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SonicWall Empowers Partners with MDR and SOCaaS

The cybersecurity landscape has never been more complex. As threats grow in number and sophistication, budgets and headcount can’t keep up. In response, many IT teams have turned to managed services for their cybersecurity needs — so much so that by the end of 2023, an estimated 41% of SMB cybersecurity spend will be allocated to managed service and system integrators, up from 35% in 2020.

But these MSPs (Managed Service Providers) and MSSPs (Managed Security Service Providers) are often facing the same challenges as their clients: they lack a team of dedicated threat analysts and researchers to help manage and respond to the never-ending stream of security alerts from disparate point solutions.

To effectively bridge these gaps, SonicWall’s global network of MSPs, MSSPs and other channel partners must move from a network of unmanaged point products to a seamless platform of managed security solutions. That’s why we’re pleased to announce we’ve acquired Solutions Granted, Inc., a top MSSP based in the United States — a move that will add several key technologies to the SonicWall portfolio, including Managed Detection and Response (MDR), Security Operations Center as a Service (SOCaaS) and other managed services.

Meet Solutions Granted

Since its inception, Solutions Granted has worked with SonicWall to deliver best-in-class cybersecurity to MSPs. The company has spent the past 18 years focusing on its open ecosystem, solving alert fatigue and empowering MSPs to better secure small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

Solutions Granted currently delivers world-class managed security services to MSPs throughout North America, including thousands of channel partners serving SMBs. Based on the strength of its services and support, the company has emerged as a clear leader in the security space, winning countless awards including the CRN Security 100 list (2018-2021), Top Global MSSP List (2018-2021), and Blackberry Cylance MSSP Partner of the Year (2018, 2019, 2021).

We are excited to welcome the expertise of the Solutions Granted team, particularly their CEO Michael Crean. Crean will assume a critical leadership role, advising on the ongoing process of seamlessly integrating Solutions Granted services with our products and partner offerings.

Crean is a 20-year veteran of the channel who has built a career characterized by a passion for enabling the MSP community on practical approaches to cybersecurity.

His vision of bridging the gap between information technology and security — and his commitment to providing solutions tailored to customers’ business goals, ecosystem and compliance standards — pushed Solutions Granted to quick and enduring success.

New Solutions and Services

Solutions Granted will augment partners’ managed service portfolio by extending new core offerings:

MDR for Endpoint: Comprehensive service that includes 24×7 threat monitoring, threat hunting and detection/response to all types of threats from many different points of entry

MDR for Cloud: 24×7 protection from advanced phishing and SaaS threats that make it past Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace’s defenses

SOCaaS (Managed SIEM): Centralized log management service unifying disparate security alerts and logs, designed to aid with threat investigations and compliance

Vulnerability Management: Network discovery and vulnerability management solution that identifies and prioritizes risk to your attack surface.

These services represent natural add-ons for MSPs looking to better meet customers’ evolving security and regulatory requirements. Solutions Granted services are already integrated into existing SonicWall offerings, such as firewalls and SMA (Secure Mobile Access) series, and there are other exciting developments on the horizon — including an MDR solution leveraging SonicWall Capture Client.

Benefits to You, Our Partners, MSPs and End Users

The initial acquisition of Solutions Granted was driven by an increase in partner requests for these services — and our partners will remain at the heart of SonicWall’s strategic plans going forward. Solutions Granted’s customers are many of the partners we do business with today, and this move will help them expand their business, deliver a more complete service offering, and provide advanced tools and talent as a service.

In addition to nearly half a century of combined cybersecurity expertise, SonicWall and Solutions Granted partners will benefit from a streamlined approach for managing security across customer environments, all through the same MSP-friendly unified console they’re accustomed to. And by bringing SonicWall and Solutions Granted technologies together, partners will enjoy an even greater ease of doing business.

Forging Toward the Future Together

Over time, SonicWall and Solutions Granted offerings will become as synonymous and seamless as the products contained within their portfolio. And this portfolio will continue to grow as we harness the power of superior threat intelligence to develop a unified cybersecurity platform meeting the evolving needs of service providers.

To bring this vision to life, SonicWall will leverage internal development, acquisitions and strategic partnerships to constantly innovate and deliver cutting-edge defense capabilities to keep pace with the ever-changing threat landscape.

But above all, this represents a continuation of SonicWall’s renewed commitment to its partners — one that started over a year ago with the adoption of our “outside-in” strategy and has continued with the launch of our SecureFirst Partner Program. As this journey continues, we will empower our valued partner community with cost-effective threat defense services, industry expertise and innovative technology.

Learn more about becoming a partner, or register for our live webinar hosted by Bob VanKirk and Michael Crean to get more details on this important milestone.

 

A New Era of Partnering to Win

SonicWall Partners are at the core of our success. We’re continually improving products, services, support, and brand awareness.

After a couple of months now as President and CEO of SonicWall, I’ve had a chance to begin focusing on the core objectives that will continue to drive the company going forward. A primary focus of mine will be staying better aligned with you, our trusted partners. To that end, I’d like to offer the first of many updates on how we’re doing as a company, what to expect in the future, and how we’re tracking on goals we’ve set for ourselves.

Where We Are and Where We’re Going

SonicWall is in the midst of historic growth: We’ve experienced five consecutive quarters of double-digit growth, with both top- and bottom-line performance at or near historic highs.

At the core of our successes are the key contributions from our partner community. We’re seeing strong bid performance globally, with record levels of Deal Registration Create, Deal Registration Close, In-Quarter Create and In-Quarter Close. We’re unbelievably thankful for your incredible performance and continued dedication.

We continue to see growth in the SMB market, which aligns to our strategy of building on our leadership there. We’re also continuing our expansion into the enterprise market, with strong growth in 2022. Much of this increase is due to the tremendous success of our enterprise-class NSsp next-generation firewall. We’re now coming off our highest-performing quarter of all time for our NSsp firewalls.

The growth of NSsp and other offerings has been bolstered by the strength of SonicWall’s supply chain. In 2020, long before any wide-scale supply-chain disruption had occurred, SonicWall had begun modifying its products, revisiting internal processes and changing the way we work with suppliers.

This has allowed us to have product in stock when others didn’t. In partnership with you, last year alone we collectively drove a 33% increase in the number of new customers and a 45% increase in sales — all while fulfilling 95% of all orders within just three days.

Getting ahead of supply-chain disruption has also allowed us to realize supply chain and shipping cost advantages, which in turn has enabled us to continue to offer industry-leading TCO. While SonicWall has long focused on providing the best products at the best value, during this time of economic uncertainty, this has become an even greater differentiator.

Prior to 2020, SonicWall had already begun looking toward a future built around widespread remote work. Since then, we’ve been developing, refining and expanding our cloud product offerings, including our Cloud Edge Secure Access solution, our NSv virtual firewall and more. And our focus in this area is paying off, with SonicWall’s cloud evolution achieving 36% growth in 2022.

The drivers of SonicWall’s long-term plan include maintaining our sizeable SMB base, steadfast growth in the enterprise space, and continued expansion into next-generation cloud security. And these strategies will be underpinned by ongoing innovation as we continue to build on our Boundless Cybersecurity architecture.

How We’re Continually Improving Customer and Partner Support

During this time, we’ll continue to focus on growing our MSSP program. In early 2023, we’ll introduce an updated MSSP portal, which will provide greater value for our MSSP partners.  We’re also increasing our MSSP product offerings: stay tuned as we lean even further into that area and ensure that every product is aligned to our MSSPs.

Over the past couple years, you’ve emphasized the importance of customer and technical support. We’ve already begun making strides toward greater alignment in this area, both through our web support presence and through our one-on-one support.

We’ve continued to grow and refine our knowledgebase and self-service options. As of this writing, our self-service score is 19-1. In other words, for every 19 inquiries, only one turns into a phone call — the other 18 are sufficiently addressed via the knowledgebase and other online tools. (For context, 13-1 is viewed as best in class.)

As you know, this is a journey and not a destination, and we’ll continue to do our best here. In fact, some of our efforts to improve the user experience for web-based support are already bearing fruit. In August, the Association of Support Professionals (ASP) awarded SonicWall a special award for Best Search on a Support Website, the first time such an award had ever been given.

ASP's annual Best Support Website, awarded to SonicWall in 2022 for our work with our partners.

But because not all support tasks can be handled through online inquiry, we’ve also been investing heavily in our support call center. We aren’t just focused on adding more support resources, however — we’re also focused on supporting more partners and customers, which is key as we grow and expand. Among our support initiatives is the addition of local language support wherever possible, greatly increasing the breadth of our support program.

How We’re Building Brand Awareness

Not all support is after the sale, however — we’re aware that we can make your jobs easier by ensuring end users recognize SonicWall and our partners as thought leaders in the cybersecurity space. In July, we released the mid-year update to our 2022 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report. This report continues to set records, not only in number of downloads, but also in terms of media coverage and mentions in major articles and news stories.

The Threat Report also serves as a vehicle to highlight SonicWall’s threat performance, particularly our patented Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI™). Through the end of Q3 2022, this technology had discovered 373,756 new malware variants — a 22% year-to-date increase, and an average of 1,374 new variants per day.

These capabilities have also been validated by third-party testing — not just once, but seven times in a row. For the past seven consecutive quarters, ICSA Labs has evaluated a SonicWall NSa 3600 equipped with Capture ATP with RTDMI. And in every test cycle, the solution identified 100% of new and little-known threats, some only hours old.

SonicWall is currently the only participating vendor to achieve seven straight 100% threat detection scores, and we’ve now had seven consecutive quarters with the highest overall score among all participants.

Our Partners Are at the Core

But no matter how strong our portfolio is, at SonicWall we know we’re only as strong as our partner community. That’s why we’re working toward increased partner communication and collaboration on every front.

Gen 7 have seen an eight- to nine-times improvement in their top line.

We’ll continue to focus on expanding our technical tracks, as well as our SonicWall University offerings, which have been incredibly successful. We’ve found that partners who take just three hours of SonicWall U training on topics such as Gen 7 have seen an eight- to nine-times improvement in their top line.

But for those who may not have a chance to complete a full training module right away, we’re introducing a new series of 15-minute videos that will serve as a supplement to our SonicWall U training. These videos will provide a bite-sized look at a particular topic and can be shared across your team and with customers. In our GTM revamp of the SonicWall sales team four years ago, we moved to weekly mandatory training for the entire team — something even I continue to do — every week.

With the COVID-19 pandemic easing a bit in many places, we’ll be ramping up our in-person training and will continue reintroducing our regional roadshows. Our Sales Enablement team members have begun meeting partners and customers in person where appropriate, as well.

But as our Sales Enablement team hits the road, we recognize they may be unavailable while they’re in transit or with customers. To maintain a Sales Enablement presence that’s consistently available, we’ve begun investing in virtual SES. These team members are equipped with a variety of tools and will be available during working hours in case you need a quick response.

We’re also in the process of revamping our SonicWall Secure First Partner Program. We’ll be spending a considerable amount of time, effort and investment into improving this program from a partner standpoint, to offer high-quality training and to reward the commitment partners are making in SonicWall.

Like so many of our other initiatives, this one is built around acknowledging the work that our partners put in and continuing to learn how we can better align and better understand your needs and pain points.

Going forward, my key priority is ensuring we’re listening across the company to our partners — getting your input and soliciting your opinion to shape our initiatives and offerings, as opposed to just providing updates. We’ve always strived to be a partner-centric company, but we want to continue to grow in how we can better support and enable our partners across every function and team.

SonicWall Recognizes Partners, Distributors for Outstanding Performance in 2021

2021 was a banner year for SonicWall, and we owe a lot of our success to our partners and distributors in EMEA. This dedicated group has worked tirelessly to help safeguard our customers for well over a decade, leveraging SonicWall solutions and unmatched customer service to protect against the rising tide of cybercrime — and for this we offer our sincere and heartfelt thanks.

Even among this highly accomplished group, however, a select few have distinguished themselves. Out of a wide pool of nominees, one partner per region was chosen in each category to be recognized for outstanding performance in 2021. These selections were made based on factors such as annual turnover, portfolio distribution, online activities, project success rate and certification level, along with their level of commitment and feedback from their team.

“SonicWall’s success has always been dependent on delivering highly efficient security solutions through its valued partners and distributors,” said SonicWall Vice President EMEA, Terry Greer-King. “We are thrilled to acknowledge these extraordinary SonicWall SecureFirst partners who provide world-class security services to organizations of all sizes. We value the loyal relationships we’ve built with our partners and customers – and these awards are one way to recognize their outstanding work.”

We are pleased to announce the FY2022 SonicWall Award winners in the following categories:

United Kingdom

Ireland

Norway

Germany

Switzerland

Austria

Spain

Italy

France

Saudi Arabia

United Arab Emirates

South Africa

Netherlands & Belgium

 

SonicWall offers our utmost congratulations to all the award recipients — along with our considerable thanks for your outstanding achievements in 2021. Together, we can make 2022 even more successful!

Want to find out more about the benefits of the SonicWall SecureFirst Partner Program and how to join our valued partner team? Click here for all the details.

Upgrade Your SonicWall Next-Generation Firewall with ‘3 & Free’ Program

Some good things should never end.

One of the most successful promotions in company history, SonicWall’s ‘3 & Free’ incentive is now a permanent component of our Customer Loyalty program.

In an escalated cyber threat landscape, it’s more important than ever to ensure your organization’s networks, data and applications are protected against today’s most malicious cyberattacks, including the most recent Foreshadow processor exploits. In fact, in July 2018 alone, the average SonicWall customer faced:

  • 2,164 malware attacks (28 percent increase from July 2017)
  • 81 ransomware attacks (43 percent increase)
  • 143 encrypted threats
  • 13 phishing attacks each day
  • 1,413 new malware variants discovered each day by SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox with Real-Time Deep Memory InspectionTM

When you upgrade your SonicWall hardware you gain the latest in next-generation firewall (NGFW) technology and access to the SonicWall Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) service. It’s a cloud-based, multi-engine sandbox that stops both known and unknown cyberattacks from critically impacting your business.

What is the SonicWall ‘3 & Free’ Program?


Once a limited-time promotion, the SonicWall ‘3 & Free’ is now a mainstay offering to loyal SonicWall customers. It’s an easy, cost-effective way for customers to upgrade to the very latest SonicWall next-generation firewall appliance for free.

Eligible customers may receive a complimentary NGFW appliance by purchasing a bundle that includes a three-year subscription of the SonicWall Advanced Gateway Security Suite from their authorized SonicWall SecureFirst partner.

This security suite includes everything you need to stay protected against today’s modern attacks, including ransomware, encrypted threats, zero-day attacks and processor-based exploits. It offers:

  • Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) sandbox
  • Gateway Anti-Virus and Anti-Spyware
  • Intrusion Prevention Service
  • Application Control
  • Content Filtering Service
  • 24×7 Support

SonicWall’s exclusive security subscription service also includes SonicWall Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI). A patent-pending technology, RTDMI™ enables Capture ATP to detect and block malware that does not exhibit any malicious behavior or hides weaponry via encryption. This protects your organization from zero-day attacks, malicious PDFs and Microsoft Office files, and even chip-based Spectre, Foreshadow and Meltdown exploits.

Upgrade Your SonicWall Firewall

Ready to upgrade? Take advantage of our ‘3 & Free’ program to get the latest in SonicWall next-generation firewall technology — for free. To upgrade, contact your dedicated SecureFirst Partner or begin your upgrade process via the button below.

Explore Advantages of SonicWall Security As A Service

Don’t try this at home”¦.go with next-gen firewall experts

Cyber attacks are relentless, and increasing in volume, intensity and sophistication. The sophistication of these attacks is beyond your wildest imagining. Do you have the security expertise to guard your business and customer data yourself? Today, more organizations are outsourcing to Security-as-a-Service (SECaaS).

In this two-part blog, I will discuss the top advantages to securing your business with enterprise-class security solutions provided to you as a service. In this first blog, I’ll cover the first four core advantages of SECaaS. In the second, I’ll explore more why this service could work to fit your infrastructure.

Optimally, a Security-as-a-Service provider should enable you to do the following:

1. Outsource your network security to an experienced security provider

Maximize your security position by utilizing certified partners skilled in your next-gen firewalls and associated security technologies. With the right SECaaS solution, you can easily realize the benefits of having an experienced partner overseeing everything for you.

2. Have your SECaaS firewall solution expertly configured by certified engineers

Each business is unique and the firewalls should be built and configurable to fit your needs. Your Security-as-a-Service next-gen firewall solution should block threats on multiple entry points including those from employee laptops, mobile devices and desktops. (Now, even cameras have had malware loaded on them.) You will want custom SECaaS protection for retail, and address the need high-speed wireless network security. For private schools, you will want to protect students and the devices issued to them.

3. The efficiencies of a turn-key solution delivered to your doorstep

You will want your SECaaS solution to have a next-gen firewall, with gateway anti-malware, intrusion prevention and content filtering. All of it should be installed, configured, deployed and managed as one unit. Event data should be available through one reporting system to enable proactive monitor and reporting. Your SECaaS solution should identify threats before your business is impacted.

4. Mobile Mobile Mobile

Allow your employees to access your network while on the road on any device at any time. Your SECaaS should include secure mobile access and VPN for Windows, Apple iOS, Android devices, and enable guest vendors/contractors be able to use the network securely.

Find out how SonicWall Security-as- a-Service (SECaaS) can do it all for you. SonicWall SECaaS provides you with the same level of network security that NASA demands and protects your network from a wide range of emerging threats. Pay month to month for a solution that fits your security needs. SonicWall certified partners are relied upon every day and have gone through rigorous training and education. You will be so happy you did not try this at home.