SonicWall Inc., the network security provider that spun out of Dell Technologies Inc. in 2016, today debuted new appliances and software capabilities intended to extend its market reach.

The company was already a well-established player when it got acquired by Dell in 2012 for a reported $1.2 billion. With the new products, SonicWall is taking aim at midtier enterprises that don’t have the technology budget of a Fortune 500 firm but still require quite a few advanced features.

“The past 18 months were focused on expanding our security portfolio and restoring customers and partners to the SonicWall brand,” SonicWall Chief Executive Bill Conner said in a statement. “Now, we are delivering a disruptive, cloud-based platform that brings together endpoint, firewall and cloud application security with management, reporting, analytics and integrated threat visibility.”

That cloud-based platform is the SonicWall Capture Security Center, the main focus of today’s announcement. The offering provides features for protecting backend infrastructure and employee endpoints from various types of online threats. The company said that the new capabilities in today’s upgrade together represent some 35 million new lines of code.

One of the highlights is an integration between the platform’s malware sandbox and its endpoint protection engine, which is licensed from security startup SentinelOne Inc. The two components can now share data to improve identification of threats that may be known to one but not the other. Companies also have the option of creating synced whitelists to avoid flagging their own applications as malware.

The integration is complemented by analytics tools that allow administrators to dig into the context of security events flagged as suspicious. SonicWall Capture Security Center also has 140 ready-made report templates that can be used to monitor network activity.

SonicWall debuted these enhancements alongside six new firewall appliances. Two target managed service providers, while the other four are geared toward midtier enterprises. The company said the latter systems can provide up to 25 times more connections for performing deep-packet inspection on encrypted traffic than earlier models.

“Many legacy network security solutions either don’t offer true decryption and inspection of encrypted traffic or they can’t meet the performance demands to scale it properly,” said Robert Ayoub, a program director at International Data Corp. “Coupling high-performance security, cloud-based management and powerful analytics with real-time threat visibility at the network layer is a compelling go-to-market offering that is long overdue.”

Photo: SonicWall