Cisco Cisco ASA 5580 Adaptive Security Appliance Hoja De Datos
White Paper
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For these inspection engines to be deployable in a production network environment, they must
meet the demanding performance and network service requirements of today's networks. The
Cisco ASA 5500 Series was built to meet the high performance needs of today's networks,
providing up to 450 Mbps of concurrent protective services. In addition, the stringent service-level
agreements (SLAs) of latency-sensitive voice traffic can be handled with ease through integrated
quality of service (QoS) mechanisms, including a dedicated low-latency queue for voice traffic.
Finally, the availability of the security infrastructure is protected by advanced high-availability
capabilities, including Active/Active failover services, in which network administrators can
capitalize on their redundancy investments by allowing both devices in a failover pair to inspect
application traffic under normal network operation.
The Modular Policy Framework architecture ties together the multitude of application security
inspection engines and network services available in the Cisco ASA 5500 series. Using a modular
services processing architecture enables the use of specific security or network services on a per-
traffic flow basis, delivering highly granular policy controls and with streamlined traffic processing.
The efficiencies of this architecture, as well as software extensibility and hardware extensibility via
user-installable security services modules (SSMs), enables the evolution of existing services as
well as deployment of new services without requiring a platform replacement or performance
compromise. As the architectural foundation of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series, the Modular Policy
Framework architecture enables highly customizable security policies and unprecedented services
extensibility to help protect against the rapidly evolving threat environment.
Conclusions
Networked applications have enabled great gains in business productivity, and promise further
gains still. In order for these gains to be realized, the availability and integrity of applications must
be secured. The Cisco ASA 5500 Series introduces a new class of protection, providing
comprehensive application security without the compromises of traditional solutions. The Cisco
ASA 5500 Series provides comprehensive protocol support, depth of application controls, and tight
integration with network services, tied together in the flexible and high-performance Modular Policy
Framework architecture. This flexibility helps ensure that the Cisco ASA 5500 Series has the
performance to protect today's networks, and the flexibility to protect tomorrow's.
Printed in USA
C11-453493-00 02/08