DNS - SonicWALL's Sweeney Suggests Firewalls Help Prioritize Bandwidth for Apps

Recently at Interop 2010 in New York, TMC’s CEO, Rich Tehrani (News - Alert), interviewed SonicWALL’s VP of Product Management, Patrick Sweeney. 

Recently TMC (News - Alert) reported that SonicWALL (News - Alert), which sells intelligent network security and data protection products, announced the availability of the SSL VPN 5.0 for its Secure Remote Access (SRA) 1200 and 4200 SSL VPN appliances.

The new firmware release from SonicWALL introduces High Availability and Layer-7 Load Balancing, “providing customers' remote access availability while allowing for flexible, fast growth,” company officials said.

Sweeney said there’s “a new generation of firewalls and security” coming out these days. “It’s not just cost-centered type stuff. It’s about what can a firewall do for you to make your company more productive.”

Good firewalls have the ability to inspect stuff as it comes through, Sweeney said. “They’re looking for the bad stuff: the trojans, the malware. But if you’re looking for the bad stuff, can you also look for the good stuff?” He spoke of firewalls being able to identify the productive applications passing through, and bandwidth-prioritize the most important ones.

While accessible on a broad range of devices, smartphone users running Google Android, Apple iOS 4, Windows Mobile and Symbian (News - Alert) operating systems will also benefit via SonicWALL's reverse proxy and ActiveSync offerings.

SSL VPNs have been parts of large enterprise infrastructures for a while, but small and medium businesses increasingly rely on such tools to provide them with the same anywhere/ anytime computing and security that large institutions have. With the introduction of High Availability, IT managers and business owners “will benefit from significantly enhanced network uptime and performance using the Active-Passive configuration,” SonicWALL officials said.