Chapter 3. Overview of the Cisco Security Solution and the Cisco Secure Product Family
This chapter contains the following sections:
The only system that is truly secure is one that is switched off and unplugged, locked in a titanium-lined safe, buried in a concrete bunker, and is surrounded by nerve gas and very highly paid armed guards. Even then, I wouldn't stake my life on it….
—Gene Spafford, Purdue University
This statement is true. No matter what system you implement, you will never have a truly secure system. The best that network professionals can do is to implement a solution that is as secure as current technologies allow and then redesign when hackers find a new vulnerability. This method of prevention has been around since the first misuse of the Internet.
This chapter provides an explanation of the Cisco Security Solution and an overview of the Cisco Secure product range. The Security Solution is designed to ease the implementation of your security policy and introduce you to the idea of security as an ever-evolving requirement that needs constant monitoring and redesign.
Contained within this chapter is a brief overview of the functionality and role of each product in the Cisco Secure family. This overview can be used as a quick reference when designing the security approach for a Cisco network. As with any tool, a complete understanding of the tool's full capabilities, as well as any implementation issues, is of supreme importance in order to help you make a qualified design recommendation. Internet security is a very complicated field of study that requires constantly keeping one step ahead of prospective attackers. New security threats and loopholes appear all the time, and unscrupulous people capitalize on them. The Internet security designer faces a very tough task: to design the security around ever-changing criteria.
The Cisco Secure product range is covered in great detail in Chapters 4 through 9.