Why You Must Upgrade to SonicWall TZ Firewall

From chatbots for answering customer queries to industrial robots, digital technologies are taking over the world. But with digital transformation, the risk of cyber threats also increases.

According to a report from PurpleSec, a US-based cyber security company, cybercrimes have increased by 600% since the onset of Covid-19 pandemic. Businesses are constantly challenged to defend their networks and protect their data against ever-evolving cyber threats.

One of the most effective ways used as a defense mechanism is firewall installation. However, what is often neglected is that firewall upgrades are as important, if not more, as firewall installations. Having a legacy firewall for your business is ineffective against advanced cyber threats these days.

An aging firewall can be worse than having no firewall since attackers can exploit its vulnerabilities to attack the protected network. Due to this, using an up-to-date firewall system becomes an indispensable choice for businesses.

Keeping this in mind, numerous cybersecurity providers have launched next-generation firewall solutions to help businesses. One of the most reliable cyber security solutions’ companies, SonicWall, offers TZ firewalls (TZ 350 and TZ 400) as a part of its next-generation products for SMBs.

It has advanced security and networking features to detect sophisticated attacks without any complex setup to install or manage.

This article discusses the benefits of SonicWall TZ Firewall to help you decide if upgrading to SonicWall TZ Firewall is worth the investment.

Impact of Work from Home Culture

According to Gartner, growth of the remote workforce will continue worldwide. India will produce one of the largest remote employees, with one-third of the total working population going remote by 2022.

What comes along is the responsibility to ensure secure data access from anytime and anywhere via several VPN connections. However, the existing firewalls installed by companies cannot protect the data stored in the devices of the rising number of remote employees at once.

Fortunately, the latest SonicWall TZ series can support a much larger number of SSL-VPN clients. For instance, the TZ400 firewall supports 100 SSL-VPN clients and the TZ350 supports 75 SSL-VPN clients. This number is quite large compared to TZ 205 and TZ 215, which only enable 10 SSL-VPN clients.

Benefits of Upgrading to Advanced SonicWall TZ Firewall

• Better Protection Against Advanced Attacks
• Extra Capabilities without Extra Cost
• Support for More Concurrent Users
• Faster DPI Inspection
• Higher Speed to Process Larger Traffic Volume
• Higher Wi-Fi Speed
• More VLANs for Better Performance
• Larger Onboard Memory

• Better Protection Against Advanced Attacks

New-gen SonicWall TZ firewalls provide SonicWall Capture advanced threat protection (ATP) service. This multi-engine sandbox service can protect businesses and organizations from malware, new ransomware, and side-channel attacks.

With Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI), it can catch malware faster and with a lower false-positive rate. SonicWall reports that Capture ATP subscribers are secured against more than 1,000 new attacks every business day.

• Extra Capabilities without Extra Cost

While several firewall vendors exist, many still don’t offer TSL/SSL inspection capabilities. Without this security feature, cybercriminals can easily misuse the traffic encrypted by TLS/SSL standards for accessing your network. Other vendors do offer these capabilities but at additional cost.

SonicWall firewalls come with a DPI-SSL license by default. Moreover, legacy firewalls do not enable single-sign-on (SSO) technology for as many users as advanced SonicWall firewalls do.

This feature reduces IT support costs, as more users can access a single ID leading to lower complaints. Hence, advanced TZ firewalls are an ideal choice for businesses and organizations.

• Support for More Concurrent Users

Advanced firewalls allow more active user sessions simultaneously by supporting a larger number of concurrent connections per second. Compared to legacy firewalls like TZ105, TZ205, and TZ215; TZ350 and TZ400 series can ensure secure sessions for more users at once.

• Faster DPI Inspection

With the DPI-SSL license, SonicWall TZ 350 and 400 firewalls effectively stop unauthorized data transfer attempts. They offer up to 24 times faster deep packet inspection (DPI) without affecting performance compared to legacy firewalls.

This speed is important as network bandwidth requirements are higher these days due to increased video streaming, SaaS apps and tools, among others.

• Higher Speed to Process Larger Traffic Volume

One of the major ways a firewall protects your network is by blocking undesired incoming network traffic. However, legacy firewalls are not efficient enough to manage large volumes of network traffic necessary for modern threat processing.

Businesses can benefit from more high-speed security processors (1.2 GHz and 800 MHz) in TZ350 and TZ400.

• Higher Wi-Fi Speed

Slow Internet speed can take away focus from work and reduce productivity. Legacy firewalls only support 802.11n wireless standard (Wi-Fi 4).

With next-gen firewalls like SonicWall TZ 350 and TZ 400, employees can have a safe and better experience in terms of reliability, performance, and range with 802.11ac wireless standard (Wi-Fi 5). These also support 802.11ac Wave 2 access points for increasing the maximum possible speed for wireless networking.

• More VLANs for Better Performance

VLANs are important to avoid changing VLAN groups or reconfiguring the network when users change VLAN groups. SonicWall TZ400 and TZ350 firewalls enable the protection of more VLANs than legacy firewalls like TZ 205 and TZ 215. (50 and 25 compared to 10 and 20 respectively).

An upgrade can especially help organizations with employees working in remote locations. With this, organizations can segment devices and users into additional groups without any hardware costs while improving security and performance.

• Larger Onboard Memory

Legacy firewalls do not have enough on-board memory to provide security to the ever-growing number of users on the network. Newly launched firewalls have larger memory (up to four times in the SonicWall TZ350 and TZ400) to store more users, policies and rules, and log messages.

Hence, the organizations can use a single TZ firewall for a larger userbase and enable easier reporting.

Conclusion

Whether you are a new user or need a firewall upgradation, check out SonicWall TZ Firewall today. There are different models for SMBs that you can choose as per your requirements. If your organization has remote and branch locations, it can be perfect for you.