MinistryTECH and the Church IT Roundtable gave me a lot of great opportunities to gain interest in and discuss SonicWALL solutions with Mark Moreno, consultant and reseller, and SonicWALL poster children Jason Lee and Jeremie Kilgore. I must admit to being more than a little impressed with the combination of flexibility, power, and price that the SonicWALL products provide. Those are three pretty important areas. In specific my first interest is in the SonicWALL firewall (NSA Series) products that also do UTM including antivirus, antispyware, intrusion prevention and content filtering, my second interest is in their Continuous Data Protection (CDP) products as both on-site and off-site backup solutions, and thirdly I’m interested in the ability of the SonicWALL firewall appliance to also serve as a centralized control point for relatively inexpensive SonicPoints (wireless access points).

Before making a decision there are certainly things to evaluate, and I definitely want to get my hands on an NSA box for a while to test first. I like the ISA 2004 firewall interface that we’re currently running and I want to make sure I’m comfortable managing SonicWALL if we go that route.