SonicWall Continues MSSP, MSP Push With New Platform, Firewalls

SonicWall executives are aggressively building the company’s offerings for MSSPs, MSPs, and other partners as they look at becoming the go-to security vendor for SMBs and mid-market enterprises, a population increasingly targeted by threat actors as per the company.

It’s part of the California-based company's high-profile transformation from a firewall provider into a complete cybersecurity vendor, with a stronger focus on MSSPs and MSPs as key partners in securing and protecting small and midsize companies.

CEO Bob VanKirk, who took over as the CEO in 2022, told MSSP Alert in January that “early on, we just decided we have to take a relentless focus on supporting our partners, understanding where they're going, understanding their pain points, understanding what's keeping them up at night. How do we grow their businesses? If we position them successfully, we'll do just fine.”

Over the past couple of months, SonicWall has continued that drumbeat. In March, the company rolled out SonicSentry MXDR [managed extended detection and response], an end-to-end managed threat protection that MSPs can use to safeguard their customer’s attack surface, backed by a security operation center (SOC) and network operations center (NOC).

When releasing the company’s Annual Cyber Threat Report in February highlighting a “continued onslaught of cyberattacks” on SMBs, VanKirk stated that “now more than ever, businesses need the expertise of an MSP/MSSP backed by with real-time threat monitoring and SOC capabilities. Legacy security solutions are no longer enough.”

New MSP Platform

SonicWall took another step this week, introducing two new firewalls for midsized businesses and a collection of services for MSPs backed by its proprietary SonicSentry NOC, continuing a trend in the cybersecurity industry of providing tools and services via tightly-integrated platforms than as individual point solutions.

VanKirk noted that with the launch of SonicWall’s Managed Protection Service Suite (MPSS), “we are bringing together industry-leading firewall threat performance, cloud-based ZTNA [zero trust network architecture] to replace legacy VPNs, co-managed NOC and SOC services and an industry-first cybersecurity warranty so MSPs have every tool they need to ensure the businesses they serve are safe, in a scalable and cost-effective way.”

The new Gen 8 NSa 2800 and NSa 3800 firewalls, MPSS, SonicPlatform for managing the company’s hardware and services, ZTNA, and SonicWall AI for Monitoring and Insight (SAMI) are included in a single offering for MSPs.

A Growing Partner Business

SonicWall Chief Product Officer Peter Burke said the company's executives haven been listening to the needs of MSPs over the past couple of years.

“As a result, we have made dramatic improvements to the features and scalability of our firewall management platform and integrated them into a unified platform for account, security, and network management that should simplify use and make partners more efficient,” Burke said.

The continuing shift to providing MSPs, MSSPs, and other organizations among its 17,000 partners with cloud-native solutions and co-managed security services is proving to be a boon to SonicWall.

The vendor’s latest quarterly earning showed a 68% year-over-year jump in managed security services bookings and 70% growth in zero trust and Cloud Security Edge (CSE) bookings quarter-over-quarter. SonicWall also had four consecutive quarters of year-over-year growth in transacting partners.