WatchGuard Technologies is rolling out the next generation of its
Firebox rackmount systems that offer MSPs and MSSPs more security and management capabilities at a time when their clients are increasingly adopting distributed and hybrid IT models.
The five models in WatchGuard’s new Firebox M Series, announced this week, will deliver enterprise-grade security and performance to networks that continue to grow as they stretch across multiple sites and into the cloud.
“As organizations evolve toward hybrid and distributed models, networks are handling more encrypted traffic, cloud applications, and remote connections than ever before,”
Jay Lindenauer, vice president of network security at the Seattle, Washington-based company. "Growing organizations can’t afford complexity, downtime, or runaway costs.”
The Firebox M Series “addresses this shift, enabling businesses to have the same security protection for both in-office and remote workforces, with twice the performance of the previous generation of models, and is customized to scale alongside business needs, without the premium price tag.”
An Expanding IT Universe
The trend toward distributed and hybrid infrastructure will continue, bringing with it additional management and security challenges. According to Flexera’s annual State of the Cloud Report last year, 73% of organizations had
adopted a hybrid cloud model.
Notably, in this year’s report,
Flexera found that organizations are increasingly
relying on MSPs to manage the complexity of their cloud workloads. For enterprises, 62% said they were using MSPs to manage at least some of the workloads – up from 56% last year – while 48% of SMBs said the same, a 12% increase over 2024.
Distributed IT environments also increase the attack surfaces for organizations, with
Scale Computing writing that the “decentralization of infrastructure across diverse sites dramatically
increases the potential for security gaps. Each remote location becomes a new target for attackers and a new compliance risk for IT leaders.”
Common attack vectors include weak network links, as well as insecure edge devices and web-exposed interfaces, according to the hyperconverged infrastructure and edge computing solution vendor.
Bolstering the Security Portfolio
The Firebox M Series systems are part of WatchGuard’s larger cache of offerings designed to address such challenges. The systems themselves – from the M295 for small enterprises or regional offices to the M395 for retail sites and small and midsize enterprises that operate multiple branches to the highest-end M695 for MSP- and MSSP-hosted environment and data-intensive use cases – offer twice the performance of their predecessors and can scale as businesses do, according to the vendor.
They also integrate with WatchGuard’s Unified Security Platform, designed for both self-managed and MSP-managed environments, and have the vendor’s FireCloud Total Access zero-trust network access solution for protecting remote workers.
Evolving Roles for MSSPs, MSPs
Such capabilities are important for MSSPs and MSPs as their roles within organizations evolve, Lindenauer said.
“Their role has shifted from device management to full lifecycle protection, which includes deploying, monitoring, and responding across networks, endpoints, and identities,” he said, adding that the Firebox M Series “combine powerful, real-world performance with centralized, multi-tenant management, offering a second optional power supply for resiliency against certain power disruptions, integrated XDR [extended detection and response] and MDR [managed detection and response]capabilities, and flexible licensing through WatchGuard Cloud.”
Lindenauer noted that its WatchGuardONE partner program includes more than 17,000 security resellers and service providers that work with more than 250,000 customers. The vendor only sells through the channel, he said.
WatchGuard this year has been building up its MDR capabilities. In January, the company
bought ActZero to bolster the MDR service that it offers to MSSPs and MSPs, a service that the vendor launched more than two years ago. In June, WatchGuard
rolled out Total MDR, a service unifying the company’s detection and response services onto a single platform.
