SonicWALL UTM Firewall Appliance for Branch and Head Office Hardware Sizing & Licence Desk in Brabourne Road

Six to ten network points, some of them 2.5-gigabit, with a fibre slot on the larger models for a leased line.

Scanning happens on the same multi-core chip that moves the traffic, so switching virus and web filtering on does not turn browsing into a crawl.

A rack tray is available later, for the day the box has to move off the shelf and into a cabinet.

Cabinet depth and free rack units. More installations get delayed by a shallow cabinet than by anything technical.

Keep a matched second unit powered beside it. The changeover takes a fraction of a second and a phone call does not drop (High Availability pair).

Fit the second supply and run it from another circuit. The day an electrician isolates one board, the network stays up.

Internal SSDs hold traffic history on the appliance itself, so a question about last month does not need a separate log server.

Both supplies come fitted. Feed them from separate circuits and one failed input turns into a log entry instead of an outage.

Nobody enjoys sitting next to one of these. Plan for a real server room, not a cabin behind the accounts desk.

Nothing, ideally. Billing, the shared drive and the ERP screen open at the same pace as they do at head office.

Metal case, low power draw, and it copes with a dusty stores room far better than the plastic router the ISP left behind.

Courier a replacement. It collects the same configuration by itself, so the branch is usually back on the same day.

The handover from one unit to the next is quick enough that a call carries on while somebody walks from the store room back to the billing counter.

Guests get their own name, their own login page and an expiry, kept well away from the machines running your accounts.

The firewall itself acts as the wireless controller, so there is no second box and no second console to log into.

Replacing the chain of little unmanaged switches that has grown under the desks, one added per problem over five years.

Cameras, IP phones and access points draw electricity from the network cable, so no adaptor sits stranded above a ceiling tile (PoE).

The switch shows up in the same management console as the firewall, so ports and security rules are dealt with together.

Rather than putting a laptop inside everything, each person is handed only the servers and applications they have been cleared for.

People use the office credentials they already know, and a second check on their phone means a stolen password on its own is not enough.

The service runs from the cloud, so somebody who joins today is not waiting for hardware to be couriered to their flat.

Companies with several sites, where logging into each firewall separately has stopped being realistic.

A new blocking rule reaches twenty branches at once, instead of being typed twenty times with the twentieth forgotten.

Updates get scheduled for a Sunday night across the whole estate, rather than done one branch at a time over a month.

Paying for three years at once holds the price still and removes two more rounds of quotations, approvals and reminder calls.

Show an assessor a lapsed subscription and it goes straight into the report as a finding, whatever the firewall itself is doing.

Individual modules can be added one at a time, which suits a site that only wants filtering, but the dates then drift apart and one always gets missed.