In the spectrum of network firewalls, not only is blocking threats imperative to protecting your network, but network management, bandwidth and advanced applications all determine which network security solution best handles business processes. The Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) from Cisco lives up to those expectations well enough to take home the silver in network firewalls.

In the two most heavily weighted evaluation criteria, "Application-layer/protocol/HTTP controls" and "Ability to block intrusions, attacks and unauthorized network traffic," 80% of Product Leadership survey respondents rated the ASA good or excellent.

The Cisco ASA will completely replace the Cisco PIX firewall, which will be discontinued as of January 27, 2009. The ASA builds on PIX security technology with the addition of a CSC-SSM card to provide intrusion prevention capable of real-time content filtering and stronger unified threat management (UTM).

Although some users mentioned that they are "still implementing these to replace [their] PIXes," a consensus reveals that the conversion is worth the effort. One respondent commented: "It is a new deployment, upgrading from existing PIX, [but] it appears to be doing the job."

Many users praised Cisco's ASA as a "good product" and "great tool." Another user found the ASA to have a "very fine-tuned configuration."