More Firepower: Cisco and Rackspace Deliver Advanced Security for Multi-Cloud Environments

For nearly 20 years, our customers have relied on Rackspace to help drive their digital transformations, from out of the data center and into the cloud, with our IT as a service and multi-cloud solutions. All along the way, security has been a top priority.

That’s why, for most of those years, we have closely collaborated with global hardware and networking giant Cisco, to help us guard against new threat vectors and provide the highest levels of security for our customers’ evolving and expanding IT transformations.

In today’s IT environment, networks are under attack by malware that has reached “unprecedented levels of sophistication and impact,” according Cisco’s recently released Annual Cybersecurity Report. As adversaries increasingly weaponize cloud services, dynamic workloads moving to the cloud are at risk of creating new threat vectors. These vectors can come from the companies’ premises, to the cloud, and to threats coming directly from the internet.

That's why Rackspace offers our customers a range of firewall solutions, now including Cisco Firepower Next Generation Firewalls, the industry’s first fully integrated, threat-focused next-generation firewall. Firepower stops threats, known and unknown, with the industry’s most effective threat protection; provides more insight and control; detects malware earlier and shrinks time-to-detection for faster remediation.

A tried and true collaboration 

Rackspace serves Cisco as a security testing partner, allowing us to provide our customers with the most up-to-date and innovative technologies. Cisco’s firewall technology is directly integrated into our managed services. In fact, we have one of the largest deployments of Cisco firewalls in the world — with over 22,000 Cisco firewalls in place. We also employ an industry-leading level of Cisco security expertise, with roughly 3,000 engineers who have earned more than 800 Cisco certifications (and counting), including Cisco Certified Specialists, Network Associates, Professionals, and Internetwork Experts in Security.

“Rackspace has tested and deployed many of our leading-edge security solutions, from early firewalls to Firepower, and we are grateful for their partnership in our ongoing efforts to make customers’ journey to the cloud a safe one,” said Vice President of Cisco Security Shawn Henry.

At Rackspace, not only are our security solutions industry-leading, but our firewall solutions have unique customer benefits:

• Unlike other managed hosting providers, we offer our customers customization and real-time visibility into their environments’ security through our Firewall Manager control panel in the MyRack portal. Customers can view and make changes to their environments at any time.
• Because we know keeping your network online and secure is critical to your business, we offer HA pairs of Cisco firewalls for an always-on experience — backed by a 100 percent networking uptime guarantee.
• Our firewalls are physically isolated to your environment and not shared with other tenants, making our managed hosting environment a no-brainer for customers in regulated industries, such as healthcare and finance, with HIPAA and PCI compliance requirements.
• Our Cisco firewalls are cloud-ready with our proprietary RackConnect technology. Customers can leverage a RackConnect-enabled Cisco firewall to connect traditional hosted infrastructure to any Rackspace managed cloud. Having a dedicated hardware firewall in front of cloud servers extends their security posture to the Rackspace OpenStack Public Cloud, providing protection for the integrity of their cloud data and helping to safeguard against service interruptions.

At Rackspace, we understand that one of the biggest challenges for your business is protecting your data — let Rackspace provide you with the most up-to-date and innovative security technologies, as your cloud needs evolve.

Learn more about Rackspace’s managed firewall solutions.