Intrusion Prevention for the Cisco ASA 5500-X
Series
As users and data leave the corporate boundary and the network access layer

intrusion prevention (IPS) technology, backed by Cisco Security Intelligence
Operations (SIO), identifies and mitigates attackers and attacks up to Layer 7 with
market-leading, context-aware threat prevention that augments your firewall and VPN
deployment.
The Cisco ASA 5500-X Series IPS Solution scales from the Cisco Borderless Network Architecture to data center
architectures, with integrated form factors ranging from 1 Gbps to 10 Gbps. Strong default efficacy allows you to
install a device and secure your network immediately. Achieve full visibility across your network with Cisco Security
Manager to mitigate risk and meet compliance - all while reducing your expenses.
Manage risks with a broad and deep set of inspection capabilities:
● Defend against zero-day attacks with over 40 engines and 6500 stateful, vulnerability-based signatures that
protect against tens of thousands of current exploits - and countless more to come.
● Inspect a wide variety of protocols to ensure RFC conformance and prevent hacks.
● Identify the source of and block denial of service (DoS), distributed denial of service (DDoS), SYN flood,
and encrypted attacks with Cisco Global Correlation.
● Use patented anti-evasion technology to defend and monitor against worms, viruses, Trojans,
reconnaissance attacks, spyware, botnets, phishing, peer to peer attacks, and malware, as well as
numerous evasion techniques.
● Guard Cisco infrastructure with specific protections for Unified Communications, WLAN, routing, and
switching.
● Utilize identity-based firewall to provide granular and powerful policy definition

Seamless Network Integration
A critical component of the SecureX framework, Cisco IPS technology seamlessly integrates into the Cisco ASA
firewall and network architecture. Whether defending the data center, core, or edge, Cisco IPS provides threat
protection up to Layer 7. To reduce capital expenditures, the Cisco IPS solution is built upon a common software
architecture and custom hardware platforms that enable deployment anywhere in the Cisco network, including
routing, switching, and firewall platforms. A consistent policy and operations framework helps bring the system
together to meet compliance demands and manage risk at a lower operational cost.
Unparalleled Global Correlation
As advanced persistent threats (APTs), botnets, and other blended threats evolve, signature-based content
inspection alone becomes insufficient for threat identification and mitigation. With 10 years of reputation
technology heritage, Cisco IPS with Global Correlation is the only IPS to identify and mitigate attackers - not
just signature-based attacks. With Cisco IPS Global Correlation backed by Cisco SIO, Cisco IPS gains visibility
into hundreds of additional security parameters, millions of rules, and 8 TB of threat telemetry per day from
market-leading email, web, firewall, and IPS devices.
Network-Ready Capabilities
To meet the needs of the most demanding networks, Cisco IPS directly integrates into the firewall to deliver
multigigabit performance, low latency, and high availability features. With dedicated hardware, the Cisco ASA 5500
Series with IPS delivers performance from 150 Mbps to 10 Gbps to meet the rigors of a broad range of applications
and network use. Flexible and highly available deployment options include active-active and active-standby
configurations, fail-open and fail-closed modes, IDS and IPS modes, redundant power supplies, and loadbalancing capabilities, as well as the ability to inspect encapsulated traffic, including GRE, MPLS, 802.1q, IPv4 in
IPv4, IPv4 in IPv6, and Q-in-Q double VLAN.
Proven Threat Prevention
With more than US$100 million invested in security research, 500 threat analysts, and terabytes of threat data
fed into Cisco SensorBase™ every day, Cisco IPS backed by Cisco SIO brings confidence to customer networks.
This is why Cisco IPS is the most widely deployed commercial IPS technology in the world. Independent testing
agencies, such as NSS, also recommend Cisco IPS.