SonicWALL raises bar for Network and Email Security

SonicWALL is redefining the limits of security and scalability by delivering superior protection against emerging threats and enabling broader manageability without compromising performance.

"SonicWALL is committed to developing industry leading, award-winning technology that best meets the needs of our customers that transform the historical tradeoff between network performance and security", said Patrick Sweeney, Vice President, Product Management, SonicWALL. "Today we are announcing innovative features not found elsewhere in the market that make networks faster, more secure and less expensive. These announcements include new firmware for the UTM Firewall line, a major series of enhancements to our email security product line, and a new release of our Global Management System."

Comprehensive Protection and Performance
SonicOS 5.5 for the firewall product line features SonicWALL's new Active/Active UTM, enabling a higher level of redundancy and security by providing full state synchronization for all network flows between both appliances.

Unique to SonicWALL, the implementation is also able to intelligently utilize the secondary appliance's computing power to increase total network throughput, thereby allowing the SonicWALL solution to process more total traffic, deal with traffic spikes and improve overall productivity. In the event of a single unit failure, all of the traffic flow is maintained while the system gracefully transitions traffic to the remaining active appliance.

Utilization of the addition CPU cycles on the secondary active appliance increases throughput for Intrusion Prevention, Gateway Anti-Virus, Anti-Spyware and other security functions by up to 75 percent¹.

Additional enhancements of SonicOS 5.5 include:

• Multi-WAN capability allowing up to 4 WAN interfaces to be configured on any TZ, Network Security Appliance (NSA) and E-Class NSA appliance thereby providing additional Internet redundancy along with outbound load balancing

• Single-Sign-On (SSO) Scalability improvements increasing the number of authenticated users supported by SonicWALL NSA and E-Class NSA appliances

• Route-based VPN allowing administrators to configure and treat VPN tunnels as network interfaces. This configuration then allows route look-ups to determine the available paths to use for VPN traffic

• Solera Networks Deep Forensic Analysis providing logging format changes to support complementary data capture solution

Powerful Anti-Spam and Email Protection Against Increasingly Evolving Threats

SonicWALL Email Security (SES) delivers best in class effectiveness against newly emerging and advancing threats. Spammers have shifted tactics to sophisticated, multi-vector "Spam 2.0" attacks, elevating spam from a mere annoyance to a serious security threat.

Enhanced features to the new SonicWALL SES 7.2, available November 3, 2009, include:

• SonicWALL's enhanced Advanced Reputation Management system leveraging email, Web and network security solutions to block these threats before they enter the network, minimizing bandwidth consumption and improving system performance

• Easy to install and use, SES is available as an appliance, Windows server-software, as a cloud-based solution through SonicWALL partners, or as a hybrid-cloud solution with the Comprehensive Anti-Spam Service on TZ, NSA and E-Class NSA network security appliances

Expanded Multi-appliance Management and Reporting
With Global Management System (GMS) 6.0, SonicWALL extends appliance management beyond Network Security and Secure Remote Access. GMS 6.0 will also encompass Email Security and Continuous Data Protection, thereby enabling enterprises and MSPs to centrally manage an entire distributed SonicWALL security infrastructure.

The new SonicWALL GMS feature and functionality release is scheduled to be available before the end of 2009, and will include:

• Application Firewall reporting for greater visibility into the impact and effectiveness of application utilization on networks allowing IT managers to determine specific policies for application usage and bandwidth consumption across distributed networks

• GMS customers typically use several other enterprise applications to manage their business including professional service automation consoles, network management tools, and accounting and CRM systems. GMS 6.0 includes a new web services Application Programming Interface (API) that facilitates integration between GMS and other enterprise applications allowing for the exchange of critical data and increasing the productivity of the internal IT staff and the efficiency of the overall business.

• Using customer reports for both SMB and Aventail Secure Remote Access devices, GMS customers can now create granular reports on who accessed what applications over remote SSL VPN connections and at what time for forensic analysis, troubleshooting and ensuring compliance with data privacy mandates. Data from these reports can be used to increases employee productivity and network uptime.