SonicWall announces a range of public beta trials that demonstrate enhanced security capabilities of the company's automated real-time breach detection and prevention platform. The new offerings not only provide organizations with robust deployment options across on-premises, cloud and virtualized environments, but also protect endpoints within the network from today's advanced cyber threats.

"To better equip our customers to protect their businesses, brands and data, we're ensuring critical security capabilities are available - in an integrated, cohesive architecture - across the environments of their choice," said SonicWall CEO Bill Conner. "Organizations will be able to seamlessly deploy the security tools they want, when they want and where they want while eliminating both complexity and potential network vulnerabilities. This provides a bridge from where they are today to where they are going in the future."

To responsibly validate this customer-focused approach, SonicWall announces three new products for the beta release: SonicWall Capture Client, SonicWall Network Security (NSv) virtual next-generation firewalls and SonicWall virtual web application firewalls. In addition, the beta for SonicOS 6.5.1 includes support for new firewall APIs.

Each new offering helps extend advanced security controls for specific use cases and environments, giving organizations the ability to consolidate and integrate capabilities across a single infrastructure - regardless of the form factor or deployment method required.

"The long-standing ‘silo game' is changing. Organizations want to exercise cybersecurity best practices, but existing solutions are often too complex or cumbersome," said SonicWall CTO John Gmuender. "These public betas illuminate the path forward for enterprises, SMBs and MSSPs that need agility, flexibility and automation, and realistically align with how they want to conduct business."

Real-Time Endpoint Protection via SonicWall Capture Client

Highlighting the program is a beta for the SonicWall Capture Client, a new unified client platform that offers multiple endpoint cybersecurity capabilities, including next-generation malware protection and support for SSL/TLS decryption and inspection.

The SonicWall Capture Client, coupled with the SentinelOne engine, delivers advanced threat protection through the use of continuous behavior monitoring, machine learning and endpoint system rollback. When deployed with SonicWall firewalls, the Capture Client enables the analysis of encrypted traffic through the management and deployment of trusted SSL certificates used for deep packet inspection of SSL/TLS traffic (DPI-SSL).

"With its powerful real-time threat mitigation, remediation and rollback capabilities, the Capture Client allows customers to layer in more security controls to properly defend endpoints," said SentinelOne CEO and Co-Founder Tomer Weingarten. "It's a sophisticated marriage between automated network security and autonomous endpoint protection that will help eliminate a vast number of vulnerabilities for the typical customer environment."

Virtual Next-Generation Firewalls with Improved Cloud Management

SonicWall NSv virtual firewalls extend automated breach detection and prevention into public and private cloud infrastructure. SonicWall NSv is a full-featured firewall service - including the same security and performance capabilities as a firewall appliance - operating in a virtualized environment. It provides deep packet inspection, security controls and networking services equivalent to that of SonicWall physical firewalls.

The NSv series will be available in multiple virtual options, carefully packaged and optimized for a broad range of private cloud or virtualized deployment use cases, including software-defined data centers.

"We're in more and more discussions with end customers who are moving to hybrid infrastructures," Mike Johnson, CEO at Cerdant, a beta tester. "Now that we can offer organizations virtual options of the firewalls they already trust, they'll be able to simplify management, reduce development time, leverage intelligence and enhance security."

With intuitive cloud management, organizations gain simplified hybrid infrastructure management between virtualized versions of SonicWall next-generation firewalls and common management with physical SonicWall firewall appliances. Cloud management gives the ultimate visibility, agility and capacity to govern the entire SonicWall virtual and physical firewall ecosystem with greater clarity, precision and speed.

"The days of the one-size-fits-all network approach are gone," said Secure Designs CTO Ron Culler. "Organizations are moving fast. When they spin up new environments, they can't sacrifice performance and availability for security. Now they won't have to. It's a really compelling proposition that will be welcomed almost universally."

Web Application Firewall

Complementing the new portfolio, the new SonicWall web application firewall (WAF) provides context-aware protection for web applications hosted in public, private or hybrid cloud infrastructure. The WAF protects data by performing Layer 7-aware deep packet inspection on all web traffic (i.e., HTTP and HTTPS) while filtering unwanted web traffic from connecting to web applications.

The new WAF protects web applications from various attacks, such as those outlined by the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP), advanced threats like denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and context-aware exploits.

Integration, Automation for Hybrid Environments

The upcoming version of the firewall operating system, SonicOS 6.5.1, will introduce a rich set of APIs to allow scripting and automation of firewall functions. It will also include deeper integration with third-party tools.

The firewall APIs will help integrate management, ticketing and orchestration tools to seamlessly automate the security fabric. The OS also brings API-level integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) public cloud environments for simplified operation and interoperability with AWS VPC deployments.

Commercial availability of the new offerings is slated for the second quarter of 2018.