Security

SonicWALL Moves Beyond the CPE Box

The company's new goal is to deliver more value-added services so that its resellers can make more money.

by Alex Goldman ISP-Planet Managing Editor [June 23, 2006]

A pair of engineers from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based SonicWALL are visiting our offices to tell us that the company's not just about CPE anymore. Joe Levy, senior director of engineering, and Dave Parry, principal architect, are on tour talking to VARs. (We've written about SonicWALL's award-winning VAR program in Follow SonicWALL To A Professional Internet Industry.)

Levy says that the company's role used to be easy to describe. Nowadays, he notes, people expect more from their security providers. He's comfortable with describing the company as a provider of Unified Threat Management (UTM). But even that is quite broad, so we move on to specifics.

Levy says that a few years ago, every service had a specific port, so usage tracking was not complicated. "Today, everything hops across ports," he says.

ISPs, he notes, are most interested in tracking (and sometimes throttling) P2P networking. But in order to control traffic, you have to be able to classify it. That means looking beyond the bit headers into the payloads, examining the actual traffic to determine what it is doing.

Of course, success brings greater challenges. If you google "bypass sonicwall", Levy notes, you'll find that the company is now loathed by people in the 9 to 17 age group, as SonicWALL products have been installed in schools across the nation.

Sometimes, the product blocks specific actions that are visible, Levy says. "We can see the key exchange in Skype and block it," Levy says.

SonicWALL can also look for bad actors on the internet and block them before they do harm. "With stream-based analysis, we can sever the connections before the malicious code is executed," says Levy.

Growth through acquisitions
The company is offering new services developed in house, and is also acquiring companies with key skills. In November of 2005, the company acquired EnKoo and Lasso.

Lasso brought SonicWALL a data backup capability, and EnKoo added features to the company's VPN offering.

"EnKoo had a solution in the $20,000 to $70,000 range," says Levy. "Now we have on with truly disruptive pricing in the $600 to $2,000 range, and we're now number one in units shipped."

Growth through innovation
Every security company faces the challenge of processor speeds. As bandwidth grows faster than processing power, security companies need to find ways to do more with the hardware they already have. "We're now back to the point where processor intensive inspection is reaching the limits of the hardware," says Levy.

With sufficient overhead, a firewall rated for 1 Gbps can degrade to 300 Mbps, says Levy. Fast RAM and specialized processors can solve many problems, but the company has developed a method of traffic analysis that is more efficient without being less secure.

The box checks as little of each signature as possible, discarding the test the moment it doesn't check out, and moving on to the next signature.

The SonicWALL future
Levy says he knows of no planned acquisitions in SonicWALL's future. "We're digesting recent acquisitions," he says.

Parry says that the new companies have cultures that are very compatible with SonicWALL's. "They're like SonicWALL juniors," he tells us.

Instead, SonicWALL is focusing on adding features. Levy says the goal is to be able to scan any protocol, any attachment, looking for malware.

Legislation, he adds, is driving demand for data retention in businesses of all kinds.

When SonicWALL acquired enKoo and Lasso, the company's press release said the goal was to offer more services to make its VARs more profitable. The release said:

Today's move underscores SonicWALL's commitment to creating profitable opportunities for its channel partners by offering them an integrated portfolio of affordable alternatives to complex, expensive technology. SonicWALL's global network of reseller partners will now benefit from the ability to sell an end-to-end data protection suite from a single supplier that understands the unique requirements of SMBs.

That goal, it seems, will drive future developments at SonicWALL as well.

— End