Cisco ASA 5500-X still commanding Respect

We have been using these firewalls for a long time now, and every day we can see hackers trying to break into them, trying to exploit different vulnerabilities and so far they have not been able to gain access. We also configured reporting which means that we get alerted when there is a brute force attack or a single IP address that keeps trying to break in, once we get these notifications we then add those offending IP addresses to the blacklist and they won't be able to continue malicious activities against our environment.

The firewall is great but there is always room for improvement. The use of VMWare to manage the firewall is not great, it's yet another expense that can be avoided. However, once the firewall is installed and running it just works with no issues. Also, it's very straightforward to install updates or upgrade the firewall software. The fact that there are different models means there is always a firewall for every budget.

With a limited budget, this firewall can be deployed to do basic firewalling and routing as a starting point. Once in place with an improved budget firepower services can be activated with an additional license. Depending on the scenario an appropriate model can be bought to meet the needs of the business. These firewalls range from the small 5506-X to the massive 5585-X suitable for data center deployments.

Ever since we installed Cisco ASA 5500-X with FirePOWER Services we have never had to deal with an attack. We can see in the logs almost every day hackers attempting to break into our networks and failing. We also have the ability to blacklist every IP address that attempts to break into our firewalls.

We implemented a centralized management of all our Cisco ASA 5500-x with FirePOWER Services so that we can have a holistic view of all our sites in London and other European countries. This also helps when making changes, instead of login on to each firewall we can use Firepower Management Center (FMC) to central deploy changes across all devices.

We have never had an outage caused by firewall failure. We have had a few outages caused by the internet failing or cloud applications going offline but never a firewall breaking down. When making changes we have a very strong change control, major software updates are always carried out out of working hours. At places where we have two firewalls in HA, we are able to do upgrades in working ours and the users will never know that an upgrade is taking place, that how great these firewalls are.

Like any other firewall the Cisco ASA 5500-X with FirePOWER Services requires knowledge to deploy and manage, but the Cisco ASA is very straightforward to work with. It integrates well with most switch vendors and we deploy FMC in VMware. Site-to-site VPN with the Azure cloud and AWS is very straightforward. It also works well with other vendors like Palo Alto and Juniper.