SonicWall announced a series of technology previews on Feb. 1 that expand the cyber-security vendor’s product portfolio.
Among the new products that are being made available as beta releases is the SonicWall Networks Security (NSv) firewall for virtualized environments. There is also a beta of the SonicWall Web Application Firewall (WAF) and a preview of the the company’s new endpoint technology called the SonicWall Capture Client.
The Capture Client offering, benefits from a partnership with endpoint protection vendor SentinelOne, that was first announced in September 2017.
The SonicWall Capture Client integrates the SentinelOne engine to provide continuous behavior monitoring and advanced threat protection capabilities. The new product is an evolution of an anti-virus (AV) client technology that SonicWall has offered for a decade.
“In addition to an enforced endpoint AV client, we also incorporate other SonicWall developed capabilities as part of the solution, such as SSL certificate deployment to enable inspection of an organizations SSL encrypted traffic,” John Gordineer, Director, Product Marketing at SonicWall told eWEEK. “We also have a roadmap to develop additional client capabilities in the future.”
Information from the Capture Client can be integrated and aggregated into a management dashboard that provides enterprise-wide visibility. Dmitriy Ayrapetov, Executive Director, Product Management at SonicWall explained that the Capture Client will be managed through a cloud-based dashboard for policy management and reporting across both network and endpoint security technologies.
Firewalls
As part of the new product rollout, SonicWall is also introducing a beta release of its NSv virtual firewall technology. Gordineer explained that the SonicWall NSv virtual firewall is built on top of the same operating system as SonicWall’s physical firewalls.
“In fact, one of the selling points is that with a single management experience, an administrator can manage both physical and virtual firewalls,” Gordineer said.
The NSv technology will initially be available for VMware ESXi based virtual environments. Ayrapetov said that the plan is to quickly expand the NSv platform to other hypervisors and public cloud infrastructure, such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Hyper-V, Xen and Google Compute. While NSv will expand to multiple virtual machine hypervisor technologies, it’s not headed to Docker containers deployments.
“The virtual firewall is not a container,” Ayrapetov said.
In addition to the virtual firewall, SonicWall is also previewing its Web Application Firewall (WAF). A traditional network firewall is able to filter and protect network layer traffic from potential risks. In contrast, a WAF looks at the application layer to help protect against application attacks and vulnerabilities. While the standalone WAF product is new, SonicWall already had WAF capabilities within its portfolio. Ayrapetov said that SonicWall has had WAF functionality for about six years as part of another subscription service product. SonicWall has now decided to break out the WAF capabilities as a standalone technology for customers and partners.
“The technology for the new SonicWall web application firewall is based on our own in-house implementation of web security protection,” Ayrapetov said.
General availability of the SonicWall Capture Client, NSv and WAF offerings is currently scheduled for the second quarter of 2018.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at eWEEK and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.