It can be a real challenge for IT administrators to efficiently deliver critical corporate solutions while also contending with employees wasting time on applications that are often dangerous applications. Critical applications need bandwidth prioritization while social media and gaming applications need to be bandwidth throttled or completely blocked. Stateful packet inspection firewalls used in many organizations rely on port and protocol, and therefore cannot solve the problem because they are unable to identify specific applications. Boiling it down, stateful packet inspection firewalls cannot sort out the good from the bad. Scanning every byte of every packet of all network traffic, SonicWALL provides complete application intelligence and control, regardless of port or protocol, by determining exactly what applications are being used and who is using them. SonicWALL Next-Generation Firewalls utilize a continuously expanding signature database that currently recognizes over 3,000 applications and detects millions of pieces of malware to protect the network automatically and seamlessly. The solution detects and eliminates malware, intrusions, data leakage and policy violations before they cause harm to a company.s network or its users.

Application Intelligence and Control puts power back into the hands of IT administrators with new levels of management and ease-of-use, allowing them to maintain granular control of applications and users. Administrators can easily create bandwidth management policies based on logical pre-defined categories (such as social media or gaming), individual applications, or even users and groups. As new applications are created, new signatures are pushed to the firewalls and the appropriate policies are automatically updated without IT spending costly time and effort to update rules and application objects. In addition, administrators can use granular application-based policy to restrict or block the transfer of specific files and documents, prioritize or throttle bandwidth and deny access to internal or external Web sites.

Administrators must be able to visualize application traffic to properly control network use and to adjust network policy based on those critical observations. The SonicWALL Application Flow Monitor provides real-time graphs of application usage, ingress and egress bandwidth, Web sites visited and all user activity. Administrators can then modify application rules to conform to network policy.
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