Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) is a unified software image, which includes the Cisco ASA features and FirePOWER Services. This unified software is capable of offering the function of ASA and FirePOWER in one platform, both in terms of hardware and software features. This seems to be a good approach taken by Cisco especially when most of the Next Generation Firewall Vendors are offering Next Generation Solutions on a single platform with unified image. Currently the Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) unified software image is available in the following releases
- 6.0
- 6.2
The Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) is capable of offering following Next-Generation Firewall Services
- Stateful firewall Capabilities
- Static and dynamic routing
- Supports RIP, OSPF, BGP, Static Routing
- Next-Generation Intrusion Prevention Systems (NGIPS)
- URL Filtering
- Application visibility and control (AVC)
- Advance Malware Protection
- ISE Integration
- SSL Decryption
- Captive Portal
- Multi-Domain Management
Currently Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) unified software can be deployed on Cisco Firepower 4100 Series and the Firepower 9300 appliances as well the FTD can be also be deployed on Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) ASA 5506-X, ASA 5506H-X, ASA 5506W-X, ASA 5508-X, ASA 5512-X, ASA 5515-X, ASA 5516-X, ASA 5525-X, ASA 5545-X, and ASA 5555-X. However, the Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) unified software cannot be deployed on Cisco ASA 5505 and 5585-X Series appliances.
Some of the key features which Currently Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) lacks are as follows
- VPN Function
- Multi Context mode
- EIGRP and Multicast
- Does not support Cisco ASA 5505 & 5585-X Appliances
The lack of VPN function is a major drawback which Cisco needs to overcome in upcoming release of Cisco Firepower Threat Defense image. This certainly discourages the enterprise customers to adopt the Cisco Firepower Threat Defense unified image on their supported ASA 5500-Series platforms.
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