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In what SonicWall is calling a major release of its Secure Mobile Access (SMA) product, the vendor – as an independent company once again – on Tuesday announced the SonicWall 1000 Series OS 12.0.

The updated product boasts global high availability, blended single sign-on (SSO) technology; advanced security; and an intuitive user experience.

“With this release, what we’re trying to do is focus on the robustness of the service and some of the pain points you have if the service is down. So it’s about being able to provide decent SLAs, a good OpEx, and making sure your service is robust and up all of the time,” James Whewell, director of product management at SonicWall, shared with us.

The global high availability delivers robust remote access via global traffic optimization for traffic load balancing with zero-impact failover for high resiliency across data centers. SonicWall uses pooled licensing, so when a company needs to invoke disaster recovery (DR) for business continuity, the licenses dynamically move to the nodes that are available — along with the users who are automatically moved as are the sessions.

“This gives a global high availability active-active model,” Whewell said. In the U.S., SMA-pooled license subscriptions start at 35 cents per user, per month.

Cloud and SSO is another featured focus for the new version that incorporates a single sign on to get to a portal where a user can access resources whether they’re in the cloud or on premises.

Also in version 12, SonicWall allows customers to use the identity provider they’re used to provide gateway protection. Security compliance and data protection utilize the latest ciphers and strongest encryptions, including the Suite B cryptographic algorithms, according to SonicWall.

An improved and refreshed intuitive user experience is also part and parcel of the new release.

“You can’t be the most secure product in the world that’s terrible to use — or you’ll get shadow IT where users will choose to use the thing that’s easiest for them to use,” said Whewell.

The new SonicWall SMA 1000 Series OS 12.0 is available at no cost to the installed base of SonicWall SMA customers with a support contract in place.

Bill Odell, SonicWall vice president of corporate marketing, noted that the company does well in the SMB and distributed environment sectors, such as campus, retail or general organization, with various networks that people need access to — or mobile users.

The product moves exclusively through the channel. Odell noted that the company’s strategy is to sell additional products in the portfolio.

“This release gives partners another opportunity to provide more of a total solution to their customers,” he said.