What You Will Learn

While easy access to the Internet and the ability to connect your employees, customers, and business partners can positively affect productivity and profitability, they also put your business in the path of network security risks. Cisco has merged best-in-class network security technology with more than 20 years of routing expertise to redefine network security and provide you with the protection your company needs.

Security functions embedded in your router:

• Protect the router itself and entry points to your network
• Defend against attacks targeted at your network foundation
• Allow you to add security features anywhere in the network
• Reduce the need for additional security appliances so you have fewer devices to manage

Network security breaches can occur from a wide range of sources, including your own networked PCs and servers. New worms and viruses are targeting network endpoints. Also, the speed and sophistication of network security breaches and destructive attacks continues to increase. Threats blending Internet worms, viruses, and Trojan horses spread around the world in minutes, resulting in widespread intrusions and costly damage. This is of particular concern to companies like yours, which often have limited IT resources to combat these challenges.

Cisco helps you build self-defending networks that can identify, prevent, and respond to network security threats, so your business is protected. An important component of the Cisco Self-Defending Network is the integrated services router. These routers give you data, voice, video, and other advanced services, including security, all in one device.

Value of Integrated Security in the Router

Cisco embeds network security into the hardware of every integrated services router. In addition, Cisco IOS Software security features offer additional protection.

Integrating Cisco IOS Software security directly into the router offers many benefits:

• Protects the router itself and network gateways. This allows you to deploy security functions at all entry points into the network.
• Creates a line of defense against attacks targeted directly at your network foundation
• Allows you to easily enable new security features on your integrated services router without deploying additional hardware. This reduces the number of devices in your network, lowering training and manageability costs.
• Provides the flexibility to apply security functions, such as firewall, intrusion prevention, and VPNs, anywhere in the network to help ensure the best defense against security threats. Router-based, switch-based, and security appliance-based functions combine to offer protection across your network.
• Takes advantage of the intelligence of the router as a "trusted handler" of the traffic, integrating more advanced security, quality of service (QoS), and routing features. This helps to ensure high network availability and performance.

Many third-party point product security solutions protect specific aspects of the network, but few solutions can secure all points in your network in the way that the Cisco portfolio of security solutions can.

Security Features

Integrated services routers offer three categories of protection based on the Cisco Self-Defending Network:

• Integrated threat defense: Provides highly secure Internet access without the need for additional devices to control worms, viruses, and spyware. In addition, integrated threat defense features protect the router itself from being shut down from hacking and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
• Secure connectivity: Provides highly secure and scalable network connectivity to VPN users, with support for multiple types of traffic such as VPN tunneling and encryption, Easy VPN, and dynamic multipoint VPN.
• Management and instrumentation: Using tools such as Cisco Security Manager at a broader level or Cisco Router Security and Device Manager at the device level, these features make it easier to set up and manage security across the network.

Cisco's Commitment

As our customers seek to secure all entry points into their networks, Cisco is enhancing our security portfolio to dramatically improve the ability of a network to identify, prevent, and respond to threats.

Our integrated services routers deliver the industry's most comprehensive and adaptable security solutions. Instead of adding hardware, Cisco IOS Software lets you use new integrated security features on your routers and apply those security functions anywhere in the network. Our routers help protect all entry points into your network and defend against attacks targeted directly at your network foundation. Finally, these routers are particularly suited to small companies like yours that want to minimize the number of operating systems and devices you need to manage with limited resources.

For More Information

Read more about routers and security or find a partner to help you design a network that meets your needs today and tomorrow.