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Network infrastructure company SonicWall announced updates to its network and e-mail security solutions with the release of SonicOS 5.5 for Unified Threat Management, Email Security 7.2 and Global Management System 6.0. SonicOS 5.5 for the firewall product line features the company’s Active/Active UTM, which provides full-state synchronization for all network flows between both appliances.
The company said the Active/Active UTM implementation is also able to utilize the secondary appliance’s computing power to increase total network throughput, allowing the solution to process more total traffic, deal with traffic spikes and improve overall productivity. In the event of a single unit failure, all of the traffic flow is maintained while the system transitions traffic to the remaining active appliance. Utilization of the additional CPU cycles on the secondary active appliance increases throughput for intrusion prevention, gateway antivirus, anti-spyware and other security functions by up to 75 percent, SonicWall claimed.
“SonicWall is committed to developing … technology that best meets the needs of our customers that transforms the historical trade-off between network performance and security,” said the company’s vice president of product management, Patrick Sweeney. “Today we are announcing innovative features … that make networks faster, more secure and less expensive. These announcements include new firmware for the UTM Firewall line, a major series of enhancements to our e-mail security product line, and a new release of our Global Management System.”
Additional enhancements of SonicOS 5.5 include multi-wireless area network (WAN) capability allowing up to four WAN interfaces to be configured on any TZ, network security appliance (NSA) and E-Class NSA appliance; single-sign-on (SSO); a scalability improvement increasing the number of authenticated users supported by SonicWall NSA and E-Class NSA appliances and route-based VPN; and a configuration that allows route look-ups to determine the available paths to use for VPN traffic.
Updated features for SonicWall’s Email Security (SES) anti-spam and e-mail protection product include an enhanced Advanced Reputation Management system leveraging e-mail, Web and network security solutions to block threats before they enter the network and is available beginning Nov. 3 as an appliance, Windows server-software and a cloud-based solution through SonicWall partners, or as a hybrid-cloud solution with the Comprehensive Anti-Spam Service on TZ, NSA and E-Class NSA network security appliances.
The company’s Global Management System Version 6.0, expected before the end of this year, encompasses e-mail security and continuous data protection in addition to network security and secure remote access. It offers features such as an application firewall for greater visibility into the impact and effectiveness of application utilization on networks and a Web services application programming interface (API) that facilitates integration between GMS and other enterprise applications.
“By consolidating UTM security, application firewall, clean VPN, clean wireless and comprehensive anti-spam onto one easy-to-use, affordable, high-performance-architecture UTM appliance, SonicWall has helped us optimize Lyndhurst’s productivity while reducing the expense and complexity of acquiring, deploying, operating and administering separate single-point products,” said Darren Sammartino, technical services partner for SonicWall partner MSI Technologies.