Into the Blended working: Cisco Next-Generation Firewall Secure Firewall 3100 Series Helps Evolve Enterprise Firewalls

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IT challenges brought about by hybrid office

According to the latest data from Gallup, a world-renowned management consulting company, due to the impact of the epidemic and the supply chain, our working environment and models are undergoing fundamental changes. According to the survey, in the future, only 23% of employees will need to work completely on-site, 24% can work remotely, and 53% of employees will freely allocate their time between home and office.

A hybrid workforce model offers many benefits to employers and employees, including greater flexibility and productivity. However, new IT construction challenges also follow, especially the high-performance remote access requirements brought about by the increase of video and audio conferencing, as well as the security verification and compliance audit requirements caused by remote access to office.

Enterprise firewalls play a key role in network security and are widely used in large and small businesses. However, many existing devices are not designed for hybrid office performance and functionality. Some devices cannot provide a complete next-generation firewall function stack, nor can they provide low-latency high-performance Internet throughput when decryption and security filtering functions are turned on.

With the hybridization and fragmentation of secure access, enterprise security firewalls are facing unprecedented pressure. On the one hand, it is necessary to improve the network experience for employees to access and access, and on the other hand, it is necessary to ensure complete security compliance. These two demands Often difficult to coordinate. In real-world scenarios, there is a constant trade-off, with many people experiencing poor audio quality or dropped video connections when making video calls. Stuck video conferencing, maddeningly complicated authentication, endless data leaks, cyber attacks and other issues have long been common.

A firewall platform that meets the needs of mixed scenarios

Organizations can now rely on Cisco’s new Secure Firewall 3100 Series to improve performance and security, and gain greater flexibility to adapt to business growth and meet the challenges of hybrid work.
The Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 Series leverages automation and integration for low-touch configuration, simplifying management and giving IT administrators visibility into firewall performance and security. Additionally, the appliance is designed to provide fast ROI and scalability through its clustering capabilities. “The Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 Series platform supports up to eight firewall appliances that can be added to a cluster,” said Nazmul Rajib, senior product marketing manager at Cisco. “You can start with one or two firewall appliances and simply add more appliances as your business grows.” Add it in.”
Importantly, the new family of firewalls increases security without degrading network traffic performance. The Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 series is equipped with the next-generation IPS engine Snort 3 by default. The Snort software system can simultaneously improve the efficiency of threat processing and detection capabilities through a new multi-threaded architecture and a publish/subscribe event model.
Enterprises update firewalls oriented to new hybrid architectures, based on excellent performance, expansion space and cost-effectiveness. In the comparison in Figure 2 below, we can see that the security and encryption processing performance of the 3100 series has been greatly improved compared with the traditional Cisco 2100 mid-range series and 4100 high-end series, and the price of the corresponding model in the figure remains in the same range . As a new generation of product series, 3100 series is undoubtedly a solid supplement and upgrade of 2100 and 4100 product grade series.

The innovative advantages brought by the Secure Firewall 3100 Series don’t stop there.

Between the traditional switch fabric and the x86 CPU, Cisco added a new custom FPGA chip. Not only does it implement a next-generation (and a patented industry first!) flow offload engine for fast single-flow throughput and HPC-grade latency, but it also provides another industry-first across IPsec and TLS ( DTLS) secure dedicated channel encryption acceleration capability. The 3100 Series can decrypt and encrypt tunneled traffic directly in the FPGA hardware without relying on the main system bus or consuming precious x86 CPU compute cycles. In the wave of hybrid office, this revolutionary product has increased the security dedicated channel throughput of mid-range firewall gateways several times, and complied with the requirements of full interconnection and remote mobile access of enterprise branches.

Bring a better experience through enhanced hardware

The improvement of the hardware platform is essentially to support more abundant application scenarios on the upper layer.
The Cisco Secure Firewall 3100 is equipped with the new FTD 7.X operating system and the industry-leading next-generation IPS engine Snort 3.0. Through the introduction of hundreds of new functions and feature optimizations, it ensures that different users have different perceptions of network and security in mixed scenarios. access requirements.
Hybrid office is gradually becoming an important measure of the digital maturity of enterprises. The network bearing and security protection capabilities of enterprise IT will become the top priority. Cisco released the Secure Firewall 3100 under such an era background, providing users with a future-oriented next-generation firewall security platform.