Government

Outgrowing legacy firewalls in a federal environment

Operating in a highly regulated federal environment, a government organization must balance strict compliance requirements with an uncompromising need for uptime and secure cloud connectivity. Although their environment is primarily on-premises today, the organization is focused on building an architecture that enables a smooth and flexible move to the cloud over time.

For years, Cisco Secure Firewall Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA)s have provided a reliable foundation for perimeter protection and segmentation. As the organization's environment evolved, however, growing cloud adoption and bandwidth-intensive workloads began to place new demands on the firewall layer. Throughput capacity became a limiting factor for critical functions such as backups and large data transfers, particularly as the organization looked to expand secure inspection without adding operational complexity.

These demands became even more pronounced as ExpressRoute connectivity into Azure—a private, high-bandwidth connection between the organization's data center and the cloud—grew in importance to daily operations. The dedicated ASAs protecting the Express Route connection were approaching their capacity limits, prompting the security team to evaluate how best to scale performance while maintaining strong inspection and consistent policy enforcement. The team needed a firewall solution that could deliver higher throughput, support advanced inspection at line rate, and provide centralized visibility across both on-premises and cloud environments.

As a long-time Cisco customer, the organization's primary security administrator was already familiar with Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) from earlier virtual deployments in Azure. That familiarity—combined with experience using Snort, Cisco's advanced intrusion prevention and detection engine, and Cisco Firewall Management Center (FMC)—helped establish confidence in FTD as a natural evolution of their Secure Firewall deployment rather than a disruptive architectural shift.

Beyond performance, the organization required a solution that would reduce management overhead and simplify policy administration for a lean security team, aligning with the federal government’s broader shift toward cloud-managed infrastructure. Rather than simply replacing their aging firewalls, the goal was to build a modern, scalable framework capable of supporting future security initiatives.

A phased migration built for confidence and continuity

To modernize their firewall environment while maintaining system stability, the organization adopted a phased approach to migrating their firewalls from ASA 5545 to Secure Firewall 3105.

The first step in the migration process focused on the Secure Firewall protecting ExpressRoute connectivity into Azure. This served as an initial testing ground, delivering immediate and measurable results. The migration was completed during a planned maintenance window with no disruption to business continuity, and performance gains were realized almost immediately. Throughput increased by more than 50%, significantly accelerating backups and improving data transfer efficiency.

The team then expanded the migration to additional firewall environments, including their internet-facing Secure Firewall. With guidance from Cisco’s migration services team, the organization was able to streamline policies, validate configurations, and transition to FTD with confidence. The combination of structured tooling and expert support allowed the team to move forward quickly while maintaining consistent policy enforcement and visibility.

The final migration addressed an internal administrative firewall used to manage traffic between on-premises users and backend systems. By this stage, the team was comfortable operating on FTD and completed the migration independently using Cisco Secure Firewall Migration Tool (FMT). The new deployment was implemented in a high-availability configuration and seamlessly integrated into day-to-day workflows. Subsequent software upgrades were completed in less than 35 minutes, reinforcing the organization’s ability to maintain their security environment efficiently over time.

Across all three migrations, the organization maintained uninterrupted operations and completed each transition within 8 hours. The phased approach not only minimized risk but demonstrated that FTD could be deployed consistently across environments—delivering stronger performance, resilience, and a repeatable path for future expansion.

Measurable gains in performance and security operations

Following the hardware refresh and transition to FTD, the organization experienced clear improvements across performance, manageability, and security excecution.

From a performance standpoint, the most immediate and measurable benefit was throughput. By doubling Gbps, they were able to significantly accelerate backups and reduce impact on server teams. Advanced inspection could now run without bottlenecks, enabling the organization to take full advantage of Cisco’s best in class threat detection capabilities.

Operational efficiency improved just as dramatically. Centralized management through their FMC eliminated the need to log into multiple firewall consoles, consolidating health, performance, and policy visibility into one interface. Routine tasks such as troubleshooting and policy validation became faster and more intuitive.

Upgrade processes also became more predictable. While upgrades on ASAs had often been deferred, FTD upgrades could now be completed in roughly 30 minutes. Integration with Splunk further streamlined investigations, enabling faster correlation of events and quicker resolution when users reported connectivity issues. Packet tracing and event analysis that once required multiple tools could now be completed in minutes.

Together, these improvements translated directly into higher confidence in security operations. Investigation times decreased, audit cycles became smoother, and fewer issues required escalation to leadership.

A modern foundation for cloud-managed security

Beyond immediate operational gains, the migration established a foundation that is aligned with the organization’s long-term modernization strategy. With consistent firewall technology now deployed across on-premises and Azure environments, the organization is well positioned to adopt cloud-managed security as federal initiatives continue to accelerate.

The planned transition of FMC to a cloud-based model (through Cisco Security Cloud Control) is expected to further reduce operational overhead, eliminating the need to maintain on-premises management infrastructure while simplifying upgrades and new firewall deployments. For a small security team, this shift represents a meaningful improvement in scalability and day-to-day administration.

Looking ahead, the organization also plans to deepen integration between their Secure Firewalls and existing identity infrastructure, including Cisco Identity Services Engine (ISE). By enabling user and identity-based policies, the organization aims to move beyond traditional IP-based enforcement toward more adaptive, context-aware security controls.

Throughout the journey, Cisco’s support teams played a critical role, providing migration expertise, responsive Technical Assistance Center (TAC) assistance, and ongoing guidance. For the organization, the move to the latest hardware and software was more than a technical transition—it was a strategic step toward a resilient, modern security architecture built to support their evolving needs with confidence.