SonicWALL Announces Granular Application Intelligence, Control and Real-Time Visualization for Its Next-Generation Firewalls

ORLANDO, Fla., Oct. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- GARTNER SYMPOSIUM / ITxpo -- SonicWALL, Inc. a leading provider of intelligent network security and data protection solutions, today announced SonicOS 5.8 for its Next-Generation Firewall product lines. The new release enhances its existing application intelligence and control capabilities by integrating a real-time application visualization dashboard and analysis tools, enabling IT managers to visualize all application traffic and determine application bandwidth consumption based on real-time information. Administrators can immediately control and allocate resources for critical applications and users to drive productivity, while blocking or controlling inappropriate activities. All controls operate on specific applications rather than trying to rely on generic port or protocols often used by stateful packet inspection firewalls.

Says Greg Young, vice president of research at Gartner: "Firewalls have traditionally been a binary block/allow model. Stateful inspection firewalls can only control ports and IP addresses, so there is no context for what is in that Web session. Intrusion Prevention Systems can spot malware, but application control in Next-Generation Firewalls can limit or control applications such as social media, and with granularity controlling which activities within a social media are allowed, and can allow critical applications get the bandwidth they need. Policies like 'Facebook but no Farmville, and Facebook only uses less than 10% of connections and bandwidth during business hours' are now possible."

SonicWALL Application Intelligence, Control and Visualization utilizes a continuously expanding database consisting of over 3,000 applications and leverages SonicWALL's Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection™ (RFDPI) technology for low latency, high performance deployments. SonicOS 5.8 also offers significant enhancements to its existing Next-Generation Firewall security and malware protection capabilities.  Recognizing the constantly expanding volume, frequency and sophistication of threats, SonicWALL's Next-Generation Firewalls utilize extra-firewall intelligence including the SonicWALL Global Response Intelligent Defense (GRID) Network enabling real-time threat adaptability and mitigation of over 3.7 million and growing threats.

"With SonicOS 5.8, we can for the first time fully visualize application traffic on our network, including bandwidth utilization per user," said Erin Desko, chief technology officer at BGMX Retail Solutions, a provider of PCI-compliant IT services for grocery chains. "The visualization capabilities let us see where we're wasting time and money, while at the same time keeping security front-and-center in our operations."

Additional features of SonicOS 5.8 include:

• Content Filtering Enhancements: Provides administrators more granular, flexible, and powerful content policy including the ability to define heterogeneous application bandwidth management policies that utilize both website categorization and application identification  
• NetFlow/IPFIX (Internet Protocol Flow Information Export): Flexible, extensible, and open flow export protocol that enables any network monitoring solution to leverage SonicWALL's Application Identification and Visualization
• Port Aggregation/Link Redundancy: Combines multiple one-gigabit interfaces enabling visualization and control in multi-gigabit deployments

Watch video "Next Generation Firewalls - Bringing Order to Application Chaos Across and Beyond the Enterprise": http://www.itbriefingcenter.com/programs/gartner_1080_sonicwall.html

For more information please visit www.sonicwall.com.

About SonicWALL, Inc.

Guided by its vision of Dynamic Security for the Global Network, SonicWALL develops advanced intelligent network security and data protection solutions that adapt as organizations evolve and as threats evolve. Trusted by small and large enterprises worldwide, SonicWALL solutions are designed to detect and control applications and protect networks from intrusions and malware attacks through award-winning hardware, software and virtual appliance-based solutions. For more information, visit http://www.sonicwall.com/.

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SOURCE SonicWALL, Inc.