The Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliance is a modular platform that provides the next generation of security and VPN services. The Enterprise Editions include four location-specific options.
Firewall Edition,IPS Edition,VPN Edition,Anti-X Edition
Each edition combines a focused set of services to meet the needs of specific environments within the enterprise network, enabling superior protection. The Cisco ASA 5500 Series enables standardization on a single platform to reduce overall operational costs for security. A common configuration environment simplifies management and reduces training costs, while the common hardware platform of the series reduces sparing costs.
Threats to today's networks continue to grow, with attacks coming from both outside and within corporate networks. These threats can have devastating effects, ranging from business disruption due to a network outage, financial risk resulting from information loss, or liability issues stemming from information tampering. Meanwhile, businesses are striving to improve their profitability and competitiveness through continued business process optimization and automation, leading to increased connectivity with their business partners and customers. These applications offer many benefits, but can also introduce a variety of risks, if not secured properly. Using the world-class security and networking services provided by the Cisco® ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition, businesses can securely deploy mission-critical applications and networks in a highly reliable manner, while benefiting from the significant investment protection and lower operational costs offered by this unique, modular solution.
Solution
The Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition enables businesses to securely deploy mission-critical applications and networks in a highly reliable manner, while providing significant investment protection and lower operational costs through its unique, modular design. Businesses can protect their networks from unauthorized access using the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition's robust policy enforcement services. These services combine with market-leading VPN services to enable businesses to securely extend their networks across low-cost Internet connections to business partners, remote sites, and mobile workers. This flexible solution can adapt as an organization's needs evolve along with the ever-changing security threat landscape, giving businesses the ability to easily integrate market-leading intrusion prevention, antivirus, antispam, antispyware, URL filtering, and other advanced content security services for additional layers of protection. Combined with Cisco management and monitoring application solutions, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition provides world-class security with lower operational costs.
Capabilities of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition.
Most trusted and deployed firewall technology-Building upon the market-proven capabilities of the Cisco PIX® Family of security appliances, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series provides a wide range of services to secure modern network environments. Flexible policy capabilities prevent unauthorized access to network resources or vital corporate information. Advanced application control capabilities help businesses effectively control the use of peer-to-peer file sharing, instant messaging, and other non-corporate applications-thus improving employee productivity and reducing wasted Internet bandwidth.
Threat-protected VPN-Building upon the market-proven VPN capabilities of the Cisco VPN 3000 Series Concentrator, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition provides secure site-to-site and remote-user access to corporate networks and services. This solution offers businesses maximum flexibility for secure connectivity by combining support for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and IP Security (IPSec) VPN capabilities into a single, best-in-class solution. Using the services offered by the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition, businesses can enforce identity-based security and networking policies to all network traffic, thus enabling businesses to tailor-fit access privileges for every group of employees, contractors, and business partners.
Adaptive design provides superior investment protection and extensibility to address future threats-The Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition can adapt as businesses needs change through its unique, modular design. Businesses can easily expand the number of security services offered by adding a high-performance, purpose-built Cisco ASA 5500 Series security services module, such as the Advanced Inspection and Prevention Security Services Module (AIP-SSM) for advanced intrusion prevention services, or the Content Security and Control Security Services Module (CSC-SSM) for advanced antivirus, antispam, and other anti-X services.
- Intelligent network integration and enterprise-class resiliency-Building on more than 20 years of Cisco networking leadership and innovation, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition delivers a wide range of intelligent networking services for seamless integration into today's diverse network environments.
- Businesses can maximize network uptime and throughput by taking advantage of the many resiliency and scalability services this solution has to offer, such Active/Active high availability, "zero-downtime software upgrades," and integrated VPN clustering and load balancing.
- Easy deployment and management
- The Cisco management and monitoring suite enables large-scale deployment and operation of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Firewall Edition.
- Cisco provides a complete solution, covering management and monitoring. Also included with the solution is Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM), which provides a powerful, yet easy-to-use browser-based management and monitoring interface for individual security appliances.
