New Cisco ASA 5506-X / 5508-X will replace ASA 5505

Comments

1. Bengt Akerberg says

   January 15, 2015 at 1:31 am

   Dear Harris, i’t really time for Cisco to take a grip within this segment products since the other ones like CheckPoint, Palo Alto, Watchguard do have complete UTM/IDS… sollutions on the market since realitve long time back.

   I think the company acquisition of the FirePower technology is mandatory
   for Cisco to stay in the competition.
   I’ve been on some Cisco seminars about the “Next Generation” firewalls and it’s very interesting.
   Juniper with SRX do not have a “own” complete sollution as they rely on other partners to get a complete solution, but they are working on it I heard.

   Thank You for the information.

   Best Regards
   Bengt Akerberg

2. BlogAdmin says

   January 15, 2015 at 8:07 am

   Yes I totally agree with you Bengt.

   The ASA has been behind the competitors in terms of UTM solutions. Especially in small to medium businesses, the UTM concept is much more appealing rather than having separate boxes for each different task (firewall, IPS etc).

3. DMS says

   January 22, 2015 at 12:39 am

   Cisco had rested on their laurels of the ASA platform for a long time. The fact that they continue the “bolt on” approach via modules is far from ideal considering what the competition brings to the table (i.e., Palo Alto). However, Palo Alto remains a point product while Cisco can offer a complete Edge Security solution all in house (Client Identity for instance) and make no mistake about it, the acquisition of Sourcefire is a major deal for Cisco Security.

   From what I see thus far, ASA with FirePOWER services is a major player and far exceeds the previous “NGFW” attempt that was Cisco CX. Now if they can only condense manageability into one product FireSIGHT then that is yet another major step forward.

   I’d like to see Cisco reinvent the ASA from the ground up, there should be no modules and traffic flow should not be redirected into a module only to exit and the ASA perform final services (NAT etc) but that may be asking too much?

4. BlogAdmin says

   January 22, 2015 at 7:51 am

   Great points here. Yeah, the greatest advantage of Cisco is that they can offer you complete end-to-end security solutions and Sourcefire will be a major component of their ecosystem. I hope they make advancements also in their “management systems” because that was one of their weak areas so far. If you see the management system of Checkpoint for example you will be blown away :)

5. Wayne says

   February 7, 2015 at 8:45 pm

   I’ve Engineered Enterprise Networks utilizing all the big names, from Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto, and Checkpoint. Cisco is status quo technology and if you know IOS you pretty much going to be able configure an ASA. Juniper requires you to know Unix, if your using there SRX platform. With Palo Alto there is a learning curve, but if you need an Internet Edge device then you’ll be in Good shape. I’d lump Checkpoint in the same boat as Palo Alto, but for a company that has been around since the beginning of the Internet, they have taken a lot of different roads to get where they are today. If you remember when Checkpoint was just a Software based Firewall then your like me, there Secure OS was OK, and the Crossbeam line was OK, but with current Gaia OS coupled with the Large suite of appliances I think they have finally got it right. Note, if your not a fan of the the RXX dashboards, they rewrote the new version as a multi-tenant manager called R80.

6. BlogAdmin says

   February 8, 2015 at 3:35 pm

   Yeah I agree that Checkpoint is one of the leaders in this game. Except their prices are a little “stiff”.

7. Marco says

   March 10, 2015 at 8:25 pm

   http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/products/security/asa-5500-series-next-generation-firewalls/models-comparison.html

   High-availability support A/S* (requires security plus license …)
   No problem for Security Plus License, no problem hor HA A/S.
   But if it dont manage Dual Isp A/A … 5506 is better of 5505 but have same limitations.

   I want to use both ISPs at the same time!
   One for http and other for SMTP.
   in the absence of this feature … 5506 is the same of 5505, only more maximum .

   Meraki is better for Dual ISP ?

8. BlogAdmin says

   March 10, 2015 at 9:42 pm

   Meraki is more flexible for dual ISPs indeed. Also, 5506 will support Firepower which the 5505 does not.

9. Don't Believe The Hype says

   March 12, 2015 at 7:11 pm

   I can tell you Cisco is far behind the competition when it comes to the UTM/NGFW discussion. Their performance for the price people are willing to pay amazes me. Palo Alto, Fortinet, Sonicwall are all much better firewall options, in regards to performance, functionality and then when you add price into the equation it’s not even comparable. The SourceFire acquisition helps it actually to getting to a true UTM firewall, but they are still just slapping that onto the ASA’s and it kills their performance. Maybe that will change with an ASA hardware refresh, but right now they still have a lot of catching up to do in this area. People will just blindly throw money at it, because it’s “Cisco” though. Like moths to a flame.

10. HEC says

    February 25, 2016 at 3:56 pm

    Hello Harris.
    I have bought all your books and they are very good and useful.
    Help us and make your book about the Cisco New Generation Firewall (5500 X) we all will appreciate it.
    Thank you