Data Sheet Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances ® Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances deliver a robust suite of highly integrated, marketleading security services for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), enterprises, service providers, and mission-critical data centers— in addition to providing unprecedented services flexibility, modular scalability, feature extensibility, and lower deployment and operations costs. A key component of the Cisco Secure Borderless Network, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances deliver superior scalability, a broad span of technology and solutions, and effective, always-on security designed to meet the needs of a wide array of deployments. By integrating the world’s most proven firewall; a comprehensive, highly effective intrusion prevention system (IPS) with Cisco Global Correlation and guaranteed coverage; highperformance VPN and always-on remote access, the Cisco ASA 5500 Series helps organizations provide secure, high performance connectivity and protects critical assets for maximum productivity. Figure 1. The Cisco ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances The Cisco ASA 5500 Series helps businesses increase effectiveness and efficiency in protecting their networks and applications while delivering exceptional investment protection through the following elements: ● Market-proven security capabilities—The Cisco ASA 5500 Series integrates multiple full-featured, highperformance security services, including application-aware firewall, SSL and IPsec VPN, IPS with Global Correlation and guaranteed coverage, antivirus, antispam, antiphishing, and web filtering services. Combined with real-time reputation technology, these technologies deliver highly effective network- and application-layer security, user-based access control, worm mitigation, malware protection, improved employee productivity, instant messaging and peer-to-peer control, and secure remote user and site connectivity. The only IPS with market leading reputation technology, Cisco IPS with Global Correlation provides twice the efficacy of legacy IPS and includes guaranteed coverage for enhanced peace of mind. Offering seamless client and clientless access for a broad spectrum of desktop and mobile platforms, the Cisco ASA 5585-X delivers always-on secure mobility with integrated web security and IPS for policy enforcement and threat protection. ● Extensible integrated services architecture—The Cisco ASA 5500 Series offers businesses strong, adaptive protection from the fast-evolving threat environment through its unique combination of hardware and software extensibility and its powerful Modular Policy Framework (MPF). The innovative extensible multiprocessor design and software architecture of the Cisco ASA 5500 Series enables businesses to easily install additional high-performance security services through security services processors (SSPs), security services modules (SSMs) and security services cards (SSCs). This provides businesses with outstanding investment protection, while enabling them to expand the security services profile of their Cisco ASA 5500 Series as their security and performance needs grow. All these services are easily managed through the powerful Cisco Modular Policy Framework, which allows businesses to create highly customized security policies while making it simple to add new security and networking services into their existing policies. ● Reduced deployment and operations costs—The Cisco ASA 5500 Series enables standardization on a single platform to reduce the overall operational cost of security. A common environment for configuration © 2011 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This document is Cisco Public Information. Page 1 of 22

Data Sheet simplifies management and reduces training costs for staff, while the common hardware platform of the series reduces sparing costs. Additional efficiencies are realized by deploying integrated capabilities, obviating the need for the complex designs required to connect standalone solutions. ● Comprehensive management interfaces—The graphical Cisco Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM), a comprehensive command line interface (CLI), verbose syslog, and Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) support round out a rich complement of management options. Multi-unit deployments benefit...

Data Sheet As business needs grow, customers can install a Security Plus upgrade license, enabling the Cisco ASA 5505 to scale to support a higher connection capacity and up to 25 IPsec VPN users, add full DMZ support, and integrate into switched network environments through VLAN trunking support. Furthermore, this upgrade license maximizes business continuity by enabling support for redundant ISP connections and stateless Active/Standby high-availability services. Businesses can also extend the Cisco ASA 5505’s VPN service by enabling AnyConnect client and clientless VPN remote access to support...

Data Sheet compartmentalized control of security policies on a departmental level. This virtualization strengthens security and reduces overall management and support costs while consolidating multiple security devices into a single appliance. Businesses can extend their SSL and IPsec VPN capacity to support a larger number of mobile workers, remote sites, and business partners. Up to 250 AnyConnect and/or clientless VPN peers can be supported on each Cisco ASA 5510 by installing an Essential or a Premium AnyConnect VPN license; up to 250 IPsec VPN peers are supported on the base platform. VPN...

Data Sheet For business continuity and event planning, the Cisco ASA 5520 can also benefit from the Cisco VPN FLEX licenses, which enable administrators to react to or plan for short-term bursts of concurrent Premium VPN remote-access users, for up to a 2-month period. The advanced application-layer security and content security defenses provided by the Cisco ASA 5520 can be extended by deploying the high-performance intrusion prevention and worm mitigation capabilities of the AIP SSM, or the comprehensive malware protection of the CSC SSM. Using the optional security context capabilities of...