Cisco Cisco ASA 5512-X Adaptive Security Appliance 데이터 시트

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The Cisco ASA 5500 as a Superior Firewall Solution

The Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliance provides leading-edge firewall

capabilities and expands to support other security services.

Firewalls provide the first line of defense in any organization’s network security infrastructure. They

do so by matching corporate policies about users’ network access rights to the connection

information surrounding each access attempt. If the variables don’t match, the firewall blocks the

access connection. If the variables do match, the firewall allows the acceptable traffic to flow

through the network.

In this way, the firewall forms the basic building block of an organization’s network security

architecture. It pays to use one with superior performance to maximize network uptime for

business-critical operations. The reason is that the rapid addition of voice, video, and collaborative

traffic to corporate networks is driving the need for firewall engines that operate at very high

speeds and that also support application-level inspection. While standard Layer 2 and Layer 3

firewalls prevent unauthorized access to internal and external networks, firewalls enhanced with

application-level inspection examine, identify, and verify application types at Layer 7 to make sure

unwanted or misbehaving application traffic doesn’t join the network. With these capabilities, the

firewall can enforce endpoint user registration and authentication and provide administrative

control over the use of multimedia applications.

The Need for Speed

As networks evolve to increase business productivity, collaboration, and communication, the

firewall is evolving in parallel. The Cisco

ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliance, for

example, was purpose-built to support both standard policy enforcement and application-level

firewall inspection for hundreds of application protocols. Independent third-party tests show that it

currently outperforms the other firewalls in its class. In addition, it ranked in the highest position in

worldwide market research company Gartner’s firewall “Magic Quadrant” in June 2006 for

leadership and vision.

The Cisco ASA 5500 Series’ high-performance application-inspection capabilities automate the

network to treat traffic according to detailed policies based not only on port, state, and addressing

information, but also on application information buried deep within the packet header. By

comparing this deep-packet inspection information with corporate policies, the firewall will allow or

block certain traffic. For example, it will automatically drop application traffic attempting to gain

entry to the network through an open port—even if it appears to be legitimate at the user and

connection levels—if a business’s corporate policy prohibits that application type from being on the

network.

Such unwanted traffic might consist of non-business-related, peer-to-peer traffic that consumes

large volumes of bandwidth. It might constitute instant messaging traffic other than traffic that

conforms to the corporate instant messaging standard. Or it might be any other non-critical

application traffic that the corporation chooses to filter off the network.