Making the Case for Faster Wireless Firewalls

Written by Mike Vizard
August 14, 2015

As more mobile devices use the wireless bandwidth on your customer networks, you need to make sure your firewalls can handle the traffic. Here's a new offering from Dell designed to address this opportunity for MSPs.

Instead of relying on traditional desktops, more workers than ever are using mobile devices to access applications for their jobs. That has put a lot of extra stress on wireless networks. And as a result, interest has spiked in next generation 801.11ac wireless networks that provide the higher bandwidth needed to support hundreds of devices simultaneously.

The problem is that all that network traffic is now trying to flow through a firewall that was never designed to cope with that volume of traffic. With that issue in mind Dell has unveiled a Dell SonicWALL TZ Wireless Firewall Series that Dell claims is four times fasters than rival firewalls offerings for wireless networks.

Kent Shuart, product marketing manager for Dell SonicWALL, said Dell views faster firewalls as a major new opportunity for managed security service providers (MSSPs) that will be increasingly asked to manage and secure these new generation of 802.11ac wireless networks. The issue those MSSPs face, said Shuart, is two-fold. No matter how fast the wireless network might be, actual throughput to the mobile devices is limited by the performance of the firewall on those networks.

Attacks on firewalls

At the same time, attacks being made against those firewalls are rising in terms of volume as more brute force attack designed to essentially disrupt delivery of network services become more common. That means that MSSPs will need to deploy faster, more robust wireless firewalls, said Shuart.

The simple fact of the matter is that the wireless network is now the primary network most end users rely on. But as many of those organizations make the shift to 802.11ac wireless networks many of them have come to realize that managing a wireless network where every user has three or more devices is more than they bargained for when they finally acquiesced to the demands of their end users. As a result, MSPs are finding that the rise of mobile computing is driving more opportunities their way.

Of course, deploying a wireless network is one thing; actually be able to secure it is quite another thing altogether not only for the MSSP, but also for the internal IT department.