Cisco officials are hoping to field a triple play of sorts in the security space with a new series of appliances aimed at addressing threats posed by Web 2.0 in the workplace.
The company is releasing the Cisco ASA 5580 Series Adaptive Security Appliances, as an answer for enterprises looking to protect media-rich, highly transactional and latency-sensitive applications in the data center. The product suite, which will be generally available in March, consists of three offerings: Cisco ASA 5580-40, 5580-20 and 5580-20 Remote Access VPN Concentrator. Of the three, the 5580-40 is the most robust, and offers up to two million simultaneous connections, 750,000 security policies and 10 Gpbs of firewall thoroughput scaling up to 20 Gbps for data-intensive applications, Cisco officials said.
The product announcement comes a month after the company released a new intrusion prevention system aimed at protecting the data center. Taken together, the products advance the company’s vision of the Self-Defending Network, company officials said.
The product suite leverages Cisco’s NetFlow v9 technology to ease security event management by reducing the number and size of individual security event messages and storing the data in NetFlow Collector.
“Security without visibility is no security at all is our motto,” said Tom Russell, senior director of product management for Cisco’s Security Technology Group.
The ASA Cisco 5580 Series also offers a variety of remote access methods including Transport Layer Security, Datagram TLS, IPsec, and clientless communications providing significant deployment flexibility as well as both full IPsec and clientless, portal-based and client-based SSL VPN remote access capabilities, Cisco officials said.