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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:
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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.
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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.
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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
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