An end-to-end firewall platform migration across a large-scale electronics retail chain, delivering PCI-DSS compliance and centralized policy management.
An end-to-end firewall platform migration for a large-scale electronics retail chain, replacing a distributed legacy pfSense deployment with Cisco Firepower 4100 series appliances managed through Firepower Management Center. Scope covered restructuring and migration of all security policies, remote access VPN, Active Directory integration, NAT rules, and global network objects across the enterprise.
Rapid business growth had outpaced the original pfSense deployment. While sufficient for a smaller operation, it could no longer meet enterprise-grade scaling and security demands.
Policy changes had to be applied manually at each site, resulting in no centralized change control or definitive audit trail.
The existing OpenVPN setup lacked deep Active Directory integration beyond basic RADIUS, and could not support group-based policies, MFA enforcement, or endpoint posture checks.
Zero IPS or IDS capability. Traffic was filtered purely on Layer 3 and Layer 4 port rules, leaving no application-layer visibility.
Years of undocumented adjustments left NAT rules and firewall policies deeply cluttered, with thousands of redundant IP and port entries and no object reuse.
Processing card payments across all retail locations requires PCI-DSS adherence, and the legacy platform could not provide the segmentation or auditing logs needed to pass.
Cisco Firepower 4100 series appliances running Firepower Threat Defense, unified under Firepower Management Center.
Firepower 4115 appliances at headquarters and distribution centers for high-throughput deep-packet inspection with IPS enabled, and 4110 appliances at regional hubs. All critical locations built with high-availability active/standby pairs.
A single FMC instance manages all appliances across the organization, providing comprehensive audit logging of every policy change, deployment action, and administrative maneuver. Host objects, network groups, port groups, URL categories, and geolocation objects are now defined once and reused globally.
An exhaustive audit of the existing ruleset identified and eliminated redundant, shadowed, and expired rules, producing a significantly leaner configuration. Legacy IP and port aliases became named, reusable objects. The flat pfSense layout was replaced with access control policy structured by zone pairs, and Layer 7 application visibility shifted the perimeter from port-based security to application-aware rules.
All outbound NAT, 1:1 NAT, and port-forwarding configurations were audited and translated into the FTD NAT policy structure, using manual NAT for static mappings and auto-NAT for standard PAT overload. Because FTD processes manual NAT before auto-NAT, rule ordering was sequenced to mirror original production behaviour exactly.
OpenVPN was retired in favour of Cisco AnyConnect over SSL and IKEv2. Active Directory integrates via LDAPS, pulling user authentication and group membership in real time. AD security groups map to distinct AnyConnect Connection Profiles, each with its own IP pool, split-tunnel policy, and access permissions. MFA is enforced via RADIUS using Duo, and endpoint posture assessment automatically isolates non-compliant devices into a restricted quarantine group.
A Cisco Talos-backed IPS policy applies to all internet-facing traffic, using a balanced security and connectivity baseline fine-tuned to suppress false positives specific to retail point-of-sale and inventory systems. SSL decryption was selectively introduced for unknown or uncategorized HTTPS traffic while bypassing encrypted financial and healthcare destinations.
Appliances were staged and fully configured in parallel with production, leaving pfSense untouched until go-live. The AnyConnect infrastructure was validated with a pilot group of IT staff two weeks ahead of enterprise cutover. Cutovers ran site by site during off-hours maintenance windows, with a definitive rollback path maintained at each site for 48 hours.
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