Strong network security starts with strong policy — but even the best policies are ineffective without fast, centralized deployment. With SonicWall’s Network Security Management (NSM), partners can eliminate delays and ensure every customer gets consistent, compliant protection at scale.

Don’t look now, but your firewall may just be useless!

If you haven’t designed and deployed specific policies to your firewall, it has nothing to enforce, and the core purpose of your firewall is to enforce your policies. In fact, the deployment of firewalls must always begin with good governance and the creation of appropriate and effective policies.

What do you want to protect against? Specific applications? Specific protocols? Specific IP addresses? Traffic from specific geographic areas? Specific strings of text? Specific virus and other malware signatures?

If you’ve learned nothing else from these questions, recognize that effective policy development requires being extremely specific.

A Never-Ending Challenge

Policy development and deployment is by no means an initial installation event.

Every moment of every day, new threats are being released. Many are so pernicious and potentially so damaging that new policies must be developed and distributed as soon as they are detected “in the wild.”

Network management must review and revise policy governance each and every day and should expect to develop and deploy new policies regularly.

Policies Developed! What’s Next?

Once your policy has been developed and approved, the next step is to deploy it to your firewall. If you only have one firewall, that’s a quick and simple process driven by a console on your firewall’s interface.

For distributed networks with firewalls at various locations, the key is how quickly you can deploy your policy to all firewalls on the network. This is dependent upon your distribution methodology. In many cases, this involves sending someone to each location to implement the new policy. In some cases, there may be people stationed at remote locations who can receive the policy from you and deploy it locally.

This means that while you’re deploying your policy across your network, many locations may still be vulnerable to the threat you designed the policy to protect against. Only when all locations have been updated can you assure safety against that threat. This can create a very long period of exposure.

SonicWall Solution: Network Security Manager (NSM)

SonicWall Network Security Manager (NSM) is available in both on-premises and cloud-delivered software-as-a-service (SaaS) versions as part of SonicSentry, available in the SonicWall Managed Protection Security Suite (MPSS).

NSM ensures centralized, scalable, and efficient network security management, empowering businesses and MSPs to strengthen defenses, ensure compliance, and reduce operational costs by developing and deploying new policies to all network firewalls as quickly and accurately as possible.

To learn more about SonicWall NSM or sign up for a free trial, visit the NSM web page.