Cisco security products

The new network model

Gone are the days of the single ingress/egress point for the corporate network, where all the data was housed on site and staff only worked when they were in the office.

These days we have a much more challenging security environment. Servers are often housed in the cloud, remote sites are connected over the internet, staff can access their data from their phone or laptop outside of the office, and all of this needs to be managed in a secure way. However the underlying principles of the last two blogs don't need to change, we just need to adapt our methods.

Cisco SecureX model

This is the model which Cisco describe as their architecture, I won't go into any detail but you can find more details here: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/ac49/ac0/ac1/ac259/docs/email_web_security_services.pdf

• Context awareness
• AnyConnect client
• TrustSec
• Secure Intelligence Operations

Cisco products

Here is a list of Cisco products which we will talk about more in later posts, but these are all tools which are used to mitigate threats and monitor networks.

• ASA firewalls
• Integrated Service Routers (ISRs)
• Intrusion prevention systems (IPS)
• IronPort Email Security Appliances and IronPort Web Security Appliances (WSA)
• ScanSafe

Virtual Private Networks (VPN)

I'm sure you have used VPNs and probably know how they work; they are used to secure traffic flowing over an unsecured network. Typically they are used in a couple of scenarios, connecting remote sites over the internet, and staff connecting to the network from home or on the road. They provide a means of connecting places over third party networks, whilst maintaining a secure connection. The majority of VPNs you encounter will either be IPSec or SSL (HTTPS).

Secure Management

The last topic for today is on secure management, ensuring that the connections which we maintain to our network devices are secure and not open to manipulation. In the past connections were almost exclusively made over telnet, however telnet is completely insecure and sends all its data in cleartext. These days Secure Shell (SSH) will be used to control the command line interface (CLI) and https will be used to control the web interface, or in Cisco's case, the Adaptive Security Device Manager (ASDM). There are also a number of other products available to interact with our security devices and to control them from a central application – more in this later.