Next-Generation Firewalls

Network managers and security teams are facing a double-edged challenge: networks are growing far more complex and expanding across multiple perimeters just as threat vectors become increasingly difficult to detect and threats grow more sophisticated. The Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) offers a sol…

Welcome to The Future of Firewalling, Part 1… For over two decades, the firewall has been the de-facto tool that facilitated secure connectivity between different networks. Firewalls were traditionally designed around the idea that internal traffic and users were inherently trustworthy and external…

If you are reading this blog then you most likely understand that APIs allow inter-working among products. In the context of Firepower Management Center, the REST APIs allow programming of the Firepower devices to allow one to automatically provision devices, deploy policies and controls, and monito…

“Call me anything you want, but just don’t call me late for dinner.” I wonder how many of us are familiar with this old quote. Security management often burdens teams to put in extra cycles to get the most appropriate access and security policies in place. The process too often isn’t simple and – gu…

This is Part 2 of our blog series about NG-Firewalls. See Part 1 here. Part 2: Enter Threat-Focused NG-Firewall What does a Threat-focused NG-Firewall do differently? Just about everything. Let’s compare the most popular NGFW systems on the market (typical NGFW) with the Cisco Firepower NG-Firewall…

Part 1: Rude Awakening Let us begin with some context in the form of a story. I live in a very bad part of town and I am always worried that my car is going to get stolen or broken into. So, I just invested over a thousand bucks in this awesome vehicle alarm and security system. You know, one of tho…

One of the big lessons I learned during the early days, when I was first creating Snort®, was that the open source model was an incredibly strong way to build great software and attack difficult problems in a way that the user community rallied around. I still see this as one of the chief strengths…

For those who are not familiar with the Cisco Prime Security Manager, it is a management application that was introduced in 2012 to manage Cisco ASA 5500-X Series Next-Generation Firewalls. It is built on Web 2.0 technologies and supports both single-device and multi-device manager form factors to h…