About This Solution

Today’s enterprise IT requires more than traditional security. Legacy solutions can’t protect next-gen data centers, campus, branch, or IoT networks. Cisco’s Hybrid Mesh Firewall delivers AI-ready, pervasive firewalling—integrated across switches, clouds, containers, and workloads for dynamic threat protection. As infrastructures evolve for AI, Cisco’s solution weaves protection into every layer, with unified cloud management, flexible licensing, and zero trust segmentation. It empowers modernization while ensuring security. Cisco Secure Firewall, part of the Hybrid Mesh Firewall solution, provides advanced threat protection and operational excellence across all environments. Its advanced AI and machine learning enable smarter threat detection, while AIOps and real-time malware lookups simplify management and performance.

About this Lab

This lab covers the key tasks required to bring a newly installed FMC and FTD to an operational state. It is intended to walk the user through the various tasks required to ensure you have a functional and secure firewall. There are a number of scenarios available which are outlined below. Users should start at the beginning which will take you through initial setup of the FMC, device registration, zone and interface setup, routing and NAT policies. You can then proceed to configuring threat protection such as Discovery policy, Intrusion policy using Snort 3, Malware & File policy, Security Intelligence, Decryption policy and finally Access Control rules and advanced settings. To accomplish these labs, we will use the dCloud lab environment. There are a number of VMs deployed including Firewall Management Center FMC, FTD devices, as well as Windows Domain Controllers and other Windows and Linux hosts.

Lab Scenarios 

• Initial Configuration
  • FMC configuration
  • Network Object creation and Variable Set
  • Security Zones
  • Basic Access Control
  • Device registration
  • Platform settings
• Network Configuration
  • Interface, Routes and NAT Threat Configuration
  • Network Discovery policy
  • Malware & File policy
  • Decryption policy
  • Intrusion/Network Analysis policy
  • Access Control Access Control Policy Settings
  • Rules
  • Encrypted Visibility Engine