Introduction to the Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual

The Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual (threat defense virtual) brings Cisco's Next Generation Firewall functionality to virtualized environments, enabling consistent security policies to follow workloads across your physical, virtual, and cloud environments, and between clouds.

Today, organizations rely on a mixture of physical and virtual control points to meet their network security needs. They need the flexibility to deploy different physical and virtual firewalls across a wide range of environments while still maintaining consistent policy across branch offices, corporate datacenters, and all points between. From data center consolidation to office relocations, mergers and acquisitions, as well as seasonal peaks in demand on your applications, Cisco’s virtual firewall portfolio helps you simplify security management with the convenience of unified policy and the flexibility to deploy everywhere.

The Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual combines Cisco’s proven network firewall with Snort IPS, URL filtering, and malware defense. It simplifies threat protection with consistent security policies across physical, private, and public cloud environments. Get deep visibility into your network and quickly detect threat origin and activity. Then, stop attacks before they impact your operations.

Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual is the popular virtualized solution. Prioritize threats with automated risk rankings and impact flags to focus your resources on events requiring immediate action. License portability provides flexibility to move from your on-premises private cloud to public cloud while maintaining consistent policy and unified management across all of your appliances. Cisco Smart Software Licensing makes it easy to deploy, manage, and track virtual firewall instances.

How to Manage Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual Device

You have two options to manage your Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual device.

Secure Firewall Management Center

If you are managing large numbers of devices, or if you want to use the more complex features and configurations that the threat defense allows, use the management center to configure your devices instead of the integrated device manager.


Important

You cannot use both the device manager and the management center to manage the threat defense device. Once the device manager integrated management is enabled, it won't be possible to use the management center to manage the threat defense device, unless you disable the local management and re-configure the management to use the management center. On the other hand, when you register the threat defense device to the management center, the device manager onboard management service is disabled.


Caution

Currently, Cisco does not have an option to migrate your device manager configuration to the management center and vice-versa. Take this into consideration when you choose what type of management you configure for the threat defense device.

Secure Firewall device manager

The device manager is an onboard integrated manager.

The device manager is a web-based configuration interface included on some of the threat defense devices. The device manager lets you configure the basic features of the software that are most commonly used for small networks. It is especially designed for networks that include a single device or just a few, where you do not want to use a high-powered multiple-device manager to control a large network containing many of the threat defense devices.


Note

See the Cisco Secure Firewall Device Manager Configuration Guide for list of the threat defense devices that support the device manager.