Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) Processes. 1) Service Request Management Focuses on requests and responses for the IT help-desk items. The processes should be established and uniform. To reduce the workload on agents, organization may consider implementing self service options or chat-bots. 2) Service Catalogs Generally Service Catalogs is a central location/webpage with all the details for contacting the help-desk. It may also contain the self service options and solutions for common problems/issues. 3) Knowledge,Policy and Procedures. This is the knowledge base which controls the collection, maintenance and distribution of information sharing throughout the organization. It shall include the policies, standards, guidelines and the operating procedures for each process or tasks. 4) Incident Management. Defines process on how to handle a situation when an incident happens and how to fix the situation in an accelerated and organized manner. The objective is to reduce t
Cisco's firewall road-map has been interesting. They started with PIX and advanced the market with ASA. After acquiring SourceFire, they came up with Firepower services. Firepower services on ASA was offering a lot of security features and has helped to fill the feature gaps within ASA, but it was running as two separate instances. That is ASA and Firepower.
Cisco has came up with Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) ,which is a unified image of ASA and Firepower. It is designed to do what ASA and what Firepower can ,together with unified management. Cisco FTD is capable of offering traditional ASA services plus NGIPS features, URL Filtering ,Application visibility and control (AVC), Advance Malware Protection, ISE Integration, SSL Decryption ,Captive Portal ,Multi-Domain Management etc.
Cisco might put all its focus on FTD and eventually the traditional ASA OS might get retired. You can find more details about FTD and firepower services below.