SonicWall Adds Teeth To Content Security Manager Appliance

SonicWall on Thursday took the wraps off its Content Security Manager (CSM) 3200 appliance, which protects against threats at the gateway and the desktop.

The CSM 3200, a more powerful version of the CSM 2100 appliance that SonicWall rolled out last year, includes beefed-up gateway antivirus, antispyware and intrusion-prevention features. Designed to safeguard users against e-mail and Web-based threats, the CSM 3200 can accommodate up to 1,000 concurrent users, said Sugata Sanyal, vice president of content and managed security at SonicWall, Sunnyvale, Calif.

As e-mail and other online threats continue to proliferate, it's necessary for companies to adopt a layered approach to security and lock all entry points into the network, Sanyal said. In addition to a deep packet inspection engine that peers into traffic at the application layer to identify potential threats, the CSM 3200 sports a full set of intrusion prevention signatures, he said, adding that the CSM 2100 had only a subset of those signatures.

Chris Cunningham, CTO at C3 Systems and Security, a Lomita, Calif.-based solution provider, said the CSM 3200 is about twice as fast as the CSM 2100 and features a bigger user capacity, making the new appliance more attractive to larger companies.

"Its full set of intrusion prevention [signatures] will also help us get new customers, particularly if the customer doesn't have any SonicWall gear," Cunningham said.Companies seeking to limit the use of peer-to-peer, instant-messaging and multimedia applications can create policies on the CSM 3200 to manage the bandwidth going to those applications, Sanyal said. The appliance also can be configured to strip attachments from certain types of documents to prevent sensitive information from being sent outside the corporate network.

The CSM 3200 is simple to set up and includes an Active Directory connector that pulls user profiles that become the foundation for setting up policies, Sanyal said. Although the appliance has security policy templates to allow companies to get up and running quickly, solution providers will have opportunities to develop more sophisticated policies around the product, he noted.

"Consulting opportunities will come into play for companies that require higher levels of [demonstrated] compliance," Sanyal said.

The CSM 3200 is available now and carries a starting price of $2,995, according to SonicWall.