Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance

Emma Okonji

Cisco has introduced a set of security solutions designed to protect data centres against threats they face in moving towards more consolidated and virtualised environments.

The new offerings extend data centre and security professionals’ power to enforce end-to-end security for high-capacity data centres and mobile workforces. The offerings include new scalable software for the world’s most widely deployed firewall, the Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) line, virtualised ASA for multi-tenant environments, and data centre-grade intrusion prevention system (IPS).

The virtualisation and cloud mega trend is forcing profound shifts within data centres, affecting everything from IT services to business models to architectures. According to a recent Cisco reports, nearly 3000 per cent increase in application traffic and network connections per second by 2015, more than 50 per cent of workloads in the data centre will be virtualised by 2013 and an average of 3 X mobile devices are used on enterprise networks by employees.

According to Acting General Manager for Cisco Nigeria, Said Rechchad,
“For enterprises to confidently seize the business benefits offered by data centre virtualisation and the cloud security must be seen as the art of the possible, not as a hindrance. As with the rest of your network, we make consistent security a deployment decision that enables policies to work throughout hybrid environment, virtual and cloud and enables data centre professionals to securely deliver IT-as-a-Service without impeding network performance.”

With this announcement, Cisco is helping security to keep pace with the demands of changing high-performance virtual and cloud environments, as well as the demands of increased complexity, compliance and employees bringing their own devices to work, among other trends. Data centres now have the necessary security requirements such as the ability to scale to meet seemingly insatiable performance requirements, while ensuring the highest levels of security.

Operating under the principle that security must be integrated across the network to ensure protection of unified data centres, Cisco believes network policies must be unified across physical and virtual worlds, intra-virtual machine communication should be secured, and access to applications by wired and mobile clients must be protected.