Cisco adds to VPN, SSL range

Cisco is introducing a VPN box designed for midsized corporate sites for connecting one facility to another as opposed to supporting remote access from single machines.

Called Cisco 7301, the box supports 370M bit/sec of IPSec tunneled traffic, which compares, for example, to Nokia’s IP 530, a custom appliance sporting Check Point firewall and VPN software. The Cisco box costs $21,000 while the Nokia appliance costs $16,500 without the software licenses.

It also roughly compares with NetScreen’s 500, which costs $20,000 and includes Layer 7 firewalling, traffic management and denial-of-service protections.

Cisco is also introducing a second box called Cisco 3020, an either/or appliance that supports either Secure Sockets Layer remote access or IPSec VPNs, an acknowledgement that customers are looking for both, if not for the same types of end users. The 3020 costs $10,000.

Along with these new devices, the company has upgraded its Security Device Manager software that lets users access firewall and VPN devices via a Web interface to configure security policies. It uses a graphic interface rather than the traditional command-line interface. Previously, only Cisco’s lower end routers supported the software, but this has been extended up to the larger Cisco 7301 router.

The software also includes start-up wizards and one-step security configurations that follow industry-recommended security standards. Customers can still set their own policies manually, but these preset ones can be configured more quickly.

The company has also upgraded its IOS router software to allow role-based access to router commands. The purpose is to separate authorization to execute networking commands from authorization to execute security commands. Since separate administrators might be in charge of these areas, the ability to carry them out is also being separated. Cisco offers 16 templates of common ways enterprises divide these security and networking commands to make this portioning easier.

The new products and upgrades are available now.