SonicWall, SentinelOne partner for SMB network and endpoint protection
With the global cybersecurity industry facing a skills shortage somewhere around the 4 million-mark, it is the small to medium-sized business (SMB) segment that is going to be the last in line to scoop up the talent, according to SonicWall CEO and president Bill Conner.
As a result, SonicWall and fellow security vendor SentinelOne have announced a new offering that brings together the former's endpoint protection with SonicWall's firewall solution, combining the two to target the "underserved" SMB market.
Speaking with ZDNet, Conner said the onus is on the security firms to ensure the smaller organisations are not left behind when it comes to protection.
"Our two powerful solutions bring enterprise-level security enforcement, as well as automated detection, prevention, remediation, and compliance, to small and medium-sized businesses around the world," he explained.
"The combined offering takes automated real-time breach detection and prevention to the next level, enabling our customers to focus on their core businesses and fear less."
According to Tomer Weingarten, CEO of SentinelOne, the focus of the two companies is delivering a scalable and automated solution that covers the customer all the way from the endpoint through the network.
"I think it's going to be one of the first cases where you see endpoint and network products working in complete concert and also in a complete automated fashion," he told ZDNet.
"I think the SMB market was also relatively underserved when it comes to next-generation endpoint protection and the SonicWall platform really enables us and them to deliver protection across both network and endpoint."
Weingarten believes combining the two company's strengths is going to help tremendously in solving some of the more acute challenges the SMB market has, particularly when dealing with advanced persistent threats and newer-age attacks.
By combining the two solutions, SonicWall and SentinelOne will allow administrators to create policies to determine which individuals must run the endpoint solution on their devices, as well as add controls to ensure that devices are running the endpoint client, Conner explained.
Through the partnership, SentinelOne and SonicWall will also offer threat intelligence sharing.
Additionally, the combined solution brings key features such as policy-based enforcement, compliance, quarantine, and remediation; cloud-based centralised management and analytics; dynamic detection with behavioural models and machine learning; and automatic remediation of ransomware.
"It's really about trying to secure a large part of our world right now that is not receiving adequate security," Weingarten said.
"We're building for where we see the majority of attacks ... it really is clear that the attacks are trickling down to SMBs."
An attack that may marginally affect a larger organisation has the potential to completely kill-off a startup or SMB, he added.
SonicWall officially spun out of Dell Technologies as an independent company in November, with private equity firm Francisco Partners and hedge fund Elliott Management completing the $2 billion acquisition of the technology giant's software arm.