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 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.

The on-premises solution enables organizations to centrally and reliably manage a single small network to one or more enterprise-class deployments with the flexibility to scale without increasing management and administrative overhead. NSM offers many salient features:

• 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.

• High Availability that allows two identical NSMs to be configured to provide a reliable continuous connection to the public internet.
• Azure and KVM hypervisor deployments.
• Account Lockout feature, designed to prevent unauthorized access to the Network Security Manager environment and other brute-force attacks, social engineering, and phishing. This disables the user account if incorrect passwords are entered after a specified number of failed attempts during a given period. Admin can set the lockout duration until the locked account is released either after a specified time or manually done by an administrator when three unsuccessful log in attempts in 15 minutes are exceeded.
• Certificate management feature that enables a user interface to facilitate the management of digital certificates for all Network Security Manager managed firewalls. This enhances trust established between parties in a secure communication session.
• NSM adds support for the firewall series Gen 7 NSa 2700 and TZ Series (270, 370, and 470) running SonicOS as well as NSsp and Gen 7 NSv, with multi-tenancy and unified policy management features.
• Login To Unit that provides admins a fast and easy access to the managed firewall device-level UI directly from the device inventory page of Network Security Manager.

• Multi-Device Upgrade Feature to upgrade multiple firewalls from a group of devices in NSM instead of manually upgrading each firewall. Admins can execute them using NSM APIs as well.

• Security feature to grant admin rights based on specific IP address ranges. The IP restrictions can be added in 3 formats - single IP, an IP range, or a specific network with a subnet mask.

• Configure or edit virtual or network interfaces using templates.

NSM can manage both Gen6 and Gen7 SonicWall firewalls. SonicOS 6.5.4.6 is the recommended version, but NSM can on-board the older Gen6 Firewall versions as well.