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New SMA Release Updates OpenSSL Library, Includes Key Security Features

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As part of SonicWall’s commitment to performance, security and usability, we are introducing SMA 100 Series release 10.2.1.7.

SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 Series is a unified secure access gateway that allows organizations to offer remote users virtual private network (VPN) access to their corporate applications. SMA 100 Series release 10.2.1.7 includes several key security features that protect the operating system from potential attack as well as updates to the OpenSSL Library.

SonicWall has taken the approach of incorporating security enhancements in their products, such as the SMA 100 series, which helps identify potentially compromised devices by performing several checks at the operating system level and baselining normal operating system state. In addition, SonicWall sends anonymous encrypted data to backend servers, including device health data, to detect and confirm security events and release new software to correct the issue.

SMA 100 Security Enhancements with NIST 800-61

SMA 100 10.2.1.7 follows the NIST incident response playbook of detection and analysis, containment, eradication, and recovery.

Detection & Analysis: The SMA 100 10.2.1.7 continuously monitors the operating system (also called firmware) for any anomalous behavior and deviations from normal operations. Further analysis is done to determine if these aberrations represent actual security incidents. If a security incident is discovered on the local system, additional diagnostic metadata is collected from the operating system to determine the root cause of the incident.

Containment: After detecting a potentially malicious event, it is important to contain the intrusion before an adversary can access more resources and cause further damage. If the SMA 100 is deemed to have deviated from normal behavior, short-term containment is performed. This involves restricting specific network communications from the SMA 100 to avoid communications to malicious servers.

Figure: SMA 100 Incident Response Methodology
Eradication: If SMA 100 has been deemed to be compromised, eradication is the process of trying to eliminate the root cause of the incident and either evict the adversary or mitigate the vulnerability that may have enabled the adversary to enter the environment. To achieve this, suspicious processes are terminated, and unauthorized files are removed from the operating system.

Recovery: This phase involves bringing an affected SMA 100 back to normal operations to avoid future incidents. When the SMA 100 has a confirmed security incident after our internal analysis, customers are notified by SonicWall support. SonicWall will work with the affected customers to upgrade them to newer firmware.

Hygiene: While not part of the incident response playbook, good security hygiene and following industry security practices is important in staying proactive against cyber threats. SMA 100 10.2.1.7 also checks to see if the end customer is following security best practices, such as ensuring password expiration and multi-factor authentication and enabling web application firewalling to secure the SMA 100. If these have not been enabled, the customer is prompted to do so using proactive messages on the administrative user interface.

SMA 100 gets updated OpenSSL library

SMA 100 leverages the OpenSSL Library to offer SSL-VPN connection security. We are updating the OpenSSL Library to the 1.1.1t version to patch third-party OpenSSL vulnerability documented in ‘CVE-2022-4304: A timing-based side channel exists in the OpenSSL RSA Decryption implementation.’

SonicWall recommends all SMA 100 customers upgrade to 10.2.1.7 by logging in to MySonicWall or by following the guidance in the following resources.

  1. Knowledge Base
  2. Upgrade Guide
  3. Administrative Guide
  4. Release Notes

Coronavirus Affecting Business as Remote Workforces Expand Beyond Expected Capacity

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The novel coronavirus epidemic is a major global health concern. To help prevent the spread of the new virus, organizations, businesses and enterprises are protecting their workforce and allowing employees to work remotely. This practice helps limit individual contact with large groups or crowds (e.g., restaurants, offices, transit) where viruses can easily spread.

As such, ‘stay at home’ is a common phrase in many health-conscious regions this week. According to the BBC, the city of Suzhou said businesses would remain closed until Feb 8, if not longer. As of 2018, Suzhou had a population of more than 10.7 million people.

On Jan. 30, the World Health Organization labeled the outbreak as a global health emergency. In response, the U.S. Department of issued a Level 4 travel advisory to China (do not travel).

Precautions like these are causing unexpected increases in mobile workers; many organizations don’t have enough virtual private network (VPN) licenses to accommodate the increase of users. This is a serious risk as employees will either not have access to business resources or, worse, they will do so via non-secure connections.

Organizations and enterprises in affected areas should review their business continuity plans. The National Law Review published a useful primer for employers and organizations managing workforces susceptible to coronavirus outbreaks. In addition, leverage SonicWall’s ‘5 Core Practices to Ensure Business Continuity.”

What is the coronavirus?

Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) is a respiratory illness first identified in Wuhan, China, but cases have since been reported in the U.S., Canada, Australia, Germany, France, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, and nine other countries. In an effort to contain the virus, the Chinese authorities have suspended air and rail travel in the area around Wuhan.

According to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), early patients in the outbreak in China “reportedly had some link to a large seafood and animal market, suggesting animal-to-person spread. However, a growing number of patients reportedly have not had exposure to animal markets, indicating person-to-person spread is occurring. At this time, it’s unclear how easily or sustainably this virus is spreading between people.”

The latest situation summary updates are available via the CDC: 2019 Novel Coronavirus, Wuhan, China.

Work-from-Home VPN Solutions for Remote Workforces

To help organizations cost-effectively implement VPN technology for their rapidly expanding work-from-home employees, SonicWall is making its remote access products and services available to both new and existing customers via deeply discounted rates. We’re also bundling critical security solutions for new enterprise and SMB customers.

This special offer provides free Secure Mobile Access (SMA) virtual appliances sized for enterprises and SMBs, and also includes aggressive discounts on Cloud App Security and Capture Client endpoint protection when paired with SMA.

These packages were bundled to include everything needed to protect employees outside the network:

  • Free Secure Mobile Access (SMA) virtual appliance
  • Aggressive discounts on Capture Client endpoint protection
  • Aggressive discounts on Cloud App Security
  • Aggressive discounts on support contracts and Remote Implementation Services when you bundle a virtual appliance
  • New 30- and 60-day VPN spike licenses for existing SMA 100 and 1000 series customers

12 Smart Reasons to Upgrade to SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA)

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The modern mobile or remote workforce is one businesses’ most valuable resources. Ensuring users have fast and secure anytime, anywhere access to applications, services and networks is a business-critical function.

For many years, the SonicWall Secure Remote Access (SRA) solution was the workhorse for distributed or remote personnel across the world. But technology moves fast. Today’s business environment has more users, applications and services than ever before. Satisfying this need requires a secure, high-performance remote access solution.

That’s why SonicWall introduced Secure Mobile Access (SMA), a unified secure access gateway that enables organization to provide anytime, anywhere and any device access to any application. More memory. More users. More throughput.

The solution’s granular access control policy engine, context-aware device authorization, application-level VPN and advanced authentication with single sign-on enables organizations to move to the cloud with ease, and embrace BYOD and mobility in a hybrid IT environment.

Explore the top 12 reasons organizations are upgrading to SonicWall SMA to deliver the speed, security and user experiences their mobile workforces require.

Shrink Budgets by Going Virtual

Virtualizing your infrastructure provides many benefits, while significantly improving performance needed for today’s secure mobility. Improvements include enhanced scalability and flexibility, reduction in downtime, minimized upfront investment and lower maintenance costs.

Why upgrade: SMA 8200v is a powerful virtual appliance with a quad-core processor and 8 Gb RAM. It delivers high-performance secure remote access — all at a fraction of the cost of a physical appliance.

Go Faster

Having both more and faster processing cores enables SMA to encrypt data-in-motion and with lower latency. The end result is a faster, high-performance experience for end users.

Why upgrade: The SMA series has quad core processors that run at up to 1.8 times the speed of those on the SRA series (single core on EX6000 and dual core on EX7000).

Increase Your Throughput

While speed is important, the ultimate goal is to deliver a seamless user experience. By increasing throughput, you promote better productivity with fast and secure access to mission-critical cloud and on-premises applications.

Why upgrade: SMA appliances have up to 15 times the SSL-VPN throughput of the SRA EX series (1.58 Gbps/400 Mbps/3.75 Gbps vs. 106 Mbps/550Mbps).

Serve More Concurrent Users

The mobile workforce has matured quickly in the past decade. Businesses are serving more remote users than ever before — and usually at the same time. Having a higher number of concurrent user sessions provides greater scalability by enabling more simultaneous user sessions to be active and tracked by firewalls.

Why upgrade: The SMA series offer more scalability from a single appliance for larger numbers of concurrent user sessions compared to the SRA series.

Get More High-Speed Ports

Today’s applications and cloud services are bandwidth hogs. Whether users are accessing sales data from a SaaS application or streaming a video presentation, organizations need the throughout to support bandwidth-intensive applications and high-speed data transfers.

Why upgrade: SMA 8200v supports 2 10-GbE ports and SMA 7200 includes 2 10-GbE ports out-of-the box.

Keep Features, Firmware Current

One of the most important best practices to defend against cyberattack or unknown threats is to always keep patches current. This habit also ensures you’re getting the latest feature updates to take advantage of new capabilities that help reduce costs while embracing trends such as BYOD, mobility and cloud.

Why upgrade: Every SMA firmware version is packed with new features. For example, SMA OS 12.1 is the current recommended firmware that provides advanced features, such as:

  • Federated Single Sign-On (SSO)
  • Face ID AUTH Support
  • Centralized Access Portal for Hybrid IT
  • File-Scanning via SonicWall Capture ATP Sandbox Service

Retain Support, Warrant for Hardware

Delivering secure remote access is a critical IT function that reduces attack surface for cybercriminals. It is imperative that the solution is always fully supported and has a best-in-class warranty — should the need arise.

Why upgrade: The SRA series are approaching End of Life (EOL) and the appliances will not be supported beyond November 2019.

Centralize Management & Reporting

Management and technology oversight are significant cost centers for businesses. By centralizing management and reporting, and automating routine tasks, organizations can drastically reduce administrative overhead. That’s time better spent on core business or security objectives.

Why upgrade: SonicWall Central Management Server (CMS) provides organizations with a single administrative user interface for reporting and management of all SMA appliances. This even includes SSL certificate management and policy roll-outs.

Enhance Resilience & Availability

Downtime happens. But organizations do their best to ensure business continuity and scalability, not to mention service-level agreements are being met. Service providers vastly improve Quality of Service (QoS) and workforce productivity by being in proactive in this area.

Why upgrade: Appliances managed by CMS can be configured as Active/Active or Active/Standby high-availability (HA) clusters for redundancy, availability and reliability. The solution includes Global Traffic Optimizer (GTO) for intelligent load-balancing and universal session persistence in case of failovers.

Store Critical Information with Onboard Memory

While much storage today is outsourced to clouds or servers, having large onboard modules is still a key capability. It allows for the local storage of logs, reports, file transfer inspection, firmware backups and restores, and more.

Why upgrade: The SMA 6200 and 7200 offer storage modules that have 12.5 times the capacity of the SRA series (2 x 500 GB vs. 80 GB).

Reduce Costs by Maximizing Global Usage

Organizations with appliances that are globally distributed can benefit from the fluctuating demands for user licenses due to time differences from off‐work/night hours.

Why upgrade: User licenses no longer need to be applied to individual SMA appliances. With central user licensing, CMS reallocates licenses to managed SMA appliances based on usage.

About SonicWall SMA

SMA is an advanced access security gateway that offers secure access to network and cloud resources from any device. SMA provides centralized, granular, policy-based enforcement of remote and mobile access to any corporate resource delivered using a hardened Linux-based appliance. Available as hardened physical appliances or powerful virtual appliances, SMA fits seamlessly into any existing IT infrastructure.

12 New Products Usher in SonicWall’s Expansion into Mid-Tier Enterprise Market

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It’s been just 20 months.

And in that short time as an independent company, SonicWall employees, customers and partners have accomplished so much together. Our short-term mission was to rebuild the SonicWall brand, launch new and advanced cyber security solutions and services in the SMB space, and bring our global partner community back home.

SonicWall, it’s good to have you back.

Now that our heart, soul and technology are deeply rooted in protecting organizations in the SMB space, we feel it’s time to focus on another segment we serve: the mid-tier enterprise market, where we are the No. 5 player, according to Gartner.

That’s why today we announced a focused technology, security and partner mission to deliver network security solutions that align with the performance, security efficacy and high availability required by the modern mid-tier enterprise.

But we’re also focusing on disrupting the market with our Capture Cloud Platform, which brings together network, endpoint and application security with management, reporting, analytics and visual cyber threat intelligence.

“SonicWall is ensuring network security is available via bundles designed with the requirements of mid-tier enterprises in mind.”

This will usher in a new cost structure with an assertive total cost of ownership (TCO) offering via our Capture Security Center, Capture Client endpoint protection and our new NSa series high availability (HA) offerings.

In fact, most of our competitors still require a full-price purchase of the failover firewall unit, as well as full subscription services after the first year. We don’t think that’s right. And it certainly doesn’t make much business sense.

So, SonicWall wants to ensure two things:

  • Network security is available via bundles designed with the requirements of mid-tier enterprises in mind.
  • It’s easy for mid-tier enterprises to do business with our SecureFirst partners.

What’s New from SonicWall

All told, this platform announcement includes 12 new products, updates or enhancements. And we couldn’t be more excited to share this innovation with you. Please explore each in detail. We will have detailed blogs on many of the new and updated products in the coming days.

  • Capture Cloud Platform — Expanded for mid-tier enterprises and now delivers integrated cloud-scale management and true end-to-end security that protects networks, email, endpoints, mobile and remote users. This all-in-one approach enables our complete portfolio of high-performance hardware, virtual appliances and clients to harness the power, agility and scalability of the cloud.
  • Capture Security Center — Fully enhanced to deliver a unified security governance, compliance and risk management strategy. Improve security outcomes from the firewall to the endpoint with integrated threat intelligence between the SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox service, Capture Client endpoint protection and SentinelOne threat databases.
  • Capture Client 1.5 — Now integrated with the SonicWall Capture ATP sandbox service. Suspicious files that Capture Client gives a moderate threat score (but not high enough to merit an alert), may be automatically uploaded for analysis.
  • New NSa Next-Generation Firewalls — Replacing the SuperMassive 9200, 9400 and 9600 models, our new NSa 6650, 9250, 9450 and 9650 series deliver elite levels of performance, security efficacy and high availability for mid-tier enterprises — all with industry-low TCO.
  • New NSsp 12000 Next-Generation Firewalls — A brand new product line, the new NSsp 12400 and 12800 series next-generation firewalls align with advanced requirements of service providers and data centers and are capable of scanning millions of connections for the latest cyber threats.
  • Cloud App Security — Cloud-based security service that enables organizations to secure SaaS application usage and reduce risk of shadow IT. The solution provides functionality similar to Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) offerings to deliver real-time visibility and control of applications being used by employees.
  • Analytics — Available in cloud-hosted or on-premise options, SonicWall Analytics provides network analysts, security operations engineers and incident responders deeper visibility into network traffic, threat information and cross-product insights to perform network forensics, security analysis and threat hunting for businesses, organizations and managed service providers (MSP) of all sizes.
  • SonicOS 6.5.2 — Adds 40 new security features to better secure wired, wireless and mobile network environments. It offers more dynamic defenses against modern zero-day threats, including attacks hidden within encrypted traffic, absolute control of application traffic without compromising performance and availability, and optimal wireless user experiences regardless of location.
  • Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 1000 Series 12.2 — Delivers consolidated access management and eliminates bad password habits with federated SSO to cloud and on-premise applications. Adds Always-On VPN for Windows devices for seamless and secure access from any location.
  • SMA 100 Series 9.0 — Integrates with Capture ATP to block malicious file uploads from remote users. Adds Always-On VPN for Windows devices for seamless and secure access from any location.
  • Email Security 9.2 — Blocks and quarantines messages with malicious URLs before they reach the inbox. Integrates with Google’s G Suite to provide advanced threat protection, strong data loss prevention and compliance engine, and email continuity.
  • Global Management System (GMS) 8.6 — Upgrades authentication measures with strict enforcement of password complexity and account lockout policies before granting access to its management platform. This protects against automated brute-force attacks (e.g., password spray campaigns). Update also adds management and provisioning support for the new NSa series firewalls running the latest SonicOS 6.5.2 and the “Firewall Sandwich” solution.

Enhancing our Go-to-Market Strategy

Fundamental to the release of these new enterprise-focused products and services is the strengthening of SonicWall go-to-market focus and resources. SonicWall will engage with organizations in key verticals, including retail, K12 and higher education, and state, local and federal government. SonicWall will also continue to focus on its partnership with Dell while building and expanding relationships with MSSPs.

To our existing customers, vendors and partners, thank you for making SonicWall what it is today. We can’t wait to see what we do next together.

To our future customers, trust us to protect what’s most important to you: your business, data and livelihood. Contact one of our cybersecurity experts to learn how our automated, real-time breach detection and prevention platform can protect your organization from both known and unknown cyberattacks in the fast-moving cyber arms race.

Connecting and Protecting the Remote Islands of Corporate IT – BYOD and Mobility

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How Dell and SonicWall’s SMA and Next-Generation Firewall solution builds secure virtual bridges for today’s fragmented environments

As employees are no longer restricted to the physical structures of their company headquarters, what and how they connect to their corporate network presents a multitude of challenges. Corporate IT environments consist of a seemingly uncontrollable combination of devices, operating systems, and geographic locations. Securely connecting all of these is one of the most crucial IT initiatives companies are faced with as Gartner reports that 70% of mobile professionals will conduct their work on personal smart devices by 2018.

As we are all well aware, all endpoints pose significant threats to network security. Specifically, BYOD consumer devices are usually the most difficult to manage and secure. Data loss or leakage and unauthorized access or transmission are a constant concern. Mobile devices can also retain sensitive or proprietary data while wirelessly connected to the corporate network. White-listing apps for distribution on IOS and Android platforms help lock down mobile devices, but unmanaged laptops require greater endpoint control via the VPN.

What can you do to protect it all?

Dell and SonicWall’s VPN and Next-Generation Firewall solution delivers a layered defense strategy to ensure employees have the access they need while providing the security the company requires.

Components of a VPN and Next-Generation Firewall Solution:

  • Secure Mobile Access (SMA) Appliances – Provide mobility and secure access for up to 20,000 concurrent users from a single, powerful, and granular access control engine.
  • Next-Generation Firewalls – Network security, control, and visibility through sandboxing, SSL inspection, intrusion prevention, anti-malware, application identification, and content filtering.
  • Remote Access Management & Reporting – Powerful, web-based remote IT management platform to streamline appliance management and provide extensive reporting.
  • VPN Clients/Mobile Connect – Simple, policy-enforced secure access to mission-critical applications and data for iOS, OS X, Android, Chrome OS, Kindle Fire, and Windows mobile devices.

Deploying a SonicWall VPN and Next-Generation Firewall solution provides multi-layered protection that can authorize, decrypt, and remove threats from SSL VPN traffic before it enters the network environment. The dual protection of a SonicWall SMA and Next-Generation Firewall is critical to ensuring the security of both VPN access and traffic. SonicWall’s remote access management and reporting also allows organizations to view, define, and enforce how application and bandwidth assets are used.

Securely connecting your workforce, partners, and customers has never been more important. Reach out today to your Dell and SonicWall contacts today to learn what implementing a SonicWall VPN and Next-Generation Firewall solution can mean for the future of your company.

Read Solution Brief

Mobile Workers and BYOD are Here to Stay: Is Your Data Secure

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The way business professionals work has changed dramatically over the last several years, and continues to at an ever-growing rate. They are on the go and working from different locations across all hours using many devices to allow for a work/life balance. We have become an “always-on” society.

Workers are also doing more work remotely, whether it be at a coffee shop, on the train to work, or on a business trip from a hotel room. People want to stay in touch wherever they are and whenever they need to. They also want to use the device they like, whether it is a smartphone, tablet or laptop. In addition, they also need access to the applications they choose to use, some from their work, others of their own. And most importantly, they need access to the data required to do their jobs, whether it is online through the Internet or behind their company’s firewall on the intranet.

Companies clearly need to find a way to provide their mobile workers secure access to any data from any device at any time. That said, companies’ IT organizations need to understand the risks they are opening themselves up to if they don’t take necessary precautions including data loss, malware, device proliferation, rogue applications, lost and stolen devices with data onboard, credential theft, etc.

Today, IT can implement a number of solid mobile workforce management and mobile security management tools to help secure mobile data and devices, such as:

  • Mobile Device Management (MDM)
  • Mobile Application Management (MAM)
  • Secure Sockets Layer Virtual Private Network (SSL VPN)
  • Network Access Control (NAC)

Learn more about what the industry is seeing around providing secure mobile access over BYOD by reading our executive brief, “Ready or not, mobile workers and BYOD are here to stay.”

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SYNNEX Partners with SonicWall at Upcoming PEAK16 in Las Vegas

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Note: This is a guest blog post by Reyna Thompson, Vice President, Product Marketing at SYNNEX.

Reyna Thompson is Vice President of Product Marketing at SYNNEX Corporation. She is responsible for the ConvergeSOLV Secure Networking Business at SYNNEX. Mrs. Thompson joined the SYNNEX team in 2002, as Associate Vice President of Solutions Marketing for the Technology Solutions Division. Prior to working for SYNNEX, Reyna worked for Gates/Arrow Distributing, where she held various roles dating back to 1993.

As a Fortune 212 company, SYNNEX has the size and velocity to help you efficiently run your business, and the security savvy skills and expertise to focus and expand your IT security practice. We are proud to be a distributor for the SonicWall solutions portfolio, and we’re excited to be a sponsor at this year’s Peak 16 ““ Govern Every Identity. Inspect Every Packet. Open Your Own Department of Yes. ““ at the Aria Resort and *** in Las Vegas, NV, Aug. 28-31. There are great keynotes planned for this premier channel partner conference. The speakers include, special guest – Coach Herm Edwards ““former NFL head coach and player and ESPN NFL Analyst, Curtis Hutcheson, VP and General Manager of SonicWall and One Identity, Patrick Sweeney, VP of Product Management and Marketing SonicWall and One Identity and Steve Pataky, VP of Worldwide Security Sales. These keynotes will be followed by business and technical breakouts. Our SonicWall Team is delighted to once again meet face-to-face to help you find, manage and close your next network security deal.

We’re also here to help you scale ““ and, ultimately, grow ““ your business. Key to that is ensuring you have both bandwidth and geographical reach when it comes to professional services. In this year’s booth in the expo hall, SYNNEX will be presenting 5 Ways we can help grow your business. Stop by booth 109 in the expo at PEAK16 to learn more about:

  • How to get FREE vulnerability assessments for use with your customers
  • Seven benefits of joining SYNNEX’s free Security Partner Community
  • How to increase your quoting speed with one-hour turn-around times from SYNNEX
  • How to stand-up your own managed service practice with SYNNEX’s Firewall-as-a-Service offering
  • How to save your time and resources while still earning double digit margins with our nationwide installation services

Don’t wait to register for PEAK16. For more information on how SYNNEX can grow your business, contact us today at sonicwall@synnex.com. Follow the conference hashtag #YESPeak16, @SYNNEX and @SonicWall on Twitter to follow the conversation.

Register Today

SonicWall Releases Secure Mobile Access Models 200 and 400

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The exponential proliferation of mobile devices in the workplace, both employer issued and personally owned, has increased the demand on businesses to enable secure mobile access to company applications, data and resources. Often, mobile users are using the same device for both business and personal use, resulting in the intermingling of business and personal data and applications. Consequently, businesses are at a growing risk of multiple security breaches such as:

  • Unauthorized users gaining access to company networks and systems from lost or stolen devices
  • Malware infected devices acting as a conduit to infect company systems
  • Interception of company data “in-flight” on unsecured public Wi-Fi networks
  • Loss of business data stored on devices if rogue personal apps or unauthorized users gain access

Today, we have released  SonicWall’s answer to these challenges with the “SonicWall Secure Mobile Access” (SMA) 200 and 400. We are excited to further fortify and control the primary  SonicWall next-generation firewalls, by releasing SonicWall SMA solutions, which offer the following:

  • Provide mobile users secure access to allowed network resources including folders, applications, intranet, e-mail, etc.
  • Secure access across Windows, iOS, Mac OSX, Android, Kindle Fire, Linux & Chrome OS mobile devices
  • Allow administrators to easily configure security policies for context-aware authentication to grant access only to trusted devices and users
  • The SonicWall 100 Series models are rebranded as follows: SonicWall SMA 200, with support for up to 50 concurrent sessions, replaces the SonicWall SRA 1600 and the SonicWall SMA 400, with support for up to 250 concurrent sessions, replaces the SonicWall SRA 4600.

Our partners and customers have been participating in the beta for today’s release and appreciate the solution features. Together, we partner with our Value Added Resellers (VARs) to provide superior IT services worldwide. Peter Rennenkampff, at Fuelled Networks, was part of the recent beta, and he shares the following:

“We have several customers who will benefit from the enhanced platform support for SonicWall MobileConnect in this latest release. Businesses have to contend with the BYOD trend and increase security at the same time. The SMA platform addresses these issues with capabilities such as the End User Authorization, Granular Access Control and enhanced performance. As an established VAR, we have customers that already rely on the SonicWall SRA solution. The new SMA platform will immediately allow our customers to be better connected, more productive and greater control over who has access to valuable data.” said Peter Rennenkampff, Support Engineer, Fuelled Networks, Inc.

We invite you to see a live demo of our new solutions and join us at the booth 1-007 in the South Hall at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, CA from February 29th March 3rd . Follow us on Twitter at @SonicWallSecurity with hashtag #SonicWallGoverProtect to join the conversation. If you are virtual, see our new SMA via Live Demo and learn more: here.

The Future Looks Bright for Mobile Worker Productivity

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Managing and securing mobile data is about to get a whole lot easier. Mobile platform providers, historically focused on the consumer, are now investing heavily in new OS features that will seamlessly integrate with mobile management and security solutions and allow businesses to more easily enable mobile access to more data and resources without compromising security.

Historically, IT departments protected corporate networks and data by only allowing trusted devices and users to connect to the network. IT could limit the threat of data loss and malware by controlling and managing PC and laptop and software images and configurations. In the new mobile era, IT has limited control or management over devices. Workers are often independently choosing their smart-phones and tablets as well as the apps and services they use to address business and personal needs.

So, with limited mobile device control and management, how can IT keep company data secure while enabling mobile worker productivity?

The leading mobile platform providers recognize the challenge businesses face and are adding new features to make it easier to secure and manage business apps and data on devices, whether corporate or personally owned. And they’re partnering with third party mobile management and security providers to help give IT control to secure and manage the mobile data workflow. Key mobile platform features enabling mobile for business include:

1. Managed separation of business and personal apps and data

Mobile OS’s are architected to allow data to be easily shared by apps. While this ease-of-use and transparent interaction and sharing between apps is beneficial for personal use, it can be problematic for businesses that want to protect data. For example, many social apps mine contact lists from other apps and invite contacts to join their service. With this, confidential customer contact information stored in a business app could unintentionally be “shared” to a personal social app, leaking customer contact information and potentially damaging a business’s reputation or violating regulatory rules. Another risk, if a rogue app is downloaded to a device, mobile malware or vulnerabilities may be present that can steal data or provide an entry point for a cyber-attack.

To address these issues, the new generation of mobile operating systems is adding features that, with third party mobile management tools, will help better secure business apps and data on mobile devices. IT, with mobile user permission, will be able to more easily deploy and manage trusted mobile apps for business and enforce security policy to protect company data, while personal apps and data will be isolated from business apps, preventing data leakage. To meet mobile user demands for personal app and data privacy, IT will be restricted to only manage business apps and data. With these new built-in OS features, today’s proprietary secure containers that isolate and secure business apps and data on mobile devices, will be less necessary, helping to reduce IT cost and complexity.

2. Managed apps

To further support mobile for business, mobile platform providers are making it easier for app developers to build “managed apps”, apps that can be configured and managed by mobile management tools. For these apps, IT will be able to use third party mobile management tools to configure app level policies that affect the actions an app may take. For example, a managed email app implemented with the new mobile management control protocol could be remotely configured to only allow email and attachments to be viewed from the email app, and disallow copy, cut and print functionality to keep business data secure and encrypted within the app and not allow sharing with other apps.

3. App level VPN

Businesses today often deploy VPNs to securely connect mobile and remote workers with company networks and resources, a necessity to encrypt data in-flight and protect from data theft. However, when a device is used for business and personal use, if the VPN is enabled, personal traffic also uses the corporate VPN which can impact network bandwidth and contaminate backend resources. Ideally, to preserve corporate network bandwidth, only business apps and data should use the corporate VPN.

To address this need, mobile OS, security and management technologies are evolving to allow per app VPN capabilities. With per app VPN, security and management technology may be configured with policies to initiate a VPN whenever a business app launches such that business traffic from the mobile device travels through the VPN while personal traffic does not.

So, with these new mobile management and security capabilities, what should businesses do to accelerate mobile adoption and productivity?

Get ready for the next wave of mobile technology. For information on the management and security solutions you need to help enable mobile workers productivity while protecting from threats, read our eBook, Secure Mobile Access.

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