Cisco: New firewalls – with AI, of course

Cisco presented a new firewall series as part of its in-house exhibition Live. In addition to the new top model, there was also a GenAI assistant on display.

(Image: Cisco)

Jun 13, 2024 at 8:34 am CEST

3 min. read

iX Magazin

By

Benjamin Pfister

This article was originally published in German and has been automatically translated.

Cisco is refreshing its desktop firewall portfolio for branch offices and small businesses. The new Cisco Secure Firewall 1200 series is designed to provide a high-performance and secure connection for small branch offices. For the cloud-managed Meraki MX firewalls, there is a new top model called MX650. At the same time, Cisco is launching an AI assistant for firewalls.

Background Secure Firewall 1200

There will be three new models from October 2024: The smallest 1210 CE brings 3 Gbit/s firewall and 2 Gbit/s IPSec VPN throughput. It has 8 1000BASE-T copper ports. The 1210 CP also provides UPoE+ on four of the eight ports, for example to supply WLAN access points or telephones with power. If a little more throughput is required or the Internet uplink or a connection to a switch is to be made via fiber optics. The 1220 CX provides 2*SFP+ slots and up to 6 Gbit/s firewall and 4 Gbit/s IPSec VPN throughput, in addition to 8*1000BASE-T copper ports. All three variants come with an external power supply unit.

In the iX interview, the manufacturer claims an up to three times better price/throughput ratio compared to competitors. However, Cisco did not mention specific prices at the Live, which means that the information cannot be verified.

Read also

Milliardenfonds und Infrastruktur-Angebot: Cisco setzt voll auf KI

Symbolbild Observability, Wolken und Landschaft

Nach der Übernahme: Cisco und Splunk optimieren Full-Stack-Observability

Ein Symbolbild mit einer Wolke voller stilisierter Augen, die auf Laptop und Smartphone schauen.

Monitoring: Ciscos ThousandEyes schaut noch genauer auf lokale Netze und Cloud

Cisco also announced the new software version 7.6 of Firewall Threat Defense (FTD), which is available for all Cisco physical and virtual firewalls. It is designed to support the rollout of branch office networks with pre-built SD-WAN and firewall templates, as well as zero-touch provisioning.

Cloud-managed firewall top model

The new top model of the cloud-managed Meraki MX firewall is the newly introduced MX650. It offers an SFP28 slot for up to 25G dedicated on the WAN side and a configurable 25G SFP28, two 10G SFP+ and eight 1G SFP slots on the LAN side. With up to 25 Gbit/s, it is said to offer more than 5 times the maximum IPSec throughput and more than double the performance of the MX450 with 16 Gbit/s throughput for extended security functions. The maximum recommended number of clients also increases from 10,000 for the MX450 to 50,000 for the MX650. The whole thing is based on one height unit.

AI assistant

At Cisco Live in Las Vegas, there was also some information about the so-called AI Assistant for Security. It is based on the Firewall Management Center (FMC) or the Cisco Defense Orchestrator (CDO) from the cloud. Administrators can use this combination to manage their firewalls, configure policies and access reference materials as required to become more efficient. According to the manufacturer, this is a generative AI tool based on an LLM with natural language processing (NLP). The assistant is also intended to provide recommendations in the event of misconduct, such as uncontrolled restarts, for example software updates with corresponding instructions.