Industry’s First Fully Integrated, Threat-Focused Next-Generation Firewall from Cisco

SAN JOSE, CA, Feb. 16, 2016 – As global companies embrace new digital business opportunities, cybersecurity is regularly cited as a top concern impeding growth and innovation. To give businesses the confidence to pursue digital opportunities to enable growth, Cisco has made security a top priority and is today announcing innovations to its flagship Next-Generation Firewall. The goal: to deliver leading protection to keep organizations safer.

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. By focusing instead on threat defense, Cisco will help organizations better manage and minimize risk. Think of it as legacy NGFWs protecting “homes” by securing windows and doors, whereas Cisco’s approach is to identify, detect and protect against would-be burglars no matter how they try to gain access to a property.

Cisco is also introducing the Cisco Security Segmentation Service, an advisory service that helps organizations 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.

Firepower NGFW’s Threat-Focused Capabilities Set It Apart

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 empowers 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 Firepower NGFW is the industry’s first to link contextual information about how users are connecting to applications, with threat intelligence and policy enforcement. Gaining this level of visibility across a business environment accelerates threat detection and response, and enhances protection.

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

Firepower NGFW Integrates Controls and Attack Detection and Response to Enable Business Growth

The new Cisco Firepower™ NGFW significantly 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 organizations looking to deploy cloud, virtual environment, new Internet of Things (IoT) solutions and mobile endpoints to securely drive new business opportunities.

New Firepower Appliances Launched for High-Performance Applications

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