Cisco announced its new threat-focused Cisco Firepower next-generation firewall (NGFW) today.
The Firepower NGFW significantly improves the speed and effectiveness of attack detection and response by integrating Cisco’s stateful firewalling technology and threat services into a single solution. The threat services take protection to a new level, beyond application visibility and control, and include next-generation intrusion prevention, advanced malware protection and reputation-based URL filtering.
Cisco’s Firepower Management Center is a dashboard which features shared intelligence and contextual awareness, and consistent policy enforcement for the NGFW plus other Cisco security and network solutions.Third-party solutions can also be integrated into the dashboard. Cisco states the other NGFWs often require users to switch between three or more consoles to gain the same detail. Radware for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is the first vendor participating.
“The Cisco Firepower NGFW acts as a unifying platform, integrating Cisco and third-party security solutions for increased correlation and context” says David Goeckeler, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Security Business Group, Cisco. “The result is better protection, and faster detection and response to advanced threats.”
IBM IBM +2.74% recently announced its IBM Security App Exchange which allows customers, developers and business partners to share applications, security app extensions and enhancements to IBM Security products.
Cisco seems to be following – or leading depending on how you want to look at it when comparing the two tech giants – in a move towards crowd sourcing and integrating security solutions for the greater good of their customers. Chief information officers (CIOs) and chief information security officers (CISOs) are struggling with too many cybersecurity point products that don’t talk to each other.
Investor’s Business Daily reports that IBM’s security business has reached $2 billion, and Cisco’s security unit is right behind it at $1.75 billion.
A Forbes story recently told readers to watch for knock-down, drag-out brawls between security contenders IBM, Dell , Cisco, and others. When it comes to the big vendors, focus will be key to winning in cyber because each of them play in so many different tech sectors – and it is easy to get distracted.
“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” says Cisco’s Goeckeler.
If you are wondering just how serious Cisco is about security, then visit theirhomepage and you’ll see Cisco’s cartoon heroine SuperSmart – who says “It’s curtains for you, cyber crime!”.