(Our previous supply-chain updates can be found here and here.)

If you’ve ever been to a small-town mechanic, chances are you’ve seen the sign: “We offer three types of service here — Good, Fast and Cheap. Pick any two!”

In cybersecurity, this can be framed as “Affordability, Availability and Efficacy,” but the idea is the same — when making your choice, something’s got to give.

The effects of this mentality are sending ripples across the cybersecurity industry. At the 2022 RSA Conference, Joe Hubback of cyber risk management firm ISTARI explained that based on his survey, a full 90% of CISOs, CIOs, government organizations and more reported they aren’t getting the efficacy promised by vendors.

Several reasons for this were discussed, but most came back to this idea of compromise —buyers want products now, and they’re facing budget constraints. So, they often believe the vendors’ claims (which tend to be exaggerated). With little actual evidence or confirmation for these claims available, and little time to evaluate these solutions for themselves, customers are left disappointed.

To make the buying process more transparent and objective, Hubback says, vendor solutions should be evaluated in terms of Capability, Practicality, Quality and Provenance. While his presentation didn’t reference the Affordability-Availability-Efficacy trifecta directly, these ideas are interconnected — and regardless of whether you use either metric or both, SonicWall comes out ahead.

Availability: Supply-Chain Constraints and Lack of Inventory

Order and install times have always been a consideration. But the current climate has led to a paradox in modern cybersecurity: With cyberattack surfaces widening and cybercrime rising, you really ought to have upgraded yesterday. But in many cases, the components you need won’t be in stock for several months.

While many customers are being locked into high-dollar contracts and then being forced to wait for inventory, this isn’t true for SonicWall customers: Our supply chain is fully operational and ready to safeguard your organization.

SonicWall is currently fulfilling 95% of orders within three days.

Procurement Planning & Forecasting

“We’re hearing more often than not that our competitors don’t have the product on the shelf, but we’ve been managing this for over two years,” SonicWall Executive Vice President of Operations Yew-Joo Hoe said.

In autumn of 2020, as lead times began to creep up, SonicWall’s operations department immediately began altering internal processes, changing the way it works with suppliers and ships goods, and even re-engineering some products to deliver the same performance with more readily available components.

So now, even amid remarkable growth — 2021 saw a 33% increase in new customer growth, along with a 45% rise in new customer sales — SonicWall is currently fulfilling 95% of orders within three days.

But even as we’ve zeroed in on supply-chain continuity, our dedication to the Provenance of our supply chain has been unwavering. We aim to secure, connect and mobilize organizations operating within approved or authorized regions, territories and countries by ensuring the integrity of our supply chain from start to finish.

SonicWall products are also compliant with the Trade Agreements Act in the U.S., and our practices help ensure SonicWall products aren’t compromised by third parties during the manufacturing process.

Affordability: The Two Facets of TCO

SonicWall’s goal is to deliver industry-leading TCO. But this is more than a marketing message for us — we put it to the test.

SonicWall recently commissioned the Tolly Group to evaluate the SonicWall NSsp 13700, the NSsp 15700, the NSa 2700 and more against equivalent competitor products. Each time, the SonicWall product was named the better value, saving customers thousands, tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands while delivering superior threat protection.

But we also recognize that the measure of a product’s affordability extends beyond the number on an order sheet, to how much labor that solution requires. Hubback summarized the idea of Practicality as “Is this actually something I can use in my company without needing some kind of Top Gun pilot to fly it and make it work?” With cybersecurity professionals getting harder to find, and their experience becoming more expensive every day, the ideas of Practicality and Affordability have never been so intertwined.

Fortunately, SonicWall has long recognized this association, and we’ve built our products to reduce both the amount of human intervention and the required skill level needed to run our solutions.

Innovations such as Zero-Touch Deployment, cloud-based management, single-pane-of-glass interfaces, simplified policy creation and management, and one-click rollback in the event of a breach have brought increased simplicity to our portfolio without sacrificing performance or flexibility.

Efficacy: How It’s Built and How It Performs

Hubback’s final two criteria, Quality and Capability, describe how well a solution is built, and how well it can do what it promises. Taken together, these form the core of what we think of as Efficacy.

While Quality is the most enigmatic of Hubback’s criteria, it can be reasonably ascertained based on a handful of factors, such as longevity, customer satisfaction and growth.

With over 30 years of experience, SonicWall is a veteran cybersecurity leader trusted by SMBs, enterprises and government agencies around the globe. In the crowded cybersecurity market, this sort of longevity isn’t possible without quality offerings — and our quantity of repeat purchasers and scores of customer case studies attest to the high standards we maintain for every solution we build.

In contrast, Capability can be very easy to judge — if a vendor chooses to put its products to the test. Independent, third-party evaluation is the gold standard for determining whether products live up to their promises. And based on this metric, SonicWall comes out on top.

To provide customers objective information about its performance, SonicWall Capture ATP with RTDMI has been evaluated by third-party testing firm ICSA Labs, an independent division of Verizon. For the past seven consecutive quarters, the solution has found 100% of the threats while issuing only a single false positive. SonicWall has now earned more perfect scores — and more back-to-back perfect scores — than any other active vendor.

Today, thousands of organizations will shop for new or upgraded cybersecurity solutions. While they may differ in size, industry, use case and more, at the end of the day, they’re all looking for basically the same thing: A reliable solution that performs as advertised, at a price that fits within their budget, that can be up and running as soon as possible.

There will always be those who tell you that you can’t have everything; that the center of this Venn diagram will always be empty. But at SonicWall, we refuse to compromise — and we think you should, too.

Amber Wolff

Senior Digital Copywriter | SonicWall

Amber Wolff is the Senior Digital Copywriter for SonicWall. Prior to joining the SonicWall team, Amber was a cybersecurity blogger and content creator, covering a wide variety of products and topics surrounding enterprise security. She spent the earlier part of her career in advertising, where she wrote and edited for a number of national clients.