Cisco  ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances deliver a robust suite of highly integrated, market-leading security services for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), enterprises, and service providers—in addition to providing unprecedented services flexibility, modular scalability, feature extensibility, and lower deployment and operations costs.

Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances are purpose-built solutions that integrate world-class firewall, unified communications security, VPN, intrusion prevention (IPS), and content security services in a unified platform. The series builds upon proven technologies from Cisco PIX® 500 Series Security Appliances, Cisco IPS 4200 Series Sensors, and Cisco VPN 3000 Series Concentrators.

Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances are a key component of the Cisco Self-Defending Network. The Cisco ASA 5500 Series provides intelligent threat defense that stops attacks before they penetrate the network perimeter, controls network and application activity, and delivers secure remote access and site-to-site connectivity. The result is a powerful multifunction network security appliance family that provides security breadth, precision, and depth for protecting business networks of all sizes, while reducing the overall deployment and operations costs associated with implementing comprehensive multilayer security.

The Cisco ASA 5500 Series helps businesses increase effectiveness and efficiency in protecting their networks and applications, while delivering exceptional investment protection through the following elements:

●   Market-proven security capabilities—The Cisco ASA 5500 Series integrates multiple full-featured, high-performance security services, including application-aware firewall, SSL and IPsec VPN, IPS, antivirus, antispam, antiphishing, and web filtering services. These technologies deliver strong network- and application-layer security, user-based access control, worm mitigation, malware protection, improved employee productivity, instant messaging and peer-to-peer control, and secure remote user and site connectivity.

●   Extensible integrated services architecture—The Cisco ASA 5500 Series offers businesses strong, adaptive protection from the fast-evolving threat environment through its unique combination of hardware and software extensibility and its powerful Modular Policy Framework (MPF). The innovative extensible multiprocessor design and software architecture of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series enables businesses to easily install additional high-performance security services through security services modules (SSMs) and security services cards (SSCs). This provides businesses with outstanding investment protection, while enabling them to expand the security services profile of their Cisco ASA 5500 Series, as their security and performance needs grow. All these services are easily managed through the powerful Cisco Modular Policy Framework, which allows businesses to create highly customized security policies while making it simple to add new security and networking services into their existing policies.

●   Reduced deployment and operations costs—The Cisco ASA 5500 Series enables standardization on a single platform to reduce the overall operational cost of security. A common environment for configuration simplifies management and reduces training costs for staff, while the common hardware platform of the series reduces sparing costs. Additional efficiencies are realized by deploying integrated capabilities, obviating the need for the complex designs required to connect standalone solutions.

●   Comprehensive management interfaces—The graphical Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM), a comprehensive command line interface (CLI), verbose syslog, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) support round out a rich complement of management options. Multi-unit deployments benefit greatly from Cisco Security Manager, a platform capable of managing distributed deployments of 5 to 5000 devices. The award-winning Cisco Security Monitoring, Analysis, and Response System (Cisco Security MARS) recognizes and correlates real network attacks and then rapidly defines how to stop them, thereby decreasing administrative overhead by reducing false positives and simplifying audit compliance.

The Cisco ASA 5500 Series

The Cisco ASA 5500 Series includes the Cisco ASA 5505, 5510, 5520, 5540, 5550, and 5580 Adaptive Security Appliances—purpose-built, high-performance security solutions that take advantage of Cisco’s expertise in developing industry-leading, award-winning security and VPN solutions. Through the Cisco MPF, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series brings a new level of security and policy control to applications and networks. MPF enables highly customizable, flow-specific security policies that have been tailored to application requirements. The performance and extensibility of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series are enhanced through user-installable SSMs. This adaptable architecture enables businesses to rapidly deploy security services when and where they are needed, such as tailoring inspection techniques to specific application and user needs or adding additional intrusion prevention and content security services such as those delivered by the Adaptive Inspection and Prevention (AIP) and Content Security and Control (CSC) SSMs. Furthermore, the modular hardware architecture of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series, along with the powerful MPF, provides the flexibility to meet future network and security requirements, extending the outstanding investment protection provided by the Cisco ASA 5500 Series, and allowing businesses to adapt their network defenses to new threats as they arise.