Engagement story
- Customer
- Global payments technology company
- Industry
- Payments technology
- Technologies
- Cisco Secure Firewall Threat Defense (FTD) · Cisco Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) · Cisco dCloud · Cisco Talos security intelligence · REST API · Ansible
The problem
A global payments technology company was evaluating Cisco Secure Firewall ahead of a Customer Proof of Concept at a Cisco lab facility. The CPOC ran a week and spanned cloud security, data center fabric, FTD integration, and workload segmentation. That week was the evaluation. Anything the team did not reach inside it would go untested.
One constraint shaped every hour of the program. The customer's security engineers are experienced firewall operators, and their depth was built on another vendor's platform. Every concept they needed already existed in their heads under a different name. What the program had to close was the translation gap.
Underneath sat the risk nobody puts on the agenda. A team learning terminology in the lab spends its evaluation hours on mechanics. The use cases that decide a purchase, the ones tied to how the business actually runs payments infrastructure, get whatever time is left over.
How BTA delivered
BTA ran this as an enablement engagement. The goal was a team that could drive the platform themselves from hour one of the CPOC.
BTA built the program around one move: meet the team where they already are. Before teaching anything new, BTA mapped the vocabulary, objects, and policy constructs the engineers used every day to their Cisco Secure Firewall equivalents, side by side. That mapping anchored all four days and is what let the program move at the pace it did.
Day 1 covered FTD architecture, platform options, and a full packet flow walkthrough, anchored by the side-by-side nomenclature mapping.
Day 2 covered policy frameworks, IPS profiles, and Cisco Talos security intelligence, then moved into hands-on Cisco dCloud labs with each engineer in their own environment.
Day 3 went deeper in the labs: interface configuration, NAT, access control, file and malware policy, dynamic objects, and connectors.
Day 4 took the operational view: upgrade procedures, HA management, and a REST API and Ansible automation overview, including a real firewall deployment built entirely through the API.
Lab environments stayed available for self-paced work after hours and through the weekend, so any engineer could repeat what had not landed the first time.
BTA ran this on the S.I.M.P.L.E. methodology: Start, Immerse, Map, Prove, Launch, Evolve. Map is where the platform translation happened, and it is why Immerse moved as fast as it did. Evolve is where handoff gets enforced. On an enablement engagement, handoff is the entire deliverable.
Outcomes in production
The customer confirmed the training built the platform familiarity the team needed. They walked into the CPOC ready to test use cases against their own requirements.
Engagement held across all four days. The dCloud labs stayed open for self-paced work through the weekend. The Day 4 automation session drew the strongest response of the week and opened a live conversation about running firewall operations through the API rather than the console.
The CPOC stopped being a platform tutorial. It became a week of testing Cisco Secure Firewall against the way the business runs payments infrastructure.
The engagement also mapped what comes next: data center fabric integration, security policy automation advisory, and workload segmentation, each scoped to follow the CPOC.
BTA architects, deploys, and hands off. Day-2 belongs to the customer's team, which only works when that team can operate what they own. Four days of enablement is that model at small scale. It changed what a week of evaluation was worth.