Cisco has launched its flagship next-generation firewall, to give businesses the confidence to pursue digital oppotunities to enable growth.

 

It aims at delivering leading protection to keep organisations safer, said a statement.

 

The 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 organisations better manage and minimise risk.

 

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.

 

Ziad Salameh, managing director and general manager - Gulf, Levant and Pakistan, and Middle East Services leader, said: “Attackers are getting bolder and coordinating their efforts. The industrialisation of hacking is putting Bahrain 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 cybersecurity acquisitions and internal innovations to help stay ahead of the world’s most malicious attacks that threaten organizations. 

 

"For businesses in Bahrain 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.”

 

“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 Bahrain customers build a dynamic, resilient secure infrastructure to combat threats in real-time,” said Salameh.

 

The 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, said the statement.

 

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, it said.

 

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.

 

The new Cisco Firepower NGFW will significantly improve the speed, simplicity and effectiveness of attack detection and response. It will combine 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.  

 

Meanwhile, Cisco is releasing new Cisco Firepower 4100 Series appliances for high-performance applications within mid- to large-sized organisations. 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. 

 

The new Cisco Firepower Management Center will serve as the nerve centre for the Firepower NGFW, providing a rich, unified management console. 

 

It will feature shared intelligence, shared contextual awareness, and consistent policy enforcement for the Cisco Firepower NGFW plus other Cisco security and network solutions.

 

In addition, Cisco is investing in developing security practice acceleration programmes, training and enablement for both products and services so channel partners can fuel growth and increase profitability. - TradeArabia News Service