Okay first of all, yes, I understand perfectly the difference between a firewall and a router. Here’s the story:
I have to layoff my network admin. I’m not a Cisco guy so I called a couple of IT consulting firms to get quotes on managed support. I have a Cisco 2811 managing persistent VPN connections to remote sales offices as well as the user VPN accounts. We’ve always used the built-in ACL to restrict access to IPs, ports, and doing the NATing, etc but this has always irked me a bit as the device is not a true firewall, like from the ASA line for example. I also have a couple of Barracudas behind the router, filtering spam and web content, but of which get updates.
So anyway, one IT firm says I need a dedicated firewall device ASAP. The other says “that’s small business mentality”, what you have is perfect. Well I know that at the University I worked at previously, we had a dedicated firewall. However, that was several years ago and obviously a much larger scale environment. Could it really be that firewalls are obsolete? I started to doubt myself.
Furthermore I found this on the product page of the 2811:
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/ps5881/
Security
On-board encryption
Support of up to 1500 VPN tunnels with the AIM-EPII-PLUS Module
Antivirus defense support through Network Admission Control (NAC)
Intrusion Prevention as well as stateful Cisco IOS Firewall support and many more essential security features
Cisco guys: Does this thing have intrusion prevention / detection, deep packet inspection, and a stateful firewall? Or does it just “support” being around other Cisco devices that have these features?
And is the 2nd firm just blowing smoke? I have never heard that a dedicated firewall is small business mentality. If they are wrong, well that will make the selection quite easy I suppose.
Linux / OSS guys don’t comment and tell me to run IP Tables please. I’m looking for managed support, not endless config files.
