NSv Series and AWS GovCloud: Facilitating Government’s Move to the Cloud
SonicWall NSv virtual firewalls provide superior government cloud security, with features like VPN, IPS, and URL filtering.
Due to the highly classified nature of the information they handle, Federal agencies have been among the last to move their workloads to the cloud. But with guidance such as the U.S. White House’s Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity, which directs the Federal government to accelerate movement to secure cloud services, and technology such as AWS GovCloud and SonicWall NSv Series virtual firewall, the flexibility and scalability of cloud solutions is now available to government customers as well.
What is AWS GovCloud?
The AWS GovCloud is an isolated AWS region that meets the regulatory and compliance requirements of government agencies. AWS GovCloud (U.S.) are isolated AWS regions designed to allow U.S. government agencies to move sensitive workloads into the cloud by addressing their specific regulatory and compliance requirements, including Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) High, Department of Defense Security Requirements Guide (DoD SRG) Impact Level 5, and Criminal Justice Services (CJIS).
To assist customers in managing their obligations under U.S. export control regimes such as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and the Export Administration Regulations (EAR), AWS GovCloud (U.S.) is logically and physically administered exclusively by U.S. citizens.
To secure the workloads that contain all categories of Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) data and government-oriented, publicly available data in the AWS GovCloud (U.S.) Region, SonicWall’s NSv Series virtual firewalls provides the same security features in AWS GovCloud as on the standard AWS public cloud. Through this partnership, SonicWall is extending the protection of mission-critical government workloads with virtual security products optimized for AWS.
What is SonicWall NSv virtual firewall?
SonicWall’s NSv Series virtual firewalls provide all the security advantages of a physical firewall, plus all the operational and economic benefits of the cloud — including system scalability and agility, speed of system provisioning, simple management, and cost reduction.
NSv delivers full-featured security tools including VPN, IPS, application control and URL filtering. These capabilities shield all critical components of the private/public cloud environments from resource misuse attacks, cross-virtual-machine attacks, side-channel attacks, and common network-based exploits and threats.
Users can login to their AWS GovCloud console in U.S.-West and U.S.-East regions using BYOL (Bring Your Own Licenses) and deploy NSv on AWS GovCloud.
Summary
Most Federal customers are moving their datacenters away from traditional on-premises deployments and to the cloud. It is imperative that security teams provide the same level of security for government cloud server instances as they have been doing for on-premises physical servers. A next-generation firewall with advanced security services like Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI™), IPS and application control is the first step to securing cloud instances against cyber threats.
In addition to security features, it also important to choose a firewall that provides the right level of performance needed for a given cloud workload. SonicWall NSv series offers a variety of models with performance levels suited to any size of cloud deployment, with all the necessary security features enabled. To learn more about how SonicWall NSv Series excels in AWS environments, click here.
