As a business owner, you know the importance of having a secure network. Legacy networks that consist of access points, switches, and firewalls that come from a variety of vendors are hard to manage, costly, and rigid. Read on to discover how the Cisco Meraki MX firewall series, an essential component of Cisco Meraki’s cloud networking platform, can help you protect your business from cyber threats.
What Is Cisco Meraki’s Cloud Networking Platform?
Cisco Meraki’s cloud networking platform provides centralized management and control over networking devices such as routers, switches, firewalls, and access points through a single web-based dashboard accessible from anywhere.
By leveraging the power of the cloud, Meraki enables seamless deployment, configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting of network devices across distributed locations. This means that you do not need to invest in complex on-premises infrastructure.
Cisco Meraki’s cloud networking platform offers unparalleled visibility into network performance and security, empowering IT administrators to make informed decisions and quickly respond to evolving business needs.
With features like automatic updates, advanced analytics, and integrated security measures, Cisco Meraki’s cloud networking platform delivers simplicity, scalability, and reliability to organizations of all sizes.
What Are Firewalls and Why Does Your Business Need Them?
Firewalls are network security devices. Whether hardware, software, or cloud-based, firewalls monitor both incoming and outgoing network traffic, allowing or blocking the flow of data based on predefined security rules.
There are several types of firewalls available.
Proxy firewalls act as gateways for specific applications, offering additional functions like content caching and enhanced security.
Stateful inspection firewalls, considered traditional, make decisions based on the state, port, and protocol of network traffic.
Unified threat management (UTM) firewalls combine stateful inspection with intrusion prevention and antivirus capabilities.
Next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) go beyond traditional packet filtering, incorporating intelligence-based access control, intrusion prevention, application awareness, and more.
Threat-focused NGFWs provide advanced threat detection and remediation capabilities, offering complete context awareness and intelligent security automation.
Virtual firewalls, deployed in private or public clouds, monitor and secure traffic across physical and virtual networks, often within software-defined network (SDN) environments.
Cloud-native firewalls modernize security by offering agile and elastic protection for applications and workload infrastructure, with features like automated scaling and smart load balancing.
Overview of Cisco Meraki MX Firewall Series
The Cisco Meraki firewall is a next-generation firewall (NGFW). It provides complete control over applications, content, and users.
This firewall utilizes a category-based content filter, enabling precise control over web access by matching content against millions of URLs categorized into dozens of categories. This allows your network administrators to enforce policies tailored to your organization’s needs, restricting access to inappropriate or non-business-related websites.
Furthermore, the Cisco Meraki firewall offers seamless Active Directory integration. It allows your network administrators to enforce access control based on user classes. This integration ensures that each of your employees is subject to appropriate content filtering policies based on their role or group membership.
It incorporates a robust intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS) engine powered by Sourcefire’s Snort, renowned as one of the most widely deployed technologies of its kind globally. Employing a combination of signature-based, protocol-based, and anomaly-based inspection methods, the IDS/IPS engine ensures comprehensive protection for the network.
Another standout feature of the Cisco Meraki firewall is its reliance on cloud-based updates for content lists and application signatures. This dynamic updating mechanism ensures that security policies remain current and effective, even as content and applications evolve. Leveraging the Cisco Meraki cloud management platform enables automatic updates of threat signatures, guaranteeing that the security measures remain current and effective against emerging threats.
Cisco Meraki firewall settings include features like Cellular Failover Rules, which are additional rules applied when the firewall switches to using a cellular modem for internet access. This switch might happen if the primary internet connection fails. These rules help manage cellular data usage by restricting certain types of traffic, like streaming or social media, during the failover period. This is important because it helps prevent unexpected charges from excessive cellular data usage, ensuring that the cellular connection is primarily used for essential business activities. In other words, these settings help control and prioritize internet usage during emergencies when the primary connection goes down. This prevents unnecessary costs and keeps important business functions running smoothly.
