SonicWall’s firewalls for small and medium-sized businesses have a huge following, and for good reason: With award-winning threat protection and industry-leading TCO, our TZ and NSa Series firewalls offer some of the best values on the market today.

But just because these solutions are great, that doesn’t mean they’re a great fit for every business. If you’re securing a large enterprise, your security needs — from the number of ports and connections, to depth and breadth of management capabilities — are likely to be much different than those of a typical SMB. Fortunately, SonicWall offers a NGFW purpose-built for securing these massive (and often, massively complex) environments.

What is the SonicWall NSsp firewall?

NSsp stands for Network Security Services Platform. The SonicWall NSsp is a next-generation firewall with high port density and multi-gig speed interfaces. Designed for large enterprise, higher education, government agencies and MSSPs, it can process several million connections, scanning for zero-day (with Capture ATP) and other advanced threats and eliminating them in real time without slowing performance.

Like our other hardware and virtual firewall models, SonicWall NSsp runs on the SonicOS operating system. SonicOS leverages its patented, single-pass, low-latency Reassembly-Free Deep Packet Inspection (RFDPI) and Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI™) technologies to deliver industry-validated high security effectiveness, SD-WAN, real-time visualization, high-speed virtual private networking (VPN) and other robust security features.

How SonicWall NSsp empowers MSSPs, universities, and federal and enterprise customers

As business evolves — and as managed and unmanaged devices, networks, cloud workloads, SaaS applications, users, internet speeds, and encrypted connections all continue to proliferate — a firewall solution that cannot support any one of these becomes a chokepoint. When this happens, your firewall can quickly go from offering peace of mind to becoming a point of fear in and of itself.

From the 10700 all the way to the multi-bladed 15700 model, the SonicWall NSsp firewalls were designed to handle even the largest and most complex environments. Our multi-bladed units feature a modular design that minimizes required space and power consumption, ensuring that this firewall offers the maximum performance while minimizing physical size.

The NSsp Series includes multiple 100G/40G/10G interfaces, which allow you to process several million simultaneous encrypted and unencrypted connections with unparalleled threat prevention technology. With 70% of all sessions today being encrypted, having a firewall that can process and examine this traffic without impacting the end-user experience is critical to both productivity and network security.

Day-to-day management, monitoring and reporting of network activities is handled through the SonicWall Network Security Manager (NSM). This management solution provides an intuitive dashboard for managing firewall operations and accessing historical reports — all from a single source. The NSsp’s simplified deployment and setup, along with its ease of management, enable organizations to lower their total cost of ownership and realize a high return on investment.

How the SonicWall NSsp firewall beats the competition

SonicWall is known for offering superb NGFWs at a lower TCO, and the NSsp is no different. As these devices are often used by enterprises with redundancy as one of their core requirements, SonicWall offers even greater savings versus other vendors when deploying in a HA (High-Availability) configuration. When purchasing your HA solution through SonicWall, there’s no cost for subscription/services on the secondary unit.

It is very important to compare the threat performance and the cost of the solution to calculate the actual TCO. You’re not really using a firewall unless you have turned on all the security services—so any meaningful evaluation requires that any service that would be operating during a normal day to be on for testing. SonicWall also offers a report called Capture Threat Assessment (CTA 2.0) that can be used to evaluate the overall effectiveness of the solution. Below is snippet from a CTA report’s executive summary page:

We recently commissioned the Tolly Group to compare the SonicWall NSsp with a comparable Fortinet solution, and the NSsp came out on top. Read Tolly Group’s report with comparison of NSsp firewalls with Fortinet’s solution

Conclusion

When evaluating enterprise firewall vendors and overall solution’s TCO, keep in mind the importance of threat performance with all the security services being turned ON.  SonicWall NSsp NGFW provides you the right combination of features and solutions, all with the performance your enterprise environment requires.