Cisco unveiled a series of mid-range firewalls this week alongside a cloud-delivered management dashboard as part of an ongoing effort to capitalize on the pivot to hybrid work models. 

“It's all about the users and how users access certain applications that are either protected by us, or, on the flip side, we are protecting those users [from] accessing those applications,” said Andrew Ossipov, CTO of network, workload, and cloud security at Cisco.

These capabilities extend to deployments in the data center, edge, and private and public clouds, he added.

Cisco's Secure Firewall 3100 series is build around an FPGA and is backed up by a standard x86 CPU. The FPGA provides cryptographic acceleration for IPsec and transport layer security (TLS) connections, reducing the load on the general purpose processor.

“Programmed by the threat protection software, this intermediate component can decrypt and encrypt such flows in hardware without having to rely on the main system bus or consuming precious x86 CPU cycles,” Ossipov explained in a recent blog post. 

The software capabilities are based on Cisco’s latest Secure Firewall Threat Defense platform, released last year, for threat protection, visibility, and VPN acceleration. This allows the firewall to process encrypted data as the default, he explained. “Our new design is to place that encryption/decryption engine straight in line with the traffic and therefore achieve much higher throughput for both VPN as well as the transit encrypted traffic.” 

The firewalls also inherent several performance improvements from Cisco's higher-end appliances, including clustering, which allows multiple firewalls to be combined into a single larger logical firewall, according to Ossipov.

The new firewalls launch alongside a cloud-delivered firewall management dashboard, which allows customers to manage their physical and virtualized firewalls from a single interface, regardless whether they're running on-premises or in the cloud.

“A lot of customers look to realize the operational efficiencies of the cloud-delivered, SaaS management models where they completely offload the management” to a security vendor like Cisco, Ossipov said.

The manage dashboard is slated for release this summer.