SonicWall NSM 2.3.4 Uplevels Central Management Capabilities

SonicWall NSM 2.3.4 brings four eagerly awaited capabilities: Zero Touch 2.0, System Events for Gen 7 firewalls, custom tenant- and group-level reporting, and CIDR-based search abilities.

Today’s businesses must protect more, in more places, more quickly than ever before. As they do, they’re confronted by more attacks launched by more bad actors. Unfortunately, this acceleration never seems to reach the “supply” side of the equation — many organizations are struggling to get by on stagnant IT budgets, and the number of qualified cybersecurity professionals still isn’t keeping pace with the demand.

As your cybersecurity infrastructure expands, so do the challenges of managing it. To help organizations centralize and simplify firewall management in today’s increasingly complex threat landscape, SonicWall introduced Network Security Manager (NSM) in the latter half of 2020.

SonicWall NSM: Centralized Management. Elevated Security

SonicWall NSM is a scalable, cloud-native application designed to help organizations optimize, control and monitor up to tens of thousands of network security devices — including firewalls, managed switches and secure wireless access points — from anywhere via a simple interface. Available in both a cloud solution and an on-premises deployment, NSM offers complete, real-time visibility into your traffic and threats; the ability to synchronize consistent security policies across your environment; a full audit trail to ease compliance; and intuitive, self-guided workflows to uplevel and empower your admins.

SonicWall NSM 2.3.4: More Features, Less Complexity

With the release of NSM version 2.3.4, SonicWall is adding four new feature capabilities to an already highly robust and versatile management solution: Zero Touch 2.0, System Events for Gen 7 firewalls, tenant- and group-level custom reports, and CIDR-based search.

Zero Touch 2.0

The ability to onboard new firewalls from anywhere has been a major benefit of NSM since the beginning — but Zero Touch 2.0 both strengthens and enhances this capability. Zero Touch 2.0 is a new microservices-based architecture designed to further simplify the onboarding of firewalls. It increases the reliability of the connection between NSM and the firewalls in your ecosystem, providing a stable, high-performance connection that speeds firmware upgrades and configuration deployments via NSM.

While the move to Zero Touch 2.0 will require migration, users won’t need to do anything to take advantage of these new capabilities: the move will be done in phases by SonicWall. If you’re running one of the supported models (see below), watch your MySonicWall account — you’ll receive a notification in advance when your account is selected for an upgrade. Once the migration is complete, Zero Touch 2.0 will appear in the firewall inventory.

Zero Touch 2.0 is available for Gen 6 TZ/NSA/NSsp, Gen 7 TZ/NSA/NSsp and NSv deployments running Gen 6 versions 6.5.4.x or higher and Gen7 versions 7.0.1-5065 or higher.

System Events (Gen 7 Firewalls)

NSM maintains an event log for tracking potential security threats. With the release of NSM version 2.3.4, Gen 7 firewalls with NSM Advanced licenses can now view system event logs in NSM. This option can be accessed under Firewall -> Monitor -> System Events.

For compliance recordkeeping or to ease in investigations, admins can export the system events data in CSV format.

Users running SonicOS 7.0.1-5080 and higher will be able to take advantage of the new System Events feature.

Tenant- and Group-Level Custom Reports

NSM’s granular reporting capabilities already allowed users to schedule reporting, customize reports with any combination of traffic data, and access up to a year’s worth of recorded logs to aid in historical analysis, anomaly detection, discovery of security gaps and more. Now, with the release of NSM 2.3.4, users can create custom reports at the device group level or the tenant level as well.

Creating these custom reports is as easy as navigating to the Management view and selecting a device group under “Scope Selector.”

CIDR-Based Search

With the release of NSM 2.3.4, admins are now able to search multiple IPs within the Analytics data by using a CIDR. For example, all the subnets under the series 142.250 can be searched by entering 142.250.0.0/16 in the search box.

Smarter management tools are required for security teams to do their job effectively — and as attacks grow more sophisticated and security teams are increasingly stretched, these tools need to become even smarter over time. With NSM 2.3.4, SonicWall is upleveling its network management solution, giving businesses of all sizes new capabilities to ensure easier, more versatile and more comprehensive firewall management.

SonicWall NSM 2.3.4 for SaaS began rolling out in late August, and the on-premises version will be released in November 2022. To learn more about SonicWall NSM, click here.

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.