Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Container Data Sheet

Introduction

In today's fast-paced digital landscape, organizations are rapidly embracing containerized applications to achieve unparalleled scalability, flexibility, and efficiency. However, as the adoption of containers grows, so does the complexity of securing them. Traditional security measures often fall short in providing the necessary protection for these dynamic environments. This is where the need for a specialized container firewall becomes essential.

Cisco^® Secure Firewall Threat Defense Container (FTDc) extends Cisco Hybrid Mesh Firewall architecture to container networks by delivering next-generation firewall capabilities with AI-powered threat inspection and uniform security policy enforcement. It enables you to select the performance level that best suits your organization. With scalable VPN capabilities, it ensures secure access to your organization's resources while safeguarding workloads against evolving and complex threats.

Table 1.            Key capabilities of Secure Firewall Threat Defense Container

Flexible performance-based licensing

Cisco's container firewall leverages the same performance-based licensing model as the virtual form factor, designed to deliver deployment flexibility across a wide range of infrastructure environments. This unified licensing approach allows a single set of PIDs to entitle both virtual and containerized deployments across public and private cloud environments.

Each performance license tier enforces two key parameters:

●     Throughput (Rate Limit) — Controls the maximum firewall inspection throughput via an integrated rate limiter, ensuring predictable and consistent performance aligned to the selected tier.

●     Remote Access (RA) VPN Session Limit — Defines the maximum number of concurrent Remote Access VPN sessions supported under the license tier.

Table 2.        Performance license tiers

Important: FTDc performance tiers have no impact on the underlying compute resources (vCPUs and memory) assigned to the container appliance or the compute instance / shape selected in public cloud environments. The allocated compute resources drive appliance scale for capabilities such as routing table size, access control rules, and more. This decoupled approach gives customers the flexibility to independently size their container firewall with the compute resources needed to meet their specific requirements, while selecting the performance license tier that aligns with their throughput and VPN session needs.

Deployment and system requirements

Table 3.        Deployment environment summary

Note: For more information on each of the supported deployment environments, please reference the corresponding Getting Started Guide and the Secure Firewall Threat Defense Compatibility Guide.

Performance and scale

Your performance may vary from the below. These should be considered general guidelines. Your actual performance will depend on the environment, including traffic type and profile, CPU type, CPU speed, cache, number of interfaces, etc. For a complete list of supported compute instances and shapes, please reference the corresponding Getting Started Guide.

Table 4.        Performance specifications for FTDc (Docker / Kubernetes) version 10.0+ running Snort3 and SR-IOV:

Ordering information

Performance tiered licensing is available starting from Firewall Threat Defense version 7.0. The new licensing model also includes Base License as a subscription. For information on licenses, subscriptions, and other options associated with the product, refer to the Network Security Ordering Guide.

Table 5.        Ordering information for Secure Firewall Threat Defense Container

Cisco environmental sustainability

Information about Cisco’s environmental sustainability policies and initiatives for our products, solutions, operations, and extended operations or supply chain is provided in the “Environmental Sustainability” section of Cisco’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) report.

Reference links to information about key environmental sustainability topics (mentioned in the “Environment Sustainability” section of the CSR Report) are provided in the following table:

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