The purpose of a firewall is to filter incoming and outgoing traffic between networks. The ASA is a family of next-generation firewalls from Cisco systems. The ASA is a standalone appliance that provides stateful and packet filtering, Network Address Translation (NAT), routing, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Virtual Private Network (VPN) capabilities, botnet filtering, Advanced Malware Protection (AMP), and deep packet inspection. Those are only a few of the features and services it offers. In the next section, we will dive a bit deeper into discussing the features of the ASA and its abilities to prevent threats from entering a network/organization.
The following is a picture of Cisco ASA 5505:
The ASA comes in many different shapes and sizes to fit business needs. Some models include: 5505, 5510, 5520, 5540, 5550, 5506-X, 5506W-H, 5506H-X, 5508...
