Cisco Unveils Industry’s First Threat-Focused Next-Generation Firewall For Customers in Egypt

The Cisco 2014 Annual Security Report, reveals that threats designed to take advantage of users’ trust in systems, applications and personal networks have reached startling levels. According to the report, a worldwide shortage of nearly a million skilled security professionals is impacting organizations’ abilities to monitor and secure networks, while overall vulnerabilities and threats reached their highest levels since 2000.

“While Egyptian companies are innovating their future using the Internet, they face unprecedented risks caused by situations out of their control – from geopolitical events to natural disasters. As a result, company executives need to understand, create awareness, and manage cyber risks and weaknesses in the security chain. Starting from the most senior level, Middle East businesses must make cyber security a business process, and deploy cyber security solutions that cover the entire attack continuum – before, during, and after a cyber-attack,” commented Ayman Elgohary, General Manager for Cisco in Egypt. 

First Threat-Focused Next-Generation Firewall

Cisco today is changing the way organizations protect against sophisticated threats with the introduction of the industry’s first threat-focused Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW). Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services provides the full contextual awareness and dynamic controls needed to automatically assess threats, correlate intelligence, and optimize defenses to protect all networks.

By integrating the proven Cisco ASA 5500 Series firewall with application control, and the industry-leading Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention Systems (NGIPS) and Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) from Sourcefire, Cisco is surpassing legacy NGFW offerings and providing integrated threat defense across the entire attack continuum – before, during and after an attack. 

Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services is a new, adaptive, threat-focused NGFW that delivers superior, multi-layered protection from the data center to the network to the endpoint, extending its capabilities far beyond legacy NGFW solutions. Until now, NGFWs have focused on policy and application control, which helped to address known threats. However, until now, they have been unable to address unknown or zero-day attacks. Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services changes this, taking a visibility-driven, threat-focused and platform-based approach:

• Visibility-Driven. Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services delivers full contextual awareness into users, mobile devices, client side apps, virtual machine‐to-machine communications, vulnerabilities, threats, URLs, and other important telemetry. Its enterprise-class management provides users with dashboards and drill-down reports of discovered hosts, applications, threats, and indicators of compromise for comprehensive visibility.
• Threat-Focused. Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services incorporates the leading NGIPS for comprehensive protection from known and advanced threats, as well as advanced malware protection against zero-day and persistent attacks.  Big Data analytics, continuous analysis and Cisco Collective Security Intelligence (CSI) work together to provide detection, blocking, tracking, analysis, and remediation capabilities to protect against the full spectrum of attacks.
• Platform‐Based – As the industry’s first, threat-focused NGFW, Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services combines proven firewall functionality and application control, leading intrusion prevention capability, and advanced breach detection and remediation in a single device. The integration provides organizations with better protection, while also reducing operating costs and complexity. This new solution simplifies an organization’s security architecture and reduces its network footprint with fewer security devices to manage and deploy and license subscriptions to extend functionality.

Given shifting business models and the fast-changing threat landscape, an organization’s approach to reducing the time from breach to recovery needs to be truly integrated and threat-focused. With mounting concern at the executive level regarding the threat of lost IP, compromised customer information and confidence, organizations require broad coverage across all potential attack vectors that can rapidly adjust and learn from new attack methods, and then implement that intelligence to protect themselves. Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services provides that integrated threat defense that truly helps businesses address their biggest security risk — advanced and zero day threats.

Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services provides superior visibility and continuous analysis to detect advanced, multi-vector threats and streamlines and automates response for both known and unknown malware. It also offers holistic, actionable Indicators of Compromise (IoCs) that speed threat investigation and retrospective remediation, along with integrated incident response scoping and automated detection policy updates. 

Cisco, with its partners, also provides professional and technical security services to help accelerate migration from customers’ current security environments to the integrated threat defense of Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services. With deep expertise, proven processes and tools, along with global resource availability, Cisco’s security services help organizations migrate quickly and with minimal disruption.

“In today’s climate of industrialized hacking and sophisticated cybercrime gangs, we’ve entered an era in which legacy NGFW solutions are not enough to thwart attackers,” said Den Sullivan, Head of Enterprise & Architectures for Middle East, Africa, and Russia/CIS. “Now more than ever, organizations in Egypt need to be able to implement dynamic controls to manage the pace of change of their environments and address security incidents. Cisco ASA with FirePOWER Services is a major step forward for the NGFW market, empowering customers to deepen their protection from the data center, to the network, to the endpoint with the agility to identify, understand, and stop advanced threats in real-time and retrospectively.”