Cisco® ASA 5500 Series Adaptive Security Appliances deliver a robust suite of highly integrated, market-leading 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.

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, high-performance security services, including application-aware firewall, SSL and IPsec VPN, IPS, antivirus, antispam, antiphishing, and web filtering services. These technologies deliver strong 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.
- 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 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 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 greatly from Cisco Security Manager, a platform capable of managing distributed deployments of 5 to 5000 devices. The award-winning Cisco Security Monitoring, Analysis, and Response System (Cisco Security MARS) recognizes and correlates real network attacks and then rapidly defines how to stop them, thereby decreasing administrative overhead by reducing false positives and simplifying audit compliance.

Cisco ASA 5510 Adaptive Security Appliance

The Cisco ASA 5510 Adaptive Security Appliance delivers advanced security and networking services for small and medium-sized businesses and enterprise remote/branch offices in an easy-to-deploy, cost-effective appliance. These services can be easily managed and monitored by the integrated, Cisco ASDM application, thus reducing the overall deployment and operations costs associated with providing this high level of security. The Cisco ASA 5510 Adaptive Security Appliance provides high-performance firewall and VPN services and five integrated 10/100 Fast Ethernet interfaces. It optionally provides high-performance intrusion prevention and worm mitigation services through the AIP SSM, or comprehensive malware protection services through the CSC SSM. This unique combination of services on a single platform makes the Cisco ASA 5510 an excellent choice for businesses requiring a cost-effective, extensible, DMZ-enabled security solution.

As business needs grow, customers can install a Security Plus license, upgrading two of the Cisco ASA 5510 Adaptive Security Appliance interfaces to Gigabit Ethernet and enabling integration into switched network environments through VLAN support. This upgrade license maximizes business continuity by enabling Active/Active and Active/Standby high-availability services. Using the optional security context capabilities of the Cisco ASA 5510 Adaptive Security Appliance, businesses can deploy up to five virtual firewalls within an appliance to enable 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. Businesses can scale up to 250 SSL VPN peers on each Cisco ASA 5510 by installing an SSL VPN upgrade license; Up to 250 IPsec VPN peers are supported on the base platform.

VPN capacity and resiliency can also be increased by taking advantage of the Cisco ASA 5510's integrated VPN clustering and load-balancing capabilities (available with a Security Plus license). The Cisco ASA 5510 supports up to 10 appliances in a cluster, offering a maximum of 2500 SSL VPN peers or 2500 IPsec VPN peers per cluster. For business continuity and event planning, the Cisco ASA 5510 can also benefit from the Cisco VPN FLEX licenses, which enable administrators to react to or plan for short-term bursts of concurrent SSL VPN remote-access users, for up to a 2-month period.