Branch firewalls in 2026: Cisco Secure Firewall 200 and SRX400

The small-branch firewall tier changed at both vendors this year. Cisco lists 5 January 2026 as the release date of the Secure Firewall 200 Series, its new entry platform, and HPE Juniper Networking followed on 24 March 2026 at the RSA Conference with the SRX400 Series. Both are aimed at the sites where firewalls are most numerous: shops, clinics, branch offices and remote facilities.

Cisco Secure Firewall 200 Series

The series has two models. According to Cisco's datasheet, updated in October 2026, the Secure Firewall 220 delivers 1.5 Gbps of firewall and application control throughput and 1.5 Gbps with IPS enabled, 1.2 Gbps of IPsec VPN and 0.7 Gbps of TLS decryption, with four 1GbE copper ports, one 1G SFP port, up to 50 VPN peers and passive cooling. The 240P roughly doubles the firewall, IPS and VPN figures, to 3.2 Gbps of firewall and 3 Gbps of IPS and VPN throughput, with eight copper and two SFP ports, 75 VPN peers and four PoE+ ports with a 120 W budget for access points or cameras. Each model is ordered either with Firewall Threat Defense or with ASA software, as separate part numbers. Cisco's September blog post on the series highlighted integrated SD-WAN with zero-touch provisioning and management through Cisco Cloud Control, which the datasheet says can manage up to 1,500 firewalls.

HPE positioned the SRX400 Series as extending the security capabilities of its larger SRX firewalls into smaller and space-constrained sites, with hardware-rooted protections against tampering and support for device integrity, and said availability would begin in the second quarter of 2026. The same announcement added AI governance to HPE's hybrid mesh firewall: identifying AI application use, blocking selected AI websites, inspecting prompts, filtering keywords and controlling file uploads to external AI tools. HPE did not publish throughput figures for the SRX400 at launch, so like-for-like comparison with Cisco's numbers needs the final datasheet.

Both launches follow the same pattern: a compact, quiet box, cloud or central management, and security policy shared with larger firewalls in the data centre. The differences lie in software choice (FTD or ASA on Cisco, Junos on SRX), in management (Cisco Cloud Control or Firewall Management Center versus HPE Security Director) and in licensing.

What it means for buyers

Size branch firewalls on the threat-inspection and TLS-decryption figures, not on the headline firewall number; for the Secure Firewall 220 the TLS figure is less than half the firewall figure. Decide on FTD or ASA before ordering, because the software is fixed by part number. For the SRX400, ask for the published datasheet and the subscription tiers before committing to a rollout. In both cases check that the management platform version supports the new models. InTechnologies can quote Cisco Secure Firewall and Juniper SRX appliances with the relevant subscriptions.