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SonicWall PEAK17 Partner Roadshow Touring Europe

19-City Tour Brings SonicWall Enablement, Networking to EMEA Partners

It’s no secret that SonicWall is committed to its partner community. The latest testament to this dedication is the PEAK17 partner roadshow, which is currently on a 19-city European tour that launched in March.

The annual roadshow takes SonicWall right to the partners to deliver updates to the SonicWall SecureFirst partner program, news on SonicWall SonicOS 6.5 launch, market momentum, new marketing tools and more.

“We have been working together with SonicWall for 15 years, but this power of innovation is the greatest we’ve ever seen,” said Ralf Leibmann of CONCIPIA GmbH, a SonicWall partner. “Especially as a managed security provider, we are very happy to have a professional partner like SonicWall that leads us to be one of the greatest MSPs in Germany.”

In September, the roadshow started its second leg by visiting Wien, Austria; Essen, Germany; Bern, Switzerland; and Ulm, Germany. The next stop will be Oct. 3 in Stockholm, Sweden. The 2017 roadshow will conclude on Nov. 11 in Paris, France.

“It was a great event with brand-new, first-hand information from representatives and partners,” said Werner Lenz of LENZ IT & NetWorking Solutions. “A big thanks to SonicWall for being a reliable partner over the years. It enabled us to continuously expand our business and build strong relationships to our customers.”

Upcoming stops will be highlighted by keynote sessions from SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner (UK and Italy), dedicated channel strategy sessions from Senior Vice President and Chief Revenue Officer Steve Pataky (UK and Italy), and exclusive product updates from Executive Director of Product Management Dmitriy Ayrapetov (UK, Italy, Ireland and Germany).

Each day-long event will feature product-specific positioning sessions – new NSA 2650 firewall and SonicWave Wireless Access Points, marketing and partner enablement updates, and professional service presentations. The roadshow — featuring popular social events like cooking classes, wine tasting, theatre visits and escape rooms — is the perfect opportunity to learn best practices for engaging prospects, exceeding customer expectations and growing revenue opportunities.

“I really enjoyed the experience to attend the PEAK17 Partner Roadshow in Essen in a nice location,” said choin! CEO Boris Wetzel, a SonicWall gold partner in Germany. “It was an excellent event with great updates on products and roadmap. It is great to see the changes and the commitment from SonicWall.”

This is the roadshow’s second trip through Europe in 2017. Earlier in the year, SonicWall hosted partner events in Germany, Austria, Switzerland and the Netherlands. This drove SonicWall’s European partner outreach program to 19 cities for the year.

Honoring SonicWall Partners

At the PEAK17 events in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, SonicWall hosted award ceremonies to honor the region’s most successful partners.

Germany

  • SonicWall Distributor 2017: Infinigate
  • SonicWall Most Valuable Partner 2017: Axsos
  • SonicWall Security Project 2017: Kodak with Partner Axsos
  • SonicWall MSSP 2017: Concipia
  • SonicWall Mittelstandspartner 2017: Tarador

Switzerland

  • SonicWall Partner of the Year 2017: Vitodata

Austria

Attend PEAK 17

If you’re interested in attending an upcoming PEAK17 roadshow event in Europe or Africa, please reference the table below and register for a city near you.

City Country Date Registration
Wien Austria 13.09.2017 Complete
Essen Germany 19.09.2017 Complete
Bern Switzerland 20.09.2017 Complete
Ulm Germany 21.09.2017 Complete
Stockholm Sweden 03.10.2017 Complete
London United Kingdom 04.10.2017 Complete
Madrid Spain 04.10.2017 Complete
Florence Italy 05.10.2017 Complete
Dublin Ireland 06.10.2017 Complete
Hamburg Germany 10.10.2017 Complete
Johannesburg South Africa 19.10.2017 Complete
Nantes France 07.11.2017 Register
Paris France 09.11.2017 Register

SonicOS 6.5, the Biggest Update in Company History, Delivers Powerful Security, Networking and Usability Capabilities

Keeping organizations running safely, while improving business and user productivity in today’s accelerating threat environment, continues to be a non-trivial task for IT leaders. At the current pace of cyber attacks, we understand all too well that the effects of recent events, such as the Equifax, WannaCry and NotPetya attacks, have demonstrated their capacity to change the global business environment from normal to total hysteria in the blink of an eye.

When news breaks on new data breaches, we see a surge in conversations with our SonicWall partner and customer communities about security and risk assessments. These engagements reinforce our development commitment to ensure every new product release delivers more tools and capabilities to protect their networks and data, and subsequently avoid the unnecessary breach.

Delivering on that commitment, I am thrilled to introduce SonicWall’s biggest firewall feature release in its history. SonicWall SonicOS 6.5 is packed with powerful security, networking and usability capabilities, and meets the security operation requirements of organizations of various sizes and use cases. SonicOS 6.5 focuses on empowering IT leaders and their security teams to:

  • Elevate their breach detection and prevention capacity
  • Manage and enforce security controls across the entire organization
  • Bring the latest in wireless speed, performance and security for cloud and mobile users
  • Scale firewall networking, connectivity and performance for uncompromised, uninterrupted network services

SonicOS 6.5 delivers the following customer-focused outcomes as part of SonicWall’s expanding Automated Real-Time Breach Detection and Prevention Platform.

1. Bolster breach prevention capabilities for wired, wireless and cloud-enabled network environments

  • SonicOS 6.5 includes 60-plus new features, nearly half of which focus on enabling the latest Wi-Fi standard, 802.11ac Wave 2, to deliver matching network security performance, connectivity and security between wired and wireless networks.
  • The combination of SonicWall firewalls and the new SonicWave 802.11ac Wave 2 series of wireless access points gives customers the assurance that their users have uninterrupted, secure and fast access to business services and resources over wired and wireless connections.
  • Built-in features, like Wireless Deployment Tools, greatly aid in planning and building a robust wireless infrastructure, while Band Steering, Airtime Fairness and others improve the overall wireless service quality and performance to give users a safe, productive wireless experience. This helps eliminate dropped connections and slowness anytime, anywhere and in any environment within the workplace. Moreover, Dynamic VLAN assignment segments wireless users based on their roles and group associations to prevent advanced threats from spreading.
  • SonicOS 6.5 expands the threat API capabilities to help customers establish a path toward security automation. Through greater firewall collaboration with third-party security ecosystem, the firewall can automatically pull external intelligence sources for threat detection and protection, and security policies enforcement. For example, our Dynamic Botnet List feature enables customers to program their firewalls to download private third-party lists that contain desired security information, such as malicious IP and URL addresses, that they want the firewall to block for additional threat coverage.
  • For distributed organizations that have offices operating on different network domains, the new multi-domain security management capability in SonicOS 6.5 helps them manage and enforce discrete security policies across those domains. Based on service levels, risk tolerance, compliance and/or legal requirements, administrators can apply identical security controls to all domains or specific policy to a single domain or group of domains. This flexibility helps reduce the attack surface, eliminate security gaps, isolate risks and prevent any lateral movement of backdoor, network-based attacks, such as WannCry and NotPetya.

2. Increase scalability and connectivity of the firewall system

  • Advances in Layer 2/3 network and connectivity help customers optimize system availability and performance, and scale the firewall to deliver uncompromised, uninterrupted threat protection for every connected network domain. Supported on all SonicWall next-generation firewall (NGFW) models, including the newest NSA 2650, SonicOS 6.5 also supports daisy-chaining and management of Dell X-Series switches, Virtual Wire Mode, Dynamic LAG using LACP and Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP).
  • Using multi-domain security management in conjunction with virtual wire mode gives customers the ability to micro-segment and manage their virtual networks. These also provide independent security management, policies, controls and scanning to each virtual network with its separate security zone.

3. Improve ease of use and firewall management

  • SonicOS 6.5 introduces a completely redesigned user interface (UI) for a fresh, productive user experience (UX). This new UI gives users an executive dashboard loaded with security, user and traffic information. It also offers an organized, familiar and easily-understood menu-driven security management console. The dashboard presents a consolidated view of the live firewall security environment. This view includes a threat index, security events and data, network performance and connectivity, and application and bandwidth usage. The intuitive UI lets users complete security tasks faster, and with greater ease, from a single-pane-of-glass.

Meet the New SonicWall NSA 2650 Next-Gen Firewall – Where Faster Meets More Secure

Today I am excited to share the new addition to SonicWall’s NSA product family of Next-Generation Firewalls, the NSA 2650.  Three key trends form the design drivers for the new NSA 2650

  1. Wireless Devices Explosion – The demand for increased bandwidth from wireless networks is constantly on the rise with the growing number of wireless devices used per person. The wireless industry is going through waves of transformation (pun-intended) to support the requirement for more bandwidth. With the latest 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless standards opening the door for multi-gig WiFi performance there is a strong need for switches and firewalls that connect to wireless access points to support these faster speeds without increasing the cost to the network infrastructure.
  2. Multi-gig Campus Requirements – Campus/branch networks require technology trend adoption without adding significant costs to the network infrastructure. For example, switches and firewalls supporting wireless access points must be able to do so with existing the Cat5e/Cat6 cabling infrastructure.
  3. Encrypted Traffic Surge – The trend towards Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) encryption has been on the rise for several years. Articles on the use of SSL/TLS encryption typically indicate that a little over 50% of all web traffic is now encrypted and that percentage is expected to continue growing. At SonicWall, data gathered by our Capture Labs Threat Research team shows the percentage to be a little higher, around 62%. We found that as web traffic grew throughout 2016, so did SSL/TLS encryption, from 5.3 trillion web connections in 2015 to 7.3 trillion in 2016. As vendors such as Google, Facebook, Twitter and others continue to move to HTTPS, we expect the use of HTTPS to increase. So, organizations now require a secure platform to protect their network from the sophisticated encrypted threats that evade the traditional security mechanisms. 

The NSA 2650 firewall is aimed at campus and branch networks that must secure their environments against the growing number of threats looking for new ways to burrow into networks. The new NSA 2650 firewall is the first branch and campus firewall to deliver automated real-time breach detection and prevention, as well as TLS/SSL decryption and inspection, over multi-gigabit wired and 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless networks. The SonicWall NSA 2650 represents the continuing evolution of SonicWall’s vision for a deeper level of network security without a performance penalty. More than simply a replacement for its predecessor, the NSA 2600, the NSA 2650 addresses the growing trends in web encryption and mobility by delivering a solution that meets the need for high-speed threat prevention.

The NSA 2650 is a 1U-device powered by four cores that provide the processing power necessary to support the compute-intensive deep packet inspection services such as:

  • Intrusion Prevention
  • Anti-Virus
  • Anti-Spyware
  • TLS/SSL inspection and decryption
  • Application Visualization
  • Application Control, Botnet detection
  • Geo-IP identification
  • Anti-Spam
  • User Identification and Advanced Threat Protection

Real-Time Inspection of SSL and TLS Attacks:

Unlike competing firewalls that perform well only with unencrypted connections, the NSA 2650 is built to support the need for more TLS/SSL inspection connections. The NSA 2650 features an unmatched number of encrypted web connections, up to 12,000 and performs deep packet inspection on each connection after first decrypting the traffic.

To protect against more advanced threats such as unknown and zero-day attacks that are concealed in encrypted web traffic, the NSA 2650 utilizes Capture, SonicWall’s cloud-based multi-engine sandboxing service that runs on the firewall. Suspicious files are sent to the award-winning SonicWall Capture service for analysis before rendering a verdict.

The NSA 2650 is a high-port density firewall that features 4×2.5-GbE SFP, 4×2.5-GbE, and 12×1-GbE interfaces with a dedicated management port. In addition to the multi-gigabit ports, high-speed processors and robust onboard memory, the NSA 2650 includes additional hardware enhancements that make it the ideal NGFW for mid-sized organization and distributed enterprises. An optional second power supply is available in case of failure for added redundancy. To help with scalability, the NSA 2650 includes two expansion slots. One is pre-populated with a 16 GB storage module to support features including logging, reporting, last signature update, backup and restores and more. The second slot provides flexibility to add future feature and physical capability expansion. Expandable in the future with additional modules, this versatile, high-port density firewall platform has the capacity to evolve through firmware updates to keep ahead of threats such as ransomware and intrusions.

With the NSA 2650, SonicWall yet again adds a ground-breaking security product to its portfolio. Combined with new 802.11ac Wave 2 SonicWave wireless access points, SonicWall creates a high-speed wireless network security solution that provides wireless users with an enhanced mobile experience.

Our latest firmware release, SonicOS 6.5, has more than 60 new features, and provides support for NSA 2650 hardware platform where faster meets more secure without any compromise on performance to all traffic including encrypted traffic.

Test drive the new NSA 2650 on SonicWall live demo: https://livedemo.sonicwall.com