About NSM

SonicWall Network Security Manager (NSM) is the next generation firewall management application that provides a holistic approach to security management. The approach is grounded in the principles of simplifying and automating various tasks to achieve better security operation and decision-making, while reducing the complexity and time required. NSM gives you everything you need for firewall management; comprehensive visibility and granular control and the capacity to govern the entire SonicWall network security operations with greater clarity, precision, and speed. This is all managed from a single, function-packed interface that can be accessed from any location using a browser-enabled device. Firewalls can be centrally managed to provision all of the network security services with a single-pane-of-glass experience.

For ease of deployment, this security management platform is available as SaaS (Software as a Service) and as an On-Premises offering. The on-premises solutions can be installed on ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, or Azure system. It is accessible on-demand, via the cloud, with virtually unlimited system scalability to support multiple tenants with thousands of security modes under each one. The solution's redundant and distributed architecture enables organizations to centrally and reliably manage a single small network to multiple enterprise-class deployments. It has the flexibility to scale without increasing management and administrative overhead.

NSM offers many salient features:

• On-board hundreds of devices with Zero-Touch Deployment easily
• Group devices based on geographic location, business functions or customers with Device Groups
• Enforce consistent security across all your devices with Device Templates
• Quickly decide in real time what policy actions to take against any threat using detailed reporting and powerful analytics
• Centrally configure policies with the Unified Policy Management feature. Unified Policy Management provides the integrated management of various security policies for enterprise-grade firewalls.
• Easily configure devices with two new template types (in addition to the master golden configuration) for SonicOS and SonicOSX devices . It helps take configuration from baseline devices and apply it to the other devices or groups.

NSM can manage all Gen 6, Gen 7, and Gen 8 SonicWall firewalls, but SonicOS 6.5.5.1 is the recommended minimum version.

NSM adds support for the firewall series NSsp and Gen 7 NSv, with multi-tenancy and unified policy management features.

NSM On-Premises also provides distinctive features like High Availability (HA), Closed Network, two factor-authentication (2FA) for stronger security and increased productivity and flexibility, and NSM On-Premises supports standalone and multi-node deployments which provides flexible and scalable deployment options.

• The High Availability feature allows two identical SonicWall firewalls to be configured to provide a reliable continuous connection to the NSM On-Prem servers.
• The Closed Network support feature is ideal for customers that run one or more private networks that are completely shut-off from the outside environment. Customers can license the NSM managed firewall without contacting License Manager (LM) or MySonicWall (MSW), when onboarding and patching SonicWall firewall to preserve the privacy and security of the closed networks.
• NSM On-Premises also provides an added level of security with the two-factor authentication to address the increasing number of cyber security attacks.
• In standalone deployment, NSM On-Premises takes care of firewall management, reporting and analytics in single NSM installation and in multi-node deployment reporting and analytics function can be taken care by NSM reporting agents.

The latest Network Security Manager On-Premises version 3.2.0 is based on the SonicCoreX platform which supersedes the original SonicCore platform used with earlier versions of NSM.

The NSM 3.2.0 uses the Command Line Interface (CLI) as compared to previous NSM versions using Management Console. CLI is a powerful tool that will enable you to configure networking and even perform backups and upgrades. Details on the CLI commands are present under Command Line Interface.

For more information on the Saas features, refer to Network Security Manager Administration Guide for SaaS.

For more information on the NSM On-Premises features, refer to Network Security Manager Administration Guide for On-Premises.