When SonicWALL was acquired by Dell back in 2012, many wondered how SonicWALL would fare under the auspices of industry giant Dell. That said, SonicWALL managed to maintain market share in its core SMB business sector, and start making inroads in to the large, distributed enterprise sector. Nonetheless, when Dell decided to sell off its software assets, along with SonicWALL to private equity firms, many began to wonder once again what that meant for SonicWALL.
SonicWALL provided the answers to those queries at the company’s PEAK 2016 event, which was held last week in Las Vegas. The primary topics of discussion focused on applying SonicWALL technology and what the future holds for SonicWall, its partners and customers.
Along with the requisite product announcements, SonicWALL also hosted several educational sessions bringing cloud security to the forefront of partners’ minds, as well as the challenges created by the ever growing IoT infrastructure spreading through enterprises today.
SonicWALL offered a strong message that there is life after Dell, and that the company will thrive and grow despite the forced separation from Dell. For example, SonicWALL is in the process of strengthening the company’s channel programs to better support both its partners and end customers. What’s more, the company also announced its Cloud GMS offering, which is aimed at simplifying management, enhancing reporting, and reducing overhead. What’s more, Cloud GMS brings cloud based management, patching and updating to the company’s army of partners, providing them with a critical weapon in the battle against hosted security vendors, and those plying “firewalls in the cloud” as a means to an end.
The importance of the forthcoming Cloud Global Management System (GMS) cannot be understated. SonicWALL aims to eliminate the financial, technical support and system maintenance hurdles that are normally associated with traditional firewalls, transforming what was once an isolated security solution into a cloud managed security platform. A capability that will prove important to both customers and partners.
For partners, Cloud GMS brings a unique, comprehensive, low cost monthly subscription to the table, which is prices out based upon the number of firewalls under management. That ideology will allow partners to become something akin to a hosted services security provider, shifting customer expenses to OpEx, instead of CapEx.
SonicWALL Cloud GMS solution Offers:
- Governance: Establishes a cohesive approach to security management, reporting and analytics to simplify and unify network security defense programs through automated and correlated workflows to form a fully coordinated security governance, compliance and risk management strategy.
- Compliance: Rapidly responds and fulfills specific compliance regulations for regulatory bodies and auditors with automatic PCI, HIPAA and SOX reports, customized by any combination of auditable data.
- Risk Management: Provides ability to move fast and drive collaboration and communication across shared security framework, making quick security policy decisions based on time-critical and consolidated information for higher level security efficacy.
- Firewall management: MSPs will be able to leverage efficient, centralized management of firewall security policies similar to on-premises GMS features, including customer sub-account creation and increased control of user type and access privilege settings.
- Firewall reporting: Real-time and historical, per firewall, and aggregated reporting of firewall security, data and user events will give MSPs greater visibility, control and governance while maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of customer data.
- Licensing management: Seamless integration between GMS and MySonicWALL interfaces will allow users to easily and simply log into Hosted GMS to organize user group names and memberships, device group names and memberships, as well as adding and renewing subscriptions and support.
