One of the biggest challenges businesses face today is the aging infrastructure supporting the latest codes that allow organizations to take advantage of the latest feature set for today’s security concerns. This challenge can be addressed in a managed service today, as the burden falls on the MSP to keep the technology patched and up to date. Additionally, having the ability to migrate new platforms quickly and seamlessly for price performance optimization and evolving detection engines is an added benefit that typically takes a hefty toll on customers to do on their own.
C1 and Cisco are making it easier than ever to leverage the latest and greatest technologies, whether it is a branch that needs application-based routing or direct internet access, a data center firewall that is concerned about scale and latency, or a traditional edge that is transitioning to the world of zero trust. The Secure Firewall augments powerful Deep Packet Inspection capabilities with inference-based traffic classification and cooperation across the broader Cisco portfolio.
The post-pandemic era has Zero Trust Network Access in just about every single firewall discussion – from segmentation to app discovery, to access, and everything in between. Once boiled down to its core elements, ZTNA discussions is a simplified user experience connecting from anywhere, securely – a natural evolution of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). The Secure Firewall offers a new, granular Zero Trust Application Access that not only gives inline user authentication for web application traffic, but also provides inline Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) and File/Malware policies, as well.
Another challenge today is the pervasive encryption across the internet – both for the performance impact on security appliances and the potential to break sensitive application connections. As more and more applications adopt technology like TLS1.3 and certificate pinning, it is nearly impossible to decrypt in the traditional man-in-the-middle method.
Customers are looking at newer security technology like the Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE) that is giving customers their visibility back in this encrypted world. Not to be confused as a replacement for decryption, EVE gives customers the ability to detect applications and malicious traffic WITHOUT the need to do decryption. Backed by powerful Machine Learning that is evolving based on petabytes of real application traffic and tens of thousands of daily malware samples, EVE is industry-leading and more effective than traditional pattern-based application detection for evasive applications.
While the firewall is the foundation for security in almost every customer environment, the integration to the broader security portfolio (Cloud Security, Extended Detection and Response (XDR), Application Security, Secure Access, etc.) is one of the key differentiators as customers consider their vendor selection or best-in-suite approach. This consolidated approach gives the advantages of a single vendor to work with, but more importantly, integrations that are natively built and do not require a Ph.D. to build and operate so customers can focus on their business rather than their business’s security report.
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