Cisco Web Security Appliance introduction

In this and upcoming posts we’ll discuss the Cisco Web Security Appliance. This is the blog agenda for the upcoming weeks:
Part 1: Introduction
Part 2: Installing
Part 3: Deploying Proxy Services
Part 4: Policies
Part 5: Acceptable use & HTTPS Inspection
Part 6: Authentication
Part 7: Defending malware
In this blog we’ll talk about the product introduction.
The Cisco Web Security Appliance (WSA) is an appliance for securing http, https and ftp traffic from (and to) the internet.
The WSA replaces all, or most of these devices in your network:
Firewall
Webproxy
Anti spyware
Antivirus
URL Filtering
Policy management
As you can see, it’s more than just a regular proxy server.
The internet provides a lot of websites, good websites and bad websites. There are a lot of websites which are not work related for a lot of companies. If you want to limit or block those websites for users, the WSA is the product for you. Limitation can be time based, bandwidth based, user based or category based (79 categories). Road warriors (remote users) can be protected too by Anyconnect security or Web cloud Security, also known as Scansafe.
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Study blog

This is my first blog on this new blog site. I’ m quite happy with the looks and feels of this WordPress installation: it’s so easy to start and I realized that I should have been started a blog ages ago…
This new year, 2011, is just a few days old and I’ve decided to begin a ‘new’ study course: CCIE Routing & Switching. There is a lot of information about this topic on the internet: other blogs, mail groups, news groups, but I would like to share all study-related topics I’m going to experience in the upcoming months.
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