SonicWall Delivers More Speed, Security Across Entire Portfolio

New SonicWall NSA 2650 Firewall, and SonicWave Access Points Take Security, Speed and Analytics to Elite Levels

Defending your business is job No. 1. But with so many vectors and end points, it’s an arduous challenge to identify and mitigate known and unknown threats across multiple locations, networks and endpoints — particularly as the need for wireless and mobile access scales to untold heights.

It’s this amalgamation of technology that makes SonicWall’s latest announcement so intriguing. It’s not another product. It’s not just a new service. It’s not only a refined dashboard and interface.

The innovation here is keenly focused on integrating each of these advanced “ingredients” into a powerful platform that helps businesses automate real-time breach detection and prevention while exceeding speed and performance expectations.

An ‘Absolutely Superb’ Firewall

If you missed the announcement, “SonicWall Turbocharges Innovation with Unprecedented Delivery of New Wireless, Mobile and Wired Network Security Products,” this platform approach is central to how SonicWall proactively defends its end customers.

In fact, we allowed customers to beta test the new products in real-world situations. The feedback was resounding, particularly for the new SonicWall NSA 2650 firewall and our range of new SonicWall SonicWave access points, which deliver elite speeds via the 802.11ac Wave 2 standard.

“The new NSA 2650 is an absolutely superb product,” said Dr. Michael Breen, Dean of Arts at Mary Immaculate College. “In my opinion, the speed and level of security is unparalleled in its class. It gives us the throughput to conduct deep packet inspection (DPI) of encrypted traffic without costing us any loss of performance.”

The NSA 2650 firewall enables threat prevention over 2.5 gigabit Ethernet wired and 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless networks, supports twice the number of DPI connections and offers 12,000 DPI SSL connections, an increase of 12X.

“Protecting sensitive information and preventing security breaches is paramount,” said Breen. “Our network contains highly private student information and we must conform to EU GDPR (European Union General Data Protection Regulation) protocols. We see over a thousand suspect probes at our gateway every week from eastern Europe. We need to lock down access to only authorized users. We’re also concerned with threats hidden in an increasingly high proportion of encrypted traffic.”

SonicOS Goes Modern

There’s nothing like a fresh UI. Our teams have worked tirelessly to re-envision everything about our popular operating system, SonicOS. Featuring more than 50 improvements and enhancements — not to mention a modern look and feel — SonicOS 6.5 is the biggest customer-driven release in company history.

“SonicWall products have always been very good, but the new SonicOS 6.5 is a giant 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 most apparent change you’ll notice is the slimmed navigation, which now places emphasis on three of the most important functionalities: Monitor, Investigate and Manage.

“The biggest thing you’ll notice is that we’ve moved the navigation around,” said SonicWall senior UX and product design lead Tara Kelly. “We’ve done this to separate all the tasks that you need to do in three macro categories. This takes what used to be a giant menu on the left-hand side and breaks them down into smaller, bite-sized tasks.”

SonicOS offers all the standard features and capabilities you’d expect in easy, convenient locations. This includes everything from logs, reports and tools to upgrades, connectivity breakouts, systems setups and security configurations.

We will have more on SonicOS 6.5 in the future, including detailed overviews and walkthroughs.

Real-Time Analytics for Firewalls & Access Points

Each and every administrator, architect, analyst and cyber security pro wants to make better decisions faster. We want to be confident, smarter and decisive. Unfortunately, we don’t always have actionable data when we need it. In many cases, we have too much data that’s unorganized and unusable.

The new SonicWall Cloud Analytics application will help solve this everyday challenge. The intelligence-drive engine features real-time data presented in a structured, meaningful, actionable and easily consumable manner. You’ll be able to monitor, record, analyze and report security data for deep forensic analysis across multiple SonicWall firewalls and SonicWave wireless access points.

Our goal is to truly empower security teams, analysts, auditors, boards, C-suites and stakeholders to discover, interpret, prioritize and take appropriate defensive actions against both known and unknown cyberattacks or threats. Smarter decisions faster.

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 behavior and activities.

SonicWall SonicWave Is New Standard for Wireless Speed

As the number of applications and data-heavy services grow, so do speed demands. Based on the high-performance Wave 2 802.11ac standard, the new SonicWave access points couple speed, reliability, range, consistency and security into a single, cost-effective appliance.

Wave 2 represents the evolution from the Wave 1 802.11ac standard, which is fairly common in both enterprise and consumer environments. It operates on the 5 Ghz band and can deliver speeds up to 1.3 Gbps.

In contrast, Wave 2 supports multiple users, multiple inputs and multiple outputs (MU-MIMO) and is able to deliver speeds that exceed 3 Gbps. For this reason, the new SonicWave access points feature 4×4 MU-MIMO technology for best-in-class Wi-Fi performance, range and reliability.

“The new SonicWave access points blew me away,” says Spencomp Solutions security specialist Dominic Valois. “The new SonicWave line presents us with a great offering for our customers. With Wave 2 support and 2.5 GbE ports, we can provide larger business sites and campuses with better streaming and bandwidth for hundreds of wireless devices.”

The sentiment from Valois was echoed by Greg Thomas, the owner of ComLogic, a SonicWall partner based in Denver, Colo.

“The 2.5 GbE ports on both the NSA 2650 and SonicWave access points can handle the increasing congestion,” said Thomas. “You can easily position the SonicWave access points for best cellular reception, either for failover or percentage of use.”

Protecting the Mobile 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.

This truth was the precipitous behind the new SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 12.1, which helps enable access to business-critical internal and external apps for employees and partners.

For remote users, vendors and third-party contractors, SMA 12.1 provides policy- enforced secure access to email, file servers and corporate applications using federated single sign-on (SSO) to both cloud and on-premise resources from authenticated devices.

In addition to SSL encryption of sensitive user sessions, SMA provides an additional layer of security by scanning all remote file uploads with the SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) service. This helps ensure remote users have the same level of protection from zero-day threats when they are on the road as they have in the office.

Go Faster, Go Safer

If you’d like to learn more about the new security products and services that deliver unprecedented speed and security, please explore the dedicated product pages and resources:

Ready to make the jump to one of the new products or services? SonicWall is ready to help. If you don’t have a SonicWall partner, or are unsure, please contact SonicWall directly. We always welcome new members to the SonicWall family.