SonicWALL Channel Partners to Profit from Extended Target Market Addressed by Major Firmware Release

SonicWALL, a leading provider of integrated security, productivity and mobility solutions, has announced several important new features in todays major firmware release, SonicOS 3.0, that will bring many new business opportunities, especially in terms of managed services, for its Channel partners. The defining feature of SonicOS 3.0 is Gateway Anti-Virus a real-time, patent pending technology which protects businesses of all sizes against threats originating from the Internet or between internal network segments. It is the only solution on the market to allow a very high volume of traffic and files of any size to be scanned simultaneously at the gateway.

New features available in SonicOS 3.0 will help expand business opportunities enormously, said Mark Carver, business development director at Fairbridge Communications. Its powerful gateway anti-virus capability enables us to offer customers an additional anti-virus service layer to complement any solution they may already have on their host systems, he continued, while dynamic routing, VLAN and Active Directory support and are just what many of our larger accounts are looking for.

Gateway Anti-Virus is a scalable, high-speed anti-virus solution which provides enterprise-class threat management at a fraction of the cost of competitive products. It is the first solution on the market to use a per packet scanning engine. This means SonicWALLs is the only solution of its kind that can handle extremely large file sizes and hundreds of concurrent downloads, offering ultimate scalability and performance for todays networked environment. Gateway Anti-Virus delivers intelligent, real-time scanning and virus protection directly on the security gateway and also combines SonicWALLs Intrusion Prevention Service 2.0 and spyware protection.

Additional capabilities supported by SonicOS 3.0 include spam filtering, as well as enterprise-class features such as VLAN support and dynamic routing. SonicOS 3.0 and Gateway Anti-Virus will be available across SonicWALLs entire TZ 170 series and PRO series product lines, supported by a subscription service for signature updates, and current users of SonicWALLs latest appliances will not need to undertake hardware upgrades.

SonicOS 3.0 features a patent-pending deep packet inspection engine. Delivering virus protection directly on the security gateway, Gateway Anti-Virus matches downloaded, e-mailed and compressed files against an extensive database of signatures containing viruses, worms, Trojans, vulnerabilities and spyware continuously updated by a combination of sources including SonicWALLs SonicAlert Team. Gateway Anti-Virus is capable of scanning dozens of protocols using SonicWALLs stream-based protocol analyzer for a complete and layered approach to anti-virus protection.

Our existing customers will be delighted that they can benefit from Gateway Anti-Virus without needing to upgrade their current hardware, said Matthew Medeiros, president and chief executive officer at SonicWALL. Furthermore, our channel partners now have an even more compelling proposition for new customers. Once again, SonicWALL is demonstrating new levels of affordability and price-performance.

"By incorporating Gateway Antivirus into the SonicOS, SonicWALL has boldly entered the newly defined United Threat Management security appliance market," said Charles Kolodgy, research director at IDC. Additionally, it is quite rare to see products upgraded to this level of capability across the board. Customers will benefit because existing products can take advantage of the solution with the operating software upgrade, and the channel will have an opportunity to meet customers critical pain points.

One in five machines is infected by viruses every month, and over 80 per cent of viruses are proliferated by email. According to IDCs Enterprise Network Security Survey of February 2004, when asked to identify their most serious security challenge, most respondents pointed to lack of resources, confirming that the challenging array of threats and technology outstrips security and network administration staff capacity. SonicWALL Gateway AV is ideally positioned to meet these challenges because our solution offers more comprehensive protection on a single platform, reduced complexity and simplified implementation.

Network administrators can manage Gateway Anti-Virus, deploy host-based anti-virus, and manage remote installations using SonicWALLs Global Management System. SonicWALL Gateway Anti-Virus includes a pro-active alerting mechanism that notifies network administrators when a new threat is discovered. Granular policy tools and an intuitive user interface enable administrators to configure a custom set of detection or prevention policies tailored to their specific network environment.