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Organizations embrace the public cloud for the agility, scalability, and reliability it offers when running applications. But just as organizations need these capabilities to ensure their applications operate where needed and as needed, they also require their security does the same. Organizations may introduce multiple individual firewalls into their AWS infrastructure to produce this outcome. In theory, this may be a good decision, but in practice—this could lead to asymmetric routing issues. Complex SNAT configuration can mitigate asymmetric routing issues, but this isn’t practical for sustaining public cloud operations. Organizations are looking out for their long-term cloud strategies by ruling out SNAT and are calling for a more reliable and scalable solution for connecting their applications and security for always-on protection.
To solve these challenges, Cisco created stateful firewall clustering with Secure Firewall in AWS.
Firewall clustering for Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual provides a highly resilient and reliable architecture for securing your AWS cloud environment. This capability lets you group multiple Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual appliances together as a single logical device, known as a “cluster.”
A cluster provides all the conveniences of a single device (management and integration into a network) while taking advantage of the increased throughput and redundancy you would expect from deploying multiple devices individually. Cisco uses Cluster Control Link (CCL) for forwarding asymmetric traffic across devices in the cluster. Clusters can go up to 16 members, and we use VxLAN for CCL.
In this case, clustering has the following roles:
The above diagram explains traffic flow between the client and the server with the insertion of the firewall cluster in the network. Below defines the roles of clustering and how packet flow interacts at each step.
Owner: The Owner is the node in the cluster that initially receives the connection.
Backup Owner: The node that stores TCP/UDP state information received from the Owner so that the connection can be seamlessly transferred to a new owner in case of failure.
Director: The Director is the node in the cluster that handles owner lookup requests from the Forwarder(s).
Forwarder: The Forwarder is a node in the cluster that redirects packets to the Owner.
Fragment Owner: For fragmented packets, cluster nodes that receive a fragment determine a Fragment Owner using a hash of the fragment source IP address, destination IP address, and the packet ID. All fragments are then redirected to the Fragment Owner over Cluster Control Link.
Cisco brought support for AWS Gateway Load Balancer (Figure 2). This feature enables organizations to scale their firewall presence as needed to meet demand (see details here).
Building off the previous figure, organizations can take advantage of the AWS Gateway Load Balancer with Secure Firewall’s clustering capability to evenly distribute traffic at the Secure Firewall cluster. This enables organizations to maximize the benefits of clustering capabilities including increased throughput and redundancy. Figure 3 shows how positioning a Secure Firewall cluster behind the AWS Gateway Load Balancer creates a resilient architecture. Let’s take a closer look at what is going on in the diagram.
Figure 3 shows an Internet user looking to access a workload. Before the user can access the workload, the user’s traffic is routed to Firewall Node 2 for inspection. The traffic flow for this example includes:
User -> IGW -> GWLBe -> GWLB -> Secure Firewall (2) -> GLWB -> GWLBe -> Workload
In the event of failure, the AWS Gateway Load Balancer cuts off existing connections to the failed node, making the above solution non-stateful.
Recently, AWS announced a new feature for their load balancers known as Target Failover for Existing Flows. This feature enables forwarding of existing connections to another target in the event of failure.
Cisco is an early adaptor of this feature and has combined Target Failover for Existing Flows with Secure Firewall clustering capabilities to create the industry’s first stateful cluster in AWS.
Figure 4 shows a firewall failure event and how the AWS Gateway Load Balancer uses the Target Failover for Existing Flows feature to switch the traffic flow from Firewall Node 2 to Firewall Node 3. The traffic flow for this example includes:
User -> IGW -> GWLBe -> GWLB -> Secure Firewall (3) -> GLWB -> GWLBe -> Workload
Organizations need reliable and scalable security to protect always-on applications in their AWS cloud environment. With stateful firewall clustering capabilities from Cisco, organizations can protect their applications while maintaining cloud benefits such as agility, scalability, and reliability.
Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual is available in the AWS marketplace, providing features like firewalling, application visibility & control, IPS, URL filtering, and malware defense. Cisco offers flexible options for firewall licensing, such as pay-as-you-go (PAYG) and bring-your-own-license (BYOL). To learn more about how Cisco Secure Firewall clustering capabilities can help protect your AWS applications, see our additional resources, check out our 30-day free trial, or speak to your Cisco sales representative.
Cisco Secure Firewall Clustering in the Cloud
Introducing AWS Gateway Load Balancer Target Failover for Existing Flows
Secure Firewall for Public Cloud webpage
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The release of Microsoft Azure Gateway Load Balancer is great news for customers, empowering them to simply and easily add Cisco Secure Firewall capabilities to their Azure cloud infrastructure. By combining Azure Gateway Load Balancer with Cisco Secure Firewall, organizations can quickly scale their firewall presence across their Azure cloud environment, providing protection for infrastructure and applications exactly where and when they need it.
With applications and resources hyper-distributed across hybrid-multicloud environments, organizations require agile security to protect their environment at each control point. This integration empowers organizations to dynamically insert Cisco’s security controls and threat defense capabilities in their Azure environment, removing the clunkiness of provisioning and deploying firewalls, as well as the need to rearchitect the network. Organizations can now enjoy highly available threat defense on the fly, protecting their infrastructure and applications from known and unknown threats.
Combining Secure Firewall with Azure Gateway Load Balancer offers a significant reduction in operational complexity when securing cloud infrastructure. Azure Gateway Load Balancer provides bump-in-the-wire functionality ensuring Internet traffic to and from an Azure VM, such as an application server, is inspected by Secure Firewall without requiring any routing changes. It also offers a single entry and exit point at the firewall and allows organizations to maintain visibility of the source IP address. Complementing these features, organizations can take advantage of our new Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center. It enables organizations to manage their firewall presence 100% through the cloud with the same look and feel as they’ve grown accustomed to with Firewall Management Center. With Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center, organizations will achieve faster time-to-value with simplified firewall deployment and management.
Azure Gateway Load Balancer support for Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual is available now. To learn more about how Cisco Secure Firewall drives security resilience across your hybrid-multicloud environment, see the additional resources below and reach out to your Cisco sales representative.
Microsoft Blog: Gateway Load Balancer now generally available in all regions
Azure Marketplace listing: Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense Virtual
Cisco Secure Firewall At-a-Glance
Cisco Secure Firewall for Public Cloud
Cloud-delivered Firewall Management Center
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We’ve all seen the headlines like “race to the cloud” and “cloud-first.” These articles and publications are true, more and more customers have adopted cloud strategies, but there is more to the story. In these customer conversations, cloud security and network security are often discussed in unison. Why is that?
Customers desire freedom and choice when establishing resilience across every aspect of their business, and this requires both the ability to remain agile, and maintain control of their organization’s most sensitive data. Neither of these can be achieved with just the cloud, or private data center. Organizations are investing in hybrid-multicloud environments to ensure continuity amidst unpredictable threats and change. But these investments will fall short if they do not include security.
The modern enterprise relies on the network more than ever before, and it looks a lot different than it did 10 years ago. According to our 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report, where 2,500 global IT leaders were interviewed across 13 countries, 82% said they have adopted hybrid cloud architectures, and 47% of organizations use between two and three public IaaS clouds1. As organizations have grown more dependent on the network, the more complex it has become, making firewall capabilities the most critical element of the hybrid-multicloud security strategy. And Cisco has a firewall capability for every strategy, protecting your most important assets no matter where you choose to deploy it.
In May, Cisco brought offerings from Umbrella and Duo to the AWS Marketplace. Today at AWS Re:Inforce, Cisco Secure announced furthering its partnership with AWS to drive innovation with the goal to protect the integrity of your business. Validating our commitment to hybrid-multicloud security, Cisco has received the AWS Security Competency Partner designation for Network and Infrastructure Security. This designation was awarded through our demonstrated success with customer engagements and rigorous technical validations of Secure Firewall.
This week at AWS Re:Inforce, customers can stop by our booth to see our latest firewall innovation. Cisco Secure Firewall as-a-service on AWS builds on our existing portfolio, giving organizations greater flexibility and choice with a radically simplified SaaS offering. If organizations are truly to embrace security across the multi-environment IT, customers demand simplification without compromising security. With a SaaS-based form factor, management and deployment complexity is reduced. NetOps and SecOps teams will enjoy a simplified security architecture where provisioning of firewalls and control plane infrastructure are managed by Cisco. This will save your teams time by removing the need to rearchitect the network, freeing them to focus on protecting the integrity of your business.
As organizations continue to move more of their day-to-day operations to the cloud, Cisco and AWS are committed to ensure that security is an integral part of their hybrid multi-cloud strategy. We all have seen the impact of security that is bolted on, or too complex. If we are truly to find that balance between agility and protection to ensure business continuity, we need to ensure the same protections we have in the private infrastructure are easily consumed no matter where your data may roam.
Product page: Cisco Secure Firewall for Public Cloud
Partner page: Cisco solutions on AWS
Blog: Securing cloud is everyone’s responsibility
Quick Start page: Cisco solutions on AWS
Amazon Partner Network page: Cisco solutions on AWS
2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report
1 Henderson, N. & Hanselman, E. (2022, May 25). 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends Report.
S&P Global Market Intelligence, commissioned by Cisco Systems.
https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/hybrid-cloud/2022-trends.html ‘
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