The purpose of this article is to provide a complete overview of the Cisco Meraki MX firewall vs SonicWall’s firewall.
Company Comparison
Cisco Meraki is a product expansion of Cisco’s enterprise network solutions and has been owned by Cisco since 2012-2013. It is primarily targeted towards lean IT staff that have low tolerance for dealing with complexities of management that comes with traditional network infrastructure, such as the Cisco Catalyst, Nexus, and FirePOWER products.
SonicWall has been in existence since 1991, but has been bought and sold through the years, most recently to Dell and then went private through the backing of Francisco Partners, a private equity firm. SonicWall advertises itself as a network security company that provides a host of solutions, including its next-generation firewall, which is its flagship product.
SonicWall Features
SonicWall firewalls offer a range of robust features designed to provide comprehensive network security and threat protection. Here’s a high-level overview of key features commonly found in SonicWall firewalls:
- Unified Threat Management (UTM): SonicWall firewalls integrate multiple security functions into a single device, offering features such as antivirus, intrusion prevention, content filtering, and application control.
- Intrusion Prevention System (IPS): Provides real-time threat protection by inspecting network traffic for malicious activities, preventing known vulnerabilities and attacks.
- Content Filtering: Enables control over web content access, allowing administrators to define and enforce policies to restrict or filter specific websites or content categories.
- Application Control: Allows granular control over applications and their usage, enabling administrators to manage and regulate access to specific applications.
- Virtual Private Network (VPN): SonicWall firewalls support secure VPN connections, facilitating encrypted communication between remote locations or devices and the corporate network.
- Secure SD-WAN: Offers advanced SD-WAN capabilities for efficient and secure routing of network traffic across distributed sites, optimizing performance and reliability.
- SSL/TLS Decryption and Inspection: Provides the ability to inspect encrypted SSL/TLS traffic for threats, enhancing security by identifying and mitigating hidden threats within encrypted connections.
- Wireless Security: Includes features for secure wireless connectivity and management, ensuring robust protection for Wi-Fi networks against potential threats.
- High Availability and Redundancy: SonicWall firewalls support high availability configurations, allowing failover and redundancy to ensure continuous network connectivity and resilience.
- Centralized Management: SonicWall offers intuitive interfaces and centralized management platforms that provide administrators with unified control and visibility into security policies and network activity.
- Reporting and Analytics: Provides comprehensive reporting tools and analytics to monitor network performance, security events, and user activity, facilitating informed decision-making and threat response.
These features collectively empower organizations to establish a strong security posture, defend against a wide range of cyber threats, and efficiently manage their network infrastructure using SonicWall firewalls. Some of these features may require an additional license, like Centralized Management, which is a difference between Cisco Meraki and SonicWall firewalls.
Cisco Meraki Firewalls
Cisco Meraki firewalls, part of the Meraki MX series, offer cloud-managed security appliances designed for simplicity, scalability, and centralized management. Here’s a high-level overview of Cisco Meraki firewalls:
- Cloud-Based Management:
- Meraki firewalls are managed through the Meraki Dashboard, a centralized cloud-based interface. This cloud-based management allows for easy deployment, configuration, monitoring, and troubleshooting of multiple appliances across different locations from a single dashboard.
- Unified Threat Management (UTM) Capabilities:
- These firewalls provide a range of security features, including firewall, VPN, intrusion prevention, content filtering, and malware protection, all integrated into a single platform. They offer Layer 7 application-aware firewall capabilities for granular control over applications and content filtering.
- Scalability and Flexibility:
- Meraki firewalls are suitable for small to large-scale deployments, providing options for different performance levels to accommodate various network sizes and throughput requirements. They are designed to scale easily as network demands grow.
- Site-to-Site VPN and Client VPN:
- They support site-to-site VPN connections for secure communication between multiple locations and also provide secure remote access through client VPN connectivity for remote users.
- SD-WAN Functionality:
- Meraki firewalls feature SD-WAN capabilities, allowing for intelligent traffic routing and prioritization based on application needs, network health, and policies. This aids in optimizing performance and improving user experience.
- Integrated Security Features:
- They include built-in security features such as anti-malware protection, content filtering, intrusion prevention, and advanced security services, all managed and updated via the cloud.
- Automatic Firmware Updates and Threat Intelligence:
- Meraki firewalls receive automatic firmware updates and benefit from Meraki’s threat intelligence, ensuring that the devices have the latest security definitions and protection against emerging threats.
- Intuitive Dashboard and Analytics:
- The Meraki Dashboard provides a user-friendly interface for network visibility, real-time analytics, and reporting, enabling administrators to gain insights into network performance, security events, and user activity.
The Major Differences
The major differences between these two firewalls include a few factors.
Subscription and Licensing – Cisco Meraki vs SonicWall
For one, the licensing and subscription model with the two are drastically different. With SonicWall, it’s pretty straightforward. Each device has a license that ties to a support contract. Cisco Meraki on the other hand has a support contract as a pool. You can add devices to that pool and the entire pool expires at some point in time. You can add devices with a support contract to extend the length of time in that pool.
Deep Packet Inspection – Cisco Meraki vs SonicWall
SonicWall and Cisco Meraki approach SSL Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) in different ways:
- SonicWall:
- DPI-SSL: SonicWall’s DPI-SSL technology decrypts and inspects encrypted traffic. It decrypts Secure Socket Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) encrypted traffic at the gateway, inspects it for threats, and re-encrypts the traffic before forwarding it to the destination. This process allows the firewall to analyze and identify potential threats hiding within encrypted connections.
- Cisco Meraki:
- Layer 7 Application Visibility: Meraki’s approach to SSL/TLS inspection involves providing Layer 7 application visibility. While it doesn’t specifically offer a DPI-SSL feature like SonicWall, Meraki’s firewall can identify and categorize applications that are communicating over SSL/TLS-encrypted connections. This allows administrators to gain insights into the types of applications being used but might not involve decryption of the encrypted traffic itself.
Both SonicWall and Cisco Meraki aim to provide visibility into encrypted traffic, but SonicWall explicitly offers a DPI-SSL solution, allowing for decryption, inspection, and re-encryption of SSL/TLS traffic to detect and prevent potential threats hiding within encrypted connections. Cisco Meraki, on the other hand, primarily emphasizes application-level visibility for SSL/TLS-encrypted traffic without explicit decryption capabilities similar to SonicWall’s DPI-SSL feature.
SD-WAN – Cisco Meraki vs SonicWall
SonicWall and Cisco Meraki MX Firewall differ in their SD-WAN approaches. SonicWall relies on SonicOS for centralized management and emphasizes deep packet inspection (DPI) for application control and WAN redundancy, allowing policy-based routing. In contrast, Meraki MX Firewall uses a cloud-based dashboard for configuration and focuses on real-time application monitoring and automatic path selection based on performance. Both integrate security within SD-WAN, but SonicWall highlights policy-based routing, while Meraki prioritizes real-time performance-based routing and cloud-centric management, catering to distinct deployment and management preferences.
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