How do cisco firewalls work

It is renowned for its superior performance and ability to manage the intricacies of subnetted networks and larger numbers of end-users. If you head to YouTube, there are many Cisco training videos that are free to watch.

These highly visual tutorials are perfect to gain a more hands-on understanding of how the Cisco ASA can really improve and enhance the security of networks globally. Cisco is a name that you can trust, having over fifteen years of network security platform and firewall experience.

Every startup, conglomerate, and venture in the twenty first century needs to consider its cybersecurity as a paramount business function. Modern data centers require a more capable cyber-secure approach from Cisco. Your workforce needs to be protected anywhere and at anytime.

With the world morphing to a new way of working, your security measures need to keep up. Remote working, working from home, and flexible working patterns mean insecurities within networks can become more apparent, resulting in the need for hardier security options. This is why Cisco has provided businesses across the globe access to an automated, robust, and exceptional adaptive security appliance.

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Dan October 21, at am. Daniele Besana October 22, at am. Leave a Reply Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. The Cisco ASA is something many users have questions about, so here is a brief summary with a list of resources you can view when and however you like.

In efforts to provide an array of valuable information, we have seen several basic questions come up on various types of equipment and products.

With that in mind, we wanted to provide some information to help answer some of these questions. Let's get started.

In brief, Cisco ASA is a security device that combines firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, and virtual private network VPN capabilities. It provides proactive threat defense that stops attacks before they spread through the network. An ASA is valuable and flexible in that it can be used as a security solution for both small and large networks.

However, the ASA is not just a pure hardware firewall. The Cisco ASA is a security device that combines firewall, antivirus, intrusion prevention, and virtual private network VPN capabilities.

At the same time, we're never allowing external users from the outside into our inside zone. That's because everything we know about zone perspectives is maintained when dealing with packet filtering.

An ASA can provide network address translation or port address translation so that all the devices sitting behind it appear to themselves to be on the But requests to the internet get global routing addresses, and they're swapped out when they come back into the network.

If you were to look at your IP address right now on your computer, try "ipconfig" on Windows or "ifconfig" on Linux or Mac, it's very likely your device is on a 10 address or a That's because those addresses are in the RFC address base. They're private and not allowed on the internet.

Service providers block those private addresses. Nevertheless, your devices believe that's where they can find themselves on your network. The firewall itself will have a globally routable address like And then, once a reply comes back, the ASA swaps out the destination with the internal address of the device that made the request in the first place. Say one of your employees, James, is out getting coffee and wants to connect to corporate headquarters.

He has high speed connectivity through DSL or cable, but he wants to send confidential or sensitive information. You wouldn't want James transmitting confidential information in plain text over the internet. That data could easily be leaked out and seen by someone who shouldn't see it. Once the tunnel is built between his device and the ASA, he'll have full access to the same internal resources just as if he was on the local area network.

Most ASAs are rack-mountable devices that resemble switches. In fact, many have physical switches built directly into them. Two of the eight ports support power over ethernet, so if you had a camera or access point that needed to be powered, your ASA could support it. The model is additionally powerful in that it supports virtual interfaces. You can create logical interfaces: one for the inside, one for the outside, one for the DMZ, and each of those interfaces correspond to a VLAN.

So the ports can be assigned to the various VLANs based on which interface we want them to be associated with and it makes it very customizable and easy to work with.

The ASA's Command Line Interface and Graphical User Interface are both very different ways to approach managing the device, but their differences also allow for different efficiencies and strengths.