A few days ago, Cisco unveiled a set of security solutions designed to improve the robustness of data centers against the threats they constantly face while moving toward virtualized, more consolidated environments and allowing businesses to benefit from new cloud-based models.
The new set of security solutions released by Cisco extend the power of security professionals and data centers when it comes to enforcing end-to-end security measures for high capacity data centers and mobile workforces. Among these new offerings include highly scalable software for the virtualized ASA for multitenant environments; a data-center-grade intrusion prevention system (IPS); Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) line; and new improvements to the Cisco AnyConnect™ Secure Mobility Client, which aims to meet the strict requirements of a more productive mobile workforce.
Cisco TV also broadcast “Defending the Data Center” on their Secure Data Center website.
The increase in popularity of virtualization and cloud services has encouraged a massive shift within data centers, which affected everything from IT services to business models and architectures. When addressed, the trends have a potential to provide massive business benefits, including new revenue growth, reduced capital investments, greater efficiency, scalability, and agility – all of which are needed in today’s rapidly expanding global market.
With their announcement, Cisco promotes the need for security to stay one step ahead of the demands of the ever-changing virtual and cloud environments, as well as the demands posed by increased compliance, complexity, and rapid adoption of BYOD policies amongst organizations.
Based on the principle that protection of unified data centers requires standardization of security across the network, Cisco also believes that network policies must be uniform over physical and virtual worlds, and that intra virtual machine communication should be extra secure, while access by mobile and wired clients are protected. Cisco’s latest product developments support a more agile device-agnostic corporate culture, which becomes important as customers start to migrate to the cloud.
Key Highlights of the announcement include major updates to the Cisco ASA 9.0 Platform, such as the scaling of the firewall from 60 gbps to 320 gbps, a new pay as you grow scale for applications and VM traffic increases (which will get rid of the need for chassis investment), and context-awareness for next gen visibility and control, including support for TrustSec security group tags.
For the Cisco ASA 1000V, steps were taken to ensure that the mainstream ASA technology is better suited to virtual or cloud environments, such as introducing an ASA firewall that supports multitenant virtual environments, and the shift to Cisco Nexus™ 1000V Series switch, which complements the Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG).
They also announced a new intrusion prevention system designed for data centers called the Cisco IPS 4500 Series, which delivers a record breaking performance density at 10 Gbps per rack unit.
