SonicWall tightens firewall fleet
SonicOS 5.8 is said to integrate real-time application visualisation dashboard and analysis tools, which gives IT managers options to visualise application traffic and determine application bandwidth consumption.
Administrators can control and allocate resources for critical apps, while blocking or controlling inappropriate activities.
Greg Young, VP of Research at Gartner, explained, "Firewalls have traditionally been a binary block/allow model. Stateful inspection firewalls can only control ports and IP addresses, so there is no context for what is in that Web session.
"Intrusion Prevention Systems can spot malware, but application control in next generation Firewalls can limit or control applications such as social media, and with granularity controlling which activities within a social media are allowed, and can allow critical applications get the bandwidth they need. Policies like ‘Facebook but no Farmville, and Facebook only uses less than 10% of connections and bandwidth during business hours’ are now possible.”
Additional SonicOS 5.8 features include:
- Content Filtering Enhancements: Provides administrators with flexible content policy including the ability to define heterogeneous application bandwidth management policies that utilise both website categorisation and application identification.
- NetFlow/IPFIX (Internet Protocol Flow Information Export): Flexible and open flow export protocol that enables any network monitoring solution to leverage SonicWall’s Application Identification and Visualisation.
- Port Aggregation/Link Redundancy: Combines multiple one-gigabit interfaces enabling visualisation and control in multi-gigabit deployments.
