Cisco introduces’ Cisco Firepower’ next-generation firewall

Cisco’s first fully integrated, threat-focused Cisco Firepower Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) marks a significant departure from the focus of legacy NGFWs on application control. Cisco is also introducing the Cisco Security Segmentation Service, an advisory service that helps organisations create security controls that enhance compliance, breach containment, threat detection, content security and data loss prevention across their IT infrastructure.

Both offerings are aimed at protecting against bold and resilient threats from increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks. “Attackers are getting bolder and coordinating their efforts. The industrialisation of hacking is putting UAE businesses on the defensive against a growing group of adversaries that steal information for profit. In the last three years, Cisco has spent billions in strategic cyber security acquisitions and internal innovations to help stay ahead of the world’s most malicious attacks that threaten organisations. For businesses in the UAE to get real value and manage risk as they implement digital operational models, their security platforms need to integrate into the business and support growth opportunities. This means taking a threat-centric approach, with protection from the mobile endpoint to the cloud,” said Rabih Dabboussi, General Manager, Cisco UAE.

“The Cisco Firepower NGFW acts as a unifying platform, integrating Cisco and third-party security solutions for increased correlation and context. The result is better protection, and faster detection and response to advanced threats. The Cisco Segmentation Service will help our UAE customers build a dynamic, resilient secure infrastructure to combat threats in real-time,” concluded Rabih Dabboussi.

Traditional NGFWs continue to focus on application enablement and control, which limit the ability to protect against the breadth of threats in today’s business environment. Cisco’s approach is different. Cisco allows customers to easily manage and dynamically update protection from the endpoint to the network, and out to the cloud, by going beyond applications and identifying and stopping threats, both known and unknown.

Cisco’s NGFW can also automate and fine-tune security measures to rapidly harden defences, based on its ability to see vulnerabilities, assets and threats. The consistent and pervasive advanced security capabilities provide protection that point solutions cannot deliver.

 The new Cisco Firepower NGFW improves the speed, simplicity and effectiveness of attack detection and response. It combines Cisco’s stateful firewalling technology and industry-leading threat services in a single solution. The threat services take protection to a new level, beyond application visibility and control, and include Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention System, Advanced Malware Protection and reputation-based URL filtering.

Cisco’s integrated NGFW incorporates Cisco and complementary third-party solutions and uniquely enables intelligence and context to be shared between solutions. Now businesses can effectively correlate previously disparate pieces of information to identify and stop advanced attacks more rapidly wherever they may be. This has competitive implications for organisations looking to deploy cloud, virtual environment, new Internet of Things (IoT) solutions and mobile endpoints to securely drive new business opportunities.

Cisco is also releasing new Cisco Firepower 4100 Series appliances for high-performance applications within mid- to large-sized organisations. They are the highest performing, density-optimised appliances in their class, capable of high-throughput and low latency threat inspection, sufficient for high-frequency trading and data centre deployments. They are among the first with 40GbE network connectivity in a compact, one rack-unit space.

The new Cisco Firepower Management Center serves as the nerve centre for the Firepower NGFW, providing a rich, unified management console. It features shared intelligence, shared contextual awareness, and consistent policy enforcement for the Cisco Firepower NGFW plus other Cisco security and network solutions.