“In a modern, hyper-connected world, there are no compromises,” said SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. “Our customers, and their end users, expect the best in real-time security, performance and analytics — regardless of network, device or physical location. This automated, real-time breach detection and prevention platform ensures organisations can build smart, consistent and sound security postures while meeting the speed, performance and cost-of-ownership demands of today’s businesses and their users.”
The platform enhancements include more than 50 new SonicOS features, a new high-performance firewall, a series of new 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless access points, an intuitive cloud analytics application and advanced secure federated single sign-on (SSO) capabilities.
“It’s imperative that any well-meaning, responsible organisation take appropriate action to safeguard their networks, customer data and business as a whole,” said Jeff Wilson, senior research director for IHS Markit, a global information provider. “The threat landscape moves far too fast to rely on static solutions. More emphasis should be placed on real-time threat mitigation across wired and wireless networks. Companies of all sizes need to consider TLS/SSL decryption and inspection solutions as well, now that the majority of common internet traffic is encrypted by default.”
SonicOS 6.5 Boasts Modern Interface, Threat Intelligence API Capabilities for Security Automation
With more than 50 new features, SonicOS 6.5 is the biggest customer-driven release in SonicWall history. Highlighted by a modern, intuitive interface, SonicOS offers advanced networking and connectivity capabilities to optimise system availability, while scaling firewall performance to deliver uncompromised, uninterrupted threat protection for all connected networks.
“SonicWall products have always been very good, but the new SonicOS 6.5 is a huge step forward,” said Greg Thomas, owner of ComLogic, a SonicWall partner. “SonicWall is clearly visionary, not just in protection, but in analytics and usability as well. The new UI is fresh, relevant and easy to use.”
The operating system includes improved threat API capabilities to help businesses build automated security platforms that can leverage third-party threat intelligence feeds.
SonicOS 6.5 also features a suite of wireless features that enables security and connectivity for mobile users. Multi-domain authentication support also provides a simple and fast way to manage and enforce security policies across an entire organisation.
New Multi-Gigabit Firewall Boosts Speeds, Adds Real-Time Security on Wired and 802.11ac Wave 2 Networks
Core to the platform expansion, SonicWall is unveiling the new SonicWall Network Security Appliance (NSA) 2650 firewall, which delivers automated, real-time breach detection and prevention, as well as TLS/SSL decryption and inspection, over multi-gigabit wired and Wave 2 wireless networks.
The NSA 2650 appliance is the first branch and campus firewall to support both multi-engine sandboxing via the Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) service and full deep packet inspection of TLS/SSL-encrypted traffic for 2.5G wired and 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless networks.
With eight 2.5G Ethernet interfaces and 20 total ports, the NSA 2650 matches network throughput between multi-gigabit wired and 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless networks. Compared with the previous-generation NSA 2600 appliance, the NSA 2650 supports twice the number of DPI connections and offers 12,000 DPI SSL connections, an increase of 12X.
“One of our customers’ biggest challenges is ransomware, which is often sent around the internet using encryption,” said Spencomp Solutions security specialist Dominic Valois. “The NSA 2650, with high-speed TLS/SSL inspection, and the SonicWall Capture service, give them a whole lot more security from their firewall.”
To complement the NSA 2650 appliance, the new SonicWave series of access points meets the 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless standard, which features 4x4 MU-MIMO technology for best-in-class Wi-Fi performance, range and reliability.
“The new SonicWave access points give us throughput that matches our wired network,” said Dr. Michael Breen, Dean of Arts, Mary Immaculate College. “Whether someone is on a handheld device or directly wired to the network, the service is indistinguishable. Signal reception is consistently strong over a one-and-a-half-acre site.”
Centralised Firewall Security Analytics via the Cloud
Leveraging a powerful intelligence-driven engine, SonicWall Cloud Analytics is a new cloud application that is delivered as a service to customers and partners. It provides deep real-time visibility, insight and alerting for network traffic, user behaviour and device activity from a centralised dashboard.
SonicWall Cloud Analytics empowers organisations to monitor, record, analyse and report security data for deep forensic analysis across multiple SonicWall firewalls and SonicWave wireless access points.
An extension of the recently introduced SonicWall Cloud Global Management System (GMS), SonicWall Cloud Analytics provides extensive drill-down investigative and forensic capabilities for deep security data analysis, including traffic, applications, threats, and user behaviour and activities.
SonicWall Cloud Analytics — featuring real-time data presented in a structured, meaningful, actionable and easily consumable manner — enables security teams, analysts, auditors, boards, C-suites and stakeholders to discover, interpret, prioritise and take appropriate defensive actions against both known and unknown cyberattacks or threats.
Extend Speed, Security to Remote Workforce
When employees are on the road, they require secure access to the same systems and applications they trust when on Wi-Fi or wired networks in the office. Not only must access be available anywhere, anytime and on any device, speed and security cannot be compromised.
To extend SonicWall security from wired and wireless networks to remote users, SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 12.1 provides secure, policy-enforced access to email, file servers and corporate applications using federated SSO to both cloud and on premise resources from authorised devices.
To defend corporations and security-conscious organisations against advanced cyber-attacks, SMA now scans all file uploads with the SonicWall Capture ATP service, a cloud-based, multi-engine sandbox designed to discover and stop unknown, zero-day attacks, such as ransomware. This real-time sandbox approach ensures users have the same level of protection from zero-day threats when they are on the road as they have in the office.
