“It has built us for the new business norm where everyone’s remote, everyone’s mobile, and everyone is by definition less secure,” said Conner to Boundless attendees yesterday.
Statistics cited in Conner’s presentation underscored just how much less secure end users have grown this year alone. SonicWall tracked some 44 million attacks on its customers worldwide through the first three quarters of 2020, and its Capture Advanced Threat Protection sandboxing service is neutralizing some 1,600 files a day, up 40% from 2019. Ransomware assaults in the U.S., meanwhile, rose 109% in the first six months of the year.
“There has been an absolute rash of ransomware attacks against hospitals. You’ve seen ransomware attacks against schools. You’ve seen ransomware attacks against people working remotely,” Ayrapetov says.
Protecting remote workers is a complicated job, too, given all the smart thermostats, video surveillance cameras, web-enabled doorbells, and other often poorly secured IoT devices home users own. Addressing such vulnerabilities, and hardening work-from-home environments generally, will keep solution providers and MSPs busy in the months ahead, predicts Ayrapetov. “A lot of things were set up kind of in an ad hoc fashion,” he observes.
SonicWall itself, according to Ayrapetov, was ready for the demands of work-from-home security. “We were in a fortunate position,” he says. “We’ve been doing remote access for 15 years.” As a result, he continues, changes to the company’s product roadmap this year have been tactical rather than strategic.
SonicWall’s SD-Branch solution, which reached market at a time when channel pros desperately needed zero-touch provisioning options for SMB networks, won SonicWall a place among ChannelPro’s All-Star award winners for 2020.