions
  • A Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System that provides contextual analysis that looks at users, network infrastructure, apps, and content to detect threats that use simultaneous vectors
  • Fine-grained Application Visibility and Control (AVC that is aware of thousands of applications and can automatically activate both standard and customized IPS policies based on the severity of threats
Cisco Firepower Integration Consultants

Firepower Services for ASA firewalls offer multi-layered protection

Smaller deployments of Cisco ASA firewalls can be efficiently administered using Cisco's on-box Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) Adaptive Security Device Manager, a web-based utility included with all ASA 5500-X versions. ASDM provides an easy-to-use web dashboard for configuring, administering, and troubleshooting ASA 5500-X appliances and service modules.

For multi-device and multi-site deployments, ASA 5500-X firewalls with Firepower Services can be administered with Firepower Management Center, available as one or more physical units or virtual devices. Firepower Management Center offers centralized firewall management, Application Visibility and Control, advanced IPS, URL filtering, and Cisco's Advanced Malware Protection (AMP). Because of ongoing rebranding since Cisco's acquisition of Sourcefire Defense Center, Firepower Management Center has been delivered under several names that include Defense Center, FireSIGHT Defense Center, and FireSIGHT Management Center.

Cisco Firepower Management Center Experts

Firepower Management Center centralizes event and policy management for Firepower firewalls

Firepower Management Center offers capabilities beyond those available with Cisco's on-box ASDM tool. Additional features include expanded context awareness, Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) with mitigation for client devices, a console that offers real-time network infrastructure visualization, automated policy optimization based on impact evaluation of threats, comprehensive IPS, custom application discovery for Application Visibility and Control (AVC), customized health alerts, enhanced 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 the on-box ASDM or the ASA CLI.

Cisco ASA 5500 Family of Firewalls
Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances Firewalls build on technology behind the Cisco PIX 500 firewall, Cisco's IPS 4200 Series Intrusion Prevention System, and the VPN 3000 Series concentrator. These solutions enable the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall product line to offer a platform that stops the broadest range of threats. Cisco ASA Firewalls provide program security, network containment and control, and safe VPN functionality across the entire product portfolio. This breadth of security allows the guarding of any network area, including the most typical threat conduits such as remote sites, locally-connected inside users, and remote connected VPNs.

ASA 5500 Series Consulting and Technical Support
The expandable architecture of the ASA 5500 Series permits you to add features by installing service modules and cards. These easy-to-install options give you the ability to add IPS and content protection functions like filtering virus, spyware, and phishing attacks and executing data and web screening. Beside enabling your IT staff to respond rapidly to new risk vectors, the extensible design of the Cisco ASA 5500 family also protects your hardware investment by increasing the useful life of your security appliances. The Cisco ASA 5500 Series also leverages your investment in administrative team training by utilizing the rich set of PIX security management tools and protocols such as the Cisco ASDM system, protected command-line interface availability, verbose syslog, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP).

Cisco Adaptive Security Appliances (ASA) 5500 Series firewalls deliver a high-level of application security through intelligent, application-aware inspection processes that analyze network flows at Layers 4-7. This produces a more secure environment including Web, voice, and mobile wireless access. To defend against application-layer attacks and to provide better control over the applications and protocols utilized in their environments, these inspection engines incorporate broad application and protocol knowledge and rely on security enforcement technologies that include anomaly detection and state monitoring. Also included are assault sensing and mitigation technology such as application and protocol command filters and content verification. Cisco ASA firewall inspection engines also deliver management of IM and tunneling applications, enabling businesses to police usage policies and recover bandwidth for vital business processes.

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

Cisco PIX Firewalls
Based upon a hardened, specialized operating system that offers a wealth of protection services, PIX firewall appliances offer a high level of protection and have received Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 4 status and ICSA Firewall and IP Security (IPsec) qualification. PIX firewall appliances provide protection for a broad range of VoIP and additional multimedia conventions including H.323 Version 4, SIP, Cisco Skinny Client Control Protocol, Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP), and Media Gateway Control Protocol, helping businesses to safeguard deployments of a broad range of contemporary and upcoming VoIP and video applications.

PIX Firewalls Consultants
PIX firewalls offer a variety of setup, monitoring, and analysis options, giving businesses the versatility to utilize the techniques that best match their needs. Management solutions include centralized, policy-based management utilities, integrated web-based administration, and support for remote-tracking protocols like Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) and syslog. The integrated Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) interface provides a powerful Web-accessible management platform that significantly streamlines the deployment, ongoing configuration, and tracking of a specific PIX firewall appliance without the need of any extra software beyond a standard Web browser and Java plug-in to be running on a manager's PC.

Administrators can furthermore remotely configure, track, and analyze Cisco PIX firewalls via a command-line interface. Safe command-line interface (CLI) access is possible using a number of techniques including SSHv2 Protocol, Telnet over IP Security, and out-of-band through a console port. Cisco PIX security appliances also include dependable auto-update capabilities, a collection of advanced secure remote-management options that make sure that security settings and software images are kept current.

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

Progent's Migration Support for Cisco Firewalls
Since Cisco has stopped selling the PIX 500 and ASA 5500 families of firewalls, many companies are uncomfortable with relying on a key infrastructure mechanism that might no longer be supported. ASA 5500-X and Firepower NGFW Series firewalls offer the advantage of being new products and also bring several technical and economic benefits in comparison to PIX 500 firewalls. These benefits include substantially better throughput, optional Secure Sockets Layer VPN support, and an expandable architecture that protects your investment by allowing you to self-install new security services when and if you need them. Progent's CCIE-certified network engineers can help you to assess the business case for moving from PIX 500 or Cisco ASA 5500 firewalls, design a migration process that permits a fast and seamless upgrade, assist you to configure new ASA 5500-x Series or Firepower Series appliances, and provide remote training, consulting, and troubleshooting services.

Other Ways Progent Can Help You with Cisco Firewalls
Cisco's Firepower NGFW Series, ASA 5500 Series, and PIX firewalls provide a wealth of setup, monitoring, and troubleshooting options which offer you the ability to configure these security appliances to match your company's requirements. Progent's CCIE authorized network professionals can show you how to configure and support a cost-effective network infrastructure that includes Cisco firewalls and that offers world-class security, fault tolerance, performance, and manageability. Progent's GISA and CISSP-ISSP-premier IS security engineers can assist your business to develop a security strategy appropriate for your business and can configure your PIX or ASA firewall to support your security strategy. Progent's security assessment professionals can assess the strength of your current firewall deployment and validate the security of your entire IS network. Progent's Help Desk Call Center can deliver urgent online troubleshooting for Cisco products and offer quick access to a Cisco CCIE expert.

To see additional details about Progent's consulting help for Cisco products, choose 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:

If you wish to get in touch with Progent about engineering assistance for Cisco technology, call 1-800-993-9400 or go to Contact Progent.



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