infoTECH Feature

September 18, 2014

Partnership Expands Capability of Next Generation Firewall

A network equipment provider announced this week that it has released a next-generation firewall that focuses on threats in a manner that its competition does not.

This week, Cisco (News - Alert) announced the release of its Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services firewall that is the result of combined efforts with network security company Sourcefire. Cisco has already proven its next-generation firewall, the ASA 5500 Series, and now the Sourcefire next-generation intrusion prevention systems and advanced malware protection will allow the Cisco product to work even more effectively. Christopher Young, the senior vice president of the security business group at Cisco, spoke about the need for advancements in firewall technology.

"In today's climate of industrialized hacking and sophisticated cybercrime, we've entered an era in which legacy NGFW solutions are not enough to thwart attackers," Young said "Now more than ever, organizations need to be able to implement dynamic controls to manage the pace of change of their environments and address security incidents. Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services is a major step forward for the NGFW market, empowering customers to deepen their protection from the data center, through the network, to the endpoint with the agility to identify, understand, and stop advanced threats in real-time and retrospectively."

Cicso says its new firewall will be visibility-driven and will take advantage of data provided about device users, mobile devices, apps, virtual machines, system vulnerabilities, and other network factors. Basically, it will attempt to gather information about everything within the network system to combat threats it does not yet know about. It will also focus on threats by analyzing information awarded by big data analytics and system tracking to protect against threats as they occur.

Cisco says new and existing customers can take advantage of its new FirePOWER services. New customers can purchase 5500-series firewall products and bundle them with a FirePOWER Services license, and existing customers can enable a FirePOWER license that will work with their existing setups.




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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