Cisco Wednesday announced a range of new information security products and upgrades as part of the launch of its Application Centric Infrastructure framework, which is designed to make security policies easier to enforce across both physical and virtual environments.
For starters, Cisco announced an ACI Application Policy Infrastructure Controller, due to be released in April 2014, designed to enforce access and security policies across the network fabric. ACI Security Solutions will support next-generation Cisco ASA physical and virtual firewall technologies by stitching them directly into the ACI network fabric, and can be managed using the ACI Policy Infrastructure Controller management tool, Chris Young, senior VP of Cisco Security Group, said Wednesday in a blog post.
In addition, Cisco updated its ASA 5585-X Series Next-Generation Security Appliance — which it said can be scaled up to handle 640 Gbps, work with Nexus 9000 data center switches and also provide automatic load balancing — to be compatible with ACI. It’s also released a virtual version of its popular ASA firewall, dubbed the Cisco ASA Virtual Firewall (ASAv), which will likewise work with the ACI fabric. “The ASAv maintains its own data path. This allows it to work with any virtual switch and it will be available on multiple hypervisors,” said Young.