It seems that rarely a week goes without a cloud security startup exiting stealth or landing an eight-figure investment, but that’s not deterring Dell, Inc. from continuing to pursue its on-premise network protection ambitions. In fact, the company is actively expanding that effort with the launch of new firewall appliances that take direct aim at those emerging providers.

The convenience of the cloud-based approach is often most appealing in remote locations where the added risk that comes with relegating security outside the organization is relatively low and operational considerations can take priority. Particularly alluring is the ability to avoid burdening the already limited local staff with maintaining infrastructure, a pitch that Dell is trying to counter by leveraging its existing on-premise presence in many organizations.

The new TZ series firewall hooks up to its SonicWALL Global Management System, or GMS, which provides capabilities for remotely handling many of the operations that have traditionally required stationing a practitioner at each branch on a regular basis or sending one out every time a challenge arises. Supported actions included everything from tweaking settings to implementing updates.

Centralized management is also a feature of many cloud-based alternatives, but in organizations that are already running SonicWALL appliances having a single interface across all of their infrastructure one-ups that proposition, removing another interface for administrators to learn. And that’s not the only way Dell is promising to reduce the work involved in securing remote networks.

Each model in the TZ series also sports a 802.11ac wireless controller included directly in the chassis. According to the company, that provides a single point of control for all the traffic flowing to and from a facility, including encrypted communications. The homegrown deep packet inspection software running on the appliances can scan up to 1.1Gb worth every second thanks patented concurrent processing technology that incurs less latency than more conventional alternatives.