New Cisco Solutions Aim to Secure Data Center Infrastructure

Cisco announces new security solutions aimed at strengthening data centers against threats generated by consolidation and virtualization.

The new Cisco security solutions help to strengthen the protection of data centers and mobile workforce. The new offering includes a highly scalable software firewalls for Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA), a virtualized ASA firewall for multiuser environments and intrusion prevention system (IPS) for data centers, Cisco Virtual Security Gateway (VSG) as well as improvements in Cisco AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client to meet the rigorous demands of a more productive mobile workforce.

“Data centers are transforming under the pressure of virtualization and the Cloud,” said Jeff Aboud, product marketing manager at Cisco. “This creates a need for scalable security, with consistent policy enforcement, where security facilitates business integration, rather than being an inhibitor to it.

“We have developed these new products, and made enhancements to existing ones, with these things in mind,” he added.

With this announcement, Cisco helps security departments to meet the requirements of the new virtual and high performance solutions in the cloud, as well as the increasing complexity and the need to comply with regulations resulting from the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend, among others. Given that security has to be integrated with the network to ensure the protection of unified data center, Cisco believes the network should have unified policies across physical and virtual environments, the communication between virtual machines and secure application access through wired and wireless devices must be protected.

Cisco’s IPS 4500 series intrusion-prevention system offers 400 percent higher performance density with 75 percent less rack space and 75 percent less power than Juniper Networks system.

This approach to security-enhanced has become an imperative as organizations looking to migrate to the cloud and adopt a more flexible corporate culture and agnostic against the device used.

The ASA 9.0 software is capable of scales to 320 Gbps of firewall and 60 Gbps IPS throughputs with 50 million concurrent connections and at the same time 1 million connections per second. The software also supports TrustSec security group tags, IPv6 connections, Next Generation Encryption capabilities, including NSA “Suite B” and identity-based firewall capabilities to enhance data center security.

“Scalability, application control and security for virtual environments are significant issues for organizations today, and these products help solve those issues,” said Aboud.

The expanded portfolio of products and services for data center and an updated strategy for data centers in the hope to accelerate IT innovation will increase the profitability of the business and to support new business models, including desktop virtualization technology, and public and private cloud computing.