In addition to the new firewall, SonicWall made multiple other product announcements, including a version of their Capture Security appliance for closed networks, and updates of Next Generation Analytics, Network Security Manager, and Wi-Fi Cloud Manager, the latter of which is now Wireless Network Manager.

SonicWall has announced a refresh of a mid-range model in its NSa, next-generation firewall lineup, the NSa 3700, which replaces the NSa 3650. In addition, they have made several product updates. These include a new version of their SonicWall Capture Security appliance [CSa] built for closed networks, the move of SonicWall Next-Generation Analytics 3.0 into a new cloud architecture, an updated SonicWall Network Security Manager, and a rebrand and enhancement of the old WiFi Cloud Manager so that access points and switches can now be managed through the same interface.

“We began refreshing our NSa line last year in November, starting at the bottom with the entry-level NSa 2700,” said Kayvon Sadeghi, Senior Director of Product Marketing at SonicWall. “The NSa 3700 is the next one up. It is an enterprise grade firewall with a low TCO, which is aimed at retail, K-12, government agencies and some enterprises. Those are what we think are the sweet spots. We have seen a 60% ransomware increase from last year, while COVID has caused most company revenues to plummet or at best stay the same. That makes it even more important for them to have value.”

A major priority with the NSa 3700 is a big jump in performance, with 22,500 connections per second, and support for up to 750,000 concurrent DPI connections and up to 3,000 site-to-site VPN tunnels.

“We have determined that the performance is 2.6x better than the NSa 3650, at a price that is almost the same as the older model,” Sadeghi said. “The better performance comes from 128 GB of storage, a higher number of connections and a higher number of VPN tunnels. Good capacity for VPN in a next-gen firewall became more important last year, because of the work from home trend. There is a 50% increase on the number of VPN tunnels we can handle with this. The higher port density and increased memory increases the number of VPNs that can be connected.”

Sadeghi stated that partners should be excited about the NSa 3700 for a very good reason –  it will help them make more money.

“The NSa 3700 is a very exciting product,” he said. “In particular, that higher VPN connectivity is important today for supporting remote workforces at reasonable cost.”

SonicWall also announced that its SonicWall Capture Security appliance (CSa) 1000 – which is their Capture APT sandboxing solution in an appliance form factor – has now been made suitable for the government and compliance market, which need closed, air-gapped solutions for regulatory reasons.

“Our recent 2021 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report showed a 21% increase in ransomware attacks against government last year,” Sadeghi said. “This version of our CSa was built for closed networks. It’s a great opportunity for our channel to go after government agencies or any customer that has these kinds of compliance mandates that require a network be closed.”

This new CSa 1.2 is awaiting its FIPS-140-2 certification.

“We were hoping to have the certification for the launch, and we were very close, but not quite there,” Sadeghi indicated.

SonicWall Next-Generation Analytics 3.0 was another part of the announcement.

“With this version, we have moved our Analytics into a brand new cloud architecture, to get ready for cloud-era agility,” Sadeghi said. “The cloud  elasticity allows us to expand up or down depending on workload and adds an additional 25% to performance, making the analytics faster.”

An updated version of SonicWall Network Security Manager [NSM], Version 2.2 has also been released. It provides cloud-native firewall management.

“We have made it easier to manage larger firewalls, with greater usability through unified policies and template,” Sadeghi said. “We have also strengthened security to define access and manage roles, allowing lock-down of accounts, limiting log-ins to specific addresses, and providing improved 2FA, including a new choice of receiving the code with the app or through email. We have also improved deployment flexibility, with improved High Availability, KVM and IaaS support. The idea here is to make it easy to manage large number of firewalls from a central place.”

The old SonicWall Wi-Fi Cloud Manager has been rebranded as SonicWall Wireless Network Manager, and has been upgraded to unify visibility and management by including SonicWall network switches and SonicWave wireless access points into a single solution.

“The genesis of this change is that we had customers who were managing both access points and switches, but had to log in to two different UIs,” Sadeghi said. “This streamlines it into one single interface for both AP and switches, which reduces operational costs, and also the potential for misconfiguration.”