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Whether you refer to it as the new business normal, the remote work revolution, or simply business continuity, the conclusion is the same: Everyone is remote, mobile, and unsecure. When the COVID-19 pandemic turned the way we do work on its head, SonicWall was there, led by visionary President and CEO Bill Conner, and armed with a new Boundless Cybersecurity model to help organizations stop the most evasive cyberattacks across limitless exposure points.

This new way of thinking has resonated with organizations around the globe, some of whom are still struggling to make the adjustment. And the cybersecurity world is paying attention. While the Boundless Cybersecurity model points to a company on the rise, the model itself rests on two equally stout pillars: experience and expertise.

In 1992, SonicWall was formed to provide best-in-class security services to enterprises, SMBs and government entities. Today, the company boasts over one million active security solutions trusted by more than 500,000 organizations in 215 countries and territories. While those in the tech industry had acknowledged the rising threat from hackers and viruses, at the time many businesses thought more about the lint in their mouse than they did cybercrime.

In the ensuing years, SonicWall has evolved from inception to boundless cybersecurity in stages:

  • Reactive: In the beginning, cybersecurity meant applying band-aids to emergencies that had already happened. Cyberthreats weren’t considered a business risk.
  • Aware: As threats became more common, businesses gradually gained an awareness of the threat landscape. This stage was characterized by the development of a perimeter mentality and ad hoc employment of security solutions.
  • Proactive: The shift from seeing cybersecurity as an optional product designed to fix isolated cases to recognizing it as an essential part of ensuring business continuity took a number of years, but its completion was marked by the creation of dedicated security teams and the adoption of advanced protection.
  • Predictive: As cybercrime became more prevalent and more dangerous, it was no longer enough to simply have security capable of detecting attacks that had already occurred. With high profile breaches and costly ransomware incidents on the rise, companies wanted layered protection with broader coverage, including SaaS, endpoint, network and mobile.
  • Boundless: Today, organizations are adopting a data-centric security posture, as they seek to secure a remote and mobile workforce and protect against evasive threats—wherever data resides.

Today, the challenge for organizations isn’t failing to recognize the need for adequate cybersecurity. In many cases, it is being able to afford the level of securityneeded and being able to find enough skilled individuals to implement and maintain it. As the number and type of threats and number and type of attack surfaces have skyrocketed, the ability to adequately counter them is increasingly constrained by two factors that are stubbornly stuck on planet earth: budget and headcount.

The increasing inabilityof organizations to meet the threats of tomorrow—or even today—with traditional cybersecurity solutions is so widely recognized that it has a name: the Cybersecurity Business Gap. Organizations that attempt to bridge the gap with legacy solutions, or by “throwing more bodies at the problem,” see their budgets suffer as a result. On the other hand, ignoring the gap puts businesses at risk of falling in and becoming lost forever under the crushing pressure of regulatory noncompliance, insurmountable ransomware demands and permanently tarnished reputation.

But the inadequacy of the traditional approach doesn’t mean this problem is insurmountable—it was exactly this scenario, in fact, that inspired the creation of the Boundless Cybersecurity model in the first place. By allowing its customers to know the unknown, unify visibility and control and leverage breakthrough economics, SonicWall’s new cybersecurity vision is closing the gap in ways that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

The Boundless Cybersecurity platform is able to handle more threats, across more attack surfaces, that are more sophisticated through a combination of technological advancement and deep market penetration. By leveraging real-time automation, zero-touch deployment, visual dashboards and more, this approach relieves staffing pressures, allowing them to focus on what counts. And every minute of every day, data streams in from every corner of the globe, constantly making these dynamic technologies smarter, faster, more aware and more reliable.

Best of all, these technologies—and the solutions they’re attached to — work in concert. The seams and blind spots that have long characterized many “integrated” solutions up until now have been eliminated. Users get the increased visibility that comes with a true integrated solution, and the control that comes with centralized, single-pane-of-glass management.As a result, administration — long the bane of cybersecurity departments everywhere — is drastically simplified.

The disruptive economics built into the Boundless Cybersecurity model also allows you to do more with less. During a time when many organizations are struggling, SonicWall is offering increasingly scalable security, meaning they only pay for what they need. As part of a longer-term commitment to offering lower TCO, SonicWall has also began offering the Boundless Cybersecurity Bundle—a package that allows users to take advantage of discounts that increase with the number of items purchased.

Solutions for a New Era

SonicWall has a unique approach to providing end-to-end security:

  • Verify unknown users; identify, authenticate and safeguard known and unknown remote users and employees
  • Provide seamless threat protection across all attack surfaces, including network, cloud, email, endpoints and apps
  • Leverage universal intelligence from SonicWall’s unmatched, layered threat network,which continuously collects data across 215 counties and territories
  • Apply deep learning to detect and act rapidly against emerging malware
  • Capture and identify in real-time by continuously isolating andanalyzing never-before-seen and potentially malicious files with multi-engine Capture Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) Sandbox
  • Block until verdict (80% resolved in < 2 seconds)
  • Catch what others don’t: Patent-pending Real Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI) leverages AI and machine learning to detect the most evasive threats and provide protection in real time

A cornerstone of Boundless Cybersecurity, SonicWall Secure Mobile Access (SMA) enables organizations to provide anytime, anywhere and any-device access to mission critical corporate resources. SMA’s granular access control policy engine, context-aware device authorization, application-level VPN and advanced authentication with single sign-on (SSO) empower organizations to quickly and securely protect and enable remote workforces. The award-winning SonicWall SMA unifies visibility and control across every attack surface, remote workforces and multiple generations of IT deployment.

SecureFirst Managed Security Service Provider (MSSPs) Program provides the licensing models, resources and tools needed to help MSSPs profitably scale and accelerate their managed security services businesses.

Visionary Leadership, Strong Partnership

SonicWall works closely with different partners to bring these industry-leading solutions to clients. The company works with solution providers that focus on serving organizations of a given size, who have experience configuring installment and maintaining security solutions, as well as providingongoing service and support for customers.

Hundreds of thousands of organizations partner with SonicWall to help meet their cybersecurity goals, tapping into the company’s deep expertise in securing remote workforces and massively distributed IT—on premises, in the cloud, or on secure Network as a Service. SonicWall’s extensive network of certified partners are part of the company’s larger commitment to a customer-first culture, and ensure customers never go it alone.

SonicWall works with technology partners that provide adjacent offerings, allowing the company to offer even more security solutions for its customers. For example, SonicWall partners with SentinelOne to provide next-generation antivirus. And in November 2019, SonicWall and Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) provider Perimeter 81 signed a mutual OEM agreement to enhance their product offering in the cybersecurity market by delivering Secure Network as a Service.

When partnering with SonicWall, partners know they’ll be taken care of, thanks in part to the efforts of SonicWall President and CEO Bill Conner. Conner has helped grow SonicWall into one of the world’s most trusted network security companies since he took the helm in 2016. Conner has leveraged his 30 years of experience across high tech industries to become a corporate turnaround expert and a global leader in security, data and infrastructure.

Under his leadership, SonicWall has surpassed financial and operational goals, delivering

  • Record partner registrations, totaling more than 21,000 global channel partners
  • Strong pipeline growth in new partner deal registrations
  • Record number of new product releases.

Moving Securely Toward a Post-Pandemic World

According to Conner, IT departments have been largely focused on making sure their dispersed workforces were connected to the tools and data needed to remain operational at a time when it seemed that the world had stopped. But now that the adjustment period is well underway, IT departments have begun to realize that the countless number of new endpoints they were charged with safeguarding could make for a much larger and less secure target.

When businesses around the world introduced work-from-home policies due to COVID-19, the number of mobile workers increased dramatically, leaving many organizations scrambling for virtual private network (VPN) licenses. This proved to be an inflection point for leadership to recognize that employees couldn’t be relied on to ensure the security of their own mobile devices, particularly with cybercriminals ramping up operations to take advantage of the confusion and security challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations are also discovering that many employees are embracing work-from-home, meaning that recruitment and retention efforts may require remote-work policies similar to what we see currently.

Conner believes that the continued changes in the business world will occur alongside theevolution in the threat landscape, as more types of more sophisticated threats are introduced at an increasingly quicker pace. If the past year has taught us anything, it’s that prognostications are largely useless. But if the past is any indication, no matter what changes are in store for cybersecurity and the business world as a whole, SonicWall will be there, helping businesses secure their ever-increasingly remote, mobile and unsecure workforces with agile protection and scalable economics.