The value of a managed next-gen firewall service

Discover why firewalls should be top of your list when transitioning security functions to a managed service.

Delegating firewall management to a trusted provider

A managed service powered by Cisco Firepower

To keep our customers ahead of the game we invest in innovation, developing our own initiatives and creating solutions jointly within our strategic partnerships with industry leaders. We then take these innovations and wrap them into comprehensive managed services that mean our customers can achieve a consistent global experience easily, with the flexibility and choice they need. 

Our partnership with Cisco is the ideal combination of market-leading technology and our service wrap. The BT Managed Firewall, using Cisco Firepower™, brings together Cisco’s incredibly effective firewall with our extensive experience and advanced skills in delivering managed services, plus our deep knowledge of the Cisco portfolio. When security teams are stretched in terms of time and skills, we take every aspect of management off their shoulders. 

Thanks to its advanced design, the Cisco firewall delivers a highly effective balance of granular application control and robust security against the threats posed by sophisticated and evasive malware attacks. Its unified policy management of firewall functions, application control, threat prevention and advanced malware protection from the network to the endpoint contributed to Forrester naming Cisco a Leader in Enterprise Firewall Solutions, Q4 2024.

At a glance, Firepower NGFW lets you:

  • Stop more threats by containing known and unknown malware with leading Cisco AMP and sandboxing, firewalling for 7,300 commercial applications, and additional custom applications.

  • Gain more insight into your environment with next-generation Cisco IPS, which includes automated risk rankings and impact flags to identify priorities for your team.

  • Detect earlier and act faster with an infection-to-detection time of just a few hours.

  • Reduce complexity with unified management and automated threat correlation across tightly integrated security functions, including application firewalling and advanced malware protection. 

  • Reduce performance costs and increase visibility by inspecting encrypted traffic for malicious content, without the need to decrypt using Cisco’s Encrypted Visibility Engine (EVE).

  • Get more from your network and existing investments with optional integration of other Cisco and third-party networking and security solutions to enhance your security.

 

In addition, Cisco firewalls benefit from Cisco Talos, a threat intelligence service provided by Cisco that feeds directly into them. This allows them to identify and block malicious traffic based on real-time threat data collected by Talos. Using this intelligence effectively enhances the firewall's protection by providing up-to-date information about known threats like malware, phishing sites and botnets; essentially, Talos acts as the ‘brain' behind the firewall's decision-making process to block suspicious traffic.  

Keeping you secure with fully managed services using the best available products

Our extensive experience in providing managed services guides you through the consideration, selection and implementation of your chosen service from our range of scalable, BT-owned on-premises CPE solutions. The strength of this process is part of why we’re consistently voted as a leader in network and security managed services by Gartner and IDC. 

The streamlined journey to one of our managed services starts with a controlled deployment phase to agreed timescales, where we set up, configure and tune your choice of service tier. After a seamless on-boarding process, our experts then monitor your live service proactively, 24x7x365 and, in the event of any faults, our engineers will identify them faster than if you went directly to the vendor. You’ll also have access to our secure portal to request any changes and obtain reports on system health and threat activity. 

On an ongoing basis, our trusted security professionals will assess your service's effectiveness and recommend amendments that can further optimise your firewall performance. They’ll also undertake all change management, vulnerability management, renewals, licensing and patching. And your whole experience will be backed up with strong SLAs for availability. 

Contact your account manager to learn more about how a managed firewall service can make defending your organisation easier.