SonicWALL Marries Analytics to Firewall

Next-generation firewalls make it possible to collect information about the attributes of specific types of applications. To leverage that information, SonicWALL is now rolling out tools that essentially eliminate the need to deploy dedicated appliances to collect that same information, said Jan Sijp, SonicWALL director of product management.

The new offerings include Global System Management 7.0, Analyzer and Scrutinizer, which collectively give organizations both real-time and historical application performance trends. Scrutinizer is based on code that SonicWALL has licensed from Plixer.

The significance of these tools is that they lower the cost of making application analysis tools for IT organizations once they migrate to next-generation firewall technology that can identify and segment different types of application data and network protocols.