Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services brings distinctive threat-focused next-generation security services to the Cisco ASA 5500-X Series Next-Generation Firewalls and Cisco ASA 5585-X Adaptive Security Appliance firewall products. It provides comprehensive protection from known and advanced threats, including protection against targeted and persistent malware attacks (Figure 1). Cisco ASA is the world’s most widely deployed, enterprise-class stateful firewall. Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services features these comprehensive capabilities:

- Site-to-site and remote access VPN and advanced clustering provide highly secure, high-performance access and high availability to help ensure business continuity.
- Granular Application Visibility and Control (AVC) supports more than 3,000 application-layer and risk-based controls that can launch tailored intrusion prevention system (IPS) threat detection policies to optimize security effectiveness.
- The industry-leading Cisco ASA with FirePOWER next-generation IPS (NGIPS) provides highly effective threat prevention and full contextual awareness of users, infrastructure, applications, and content to detect multivector threats and automate defense response.
- Reputation- and category-based URL filtering offer comprehensive alerting and control over suspicious web traffic and enforce policies on hundreds of millions of URLs in more than 80 categories.
- AMP provides industry-leading breach detection effectiveness, a low total cost of ownership, and superior protection value that helps you discover, understand, and stop malware and emerging threats missed by other security layers.

Unprecedented Network Visibility
Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services is centrally managed by the Cisco FireSIGHT Management Center, which provides security teams with comprehensive visibility into and control over activity within the network. Such visibility includes users, devices, communication between virtual machines, vulnerabilities, threats, client-side applications, files, and web sites. Holistic, actionable indications of compromise (IoCs) correlate detailed network and endpoint event information and provide further visibility into malware infections. Cisco’s enterprise-class management tools help administrators reduce complexity with unmatched visibility and control across NGFW deployments. Cisco FireSIGHT Management Center also provides content awareness with malware file trajectory that aids infection scoping and root cause determination to speed time to remediation.

Cisco Security Manager provides scalable and centralized network operations workflow management. It integrates a powerful suite of capabilities; including policy and object management, event management, reporting, and troubleshooting for Cisco ASA firewall functions when utilizing Cisco FireSIGHT Management Center.

For local, on-device management including deployments for small and midsized businesses, Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM) 7.3.x provides, access control and advanced threat defense management. ASDM V 7.3.x provides an enhanced user interface that provides quick views on trends and the ability to drill down for further analysis.

Reduced Costs and Complexity
Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services incorporates an integrated approach to threat defense, reducing capital and operating costs and administrative complexity. It smoothly integrates with the existing IT environment, work stream, and network fabric. The appliance family is highly scalable, performs at up to multigigabit speeds, and provides consistent and robust security across branch, Internet edge, and data centers in both physical and virtual environments.

With Cisco FireSIGHT Management Center, administrators can streamline operations to correlate threats, assess their impact, automatically tune security policy, and easily attribute user identities to security events. Cisco FireSIGHT Management Center continually monitors how the network is changing over time. New threats are automatically assessed to determine which ones can affect your business. Responses are then focused on remediation and network defenses are adapted to changing threat conditions. Critical security activities such as policy tuning are automated, saving time and effort, while protections and countermeasures are maintained in an optimal state.

Cisco FireSIGHT Management Center integrates easily with third-party security solutions through the eStreamer API to streamline operation workflows and fit existing network fabrics.