• Network Security Manager
• About Network Security Manager
  • About NSM
  • Related Documents
  • API Support
  • Legal Information
  • Conventions
    • Guide Conventions
    • UI Conventions
• NSM Workflows
  • Governing Centrally
  • Managing Risk
    • Case 1: Troubleshooting Performance Issues
    • Case 2: Analytics and Visibility
    • Case 3: Notifications of Alerts
    • Case 4: On-boarding Administrators
  • Managing Compliance
    • Case 1: Review the Changes
    • Case 2: Configuration Audit
    • Case 3: Reporting and Scheduling
• Dashboards and Monitor.htm
  • Dashboards
  • Monitor
• NSM Navigation
  • Interface Overview
  • Task-Oriented Navigation
    • NSM Views
    • Command Options
  • Interface Management
    • Icons and Buttons
    • Table Tools
    • Tool tips
  • Finding Information
• Notification Center
  • Understanding Notifications
  • Managing the Alerts
  • Defining Alerts and Notifications
  • Managing Notification History
• Interface Map
  • Manager View: HOME and MONITOR
  • Firewall View
  • Group View
  • Template View
• NSM On-Premises
  • Command Options
  • On-Prem Icons and Buttons

About NSM

SonicWall Network Security Manager (NSM) is the next generation firewall management application that provides a holistic approach to security management. The approach is grounded in the principles of simplifying and automating various tasks to achieve better security operation and decision-making, while reducing the complexity and time required. NSM gives you everything you need for firewall management; comprehensive visibility and granular control and the capacity to govern the entire SonicWall network security operations with greater clarity, precision, and speed.

This is all managed from a single, function-packed interface that can be accessed from any location using a browser-enabled device. Firewalls can be centrally managed to provision all of the network security services with a single-pane-of-glass experience.

SonicWall NSM provides both on-premise and cloud options. The user experience and features differ for both the on-premise and the SaaS versions, though the command remains much the same for both. For example, the blue navigation on the left indicates that you are on the NSM on-premise version whereas it is black for NSM on cloud. For more details about the on-premise options, see NSM On-Premises.

For ease of deployment, this security management platform provides a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) offering. It is accessible on-demand, via the cloud, with virtually unlimited system scalability to support multiple tenants with thousands of security nodes under each one. The solution’s redundant and distributed architecture enables organizations to centrally and reliably manage a single small network to one or more enterprise-class deployments with the flexibility to scale without increasing management and administrative overhead.

NSM offers many salient features:

• On-boarding hundreds of devices with Zero-Touch Deployment easily
• Group devices based on geographic location, business functions or customers with Device Groups
• Enforce consistent security across all your devices with Device Templates
• Make informed decision and policy actions to any threat, quickly and in real time, with detailed reporting and powerful analytics

• NSM adds support for the firewall series Gen 7 NSa 2700 and TZ Series running SonicOS as well as NSsp and Gen 7 NSv, with multi-tenancy and unified policy management features.

• Unified Policy Management that provides the integrated management of various security policies for enterprise-grade firewalls. This offers a centralized location for configuring policies.

• Login To Unit that provides admins a fast and easy access to the managed firewall device-level UI directly from the device inventory page of NSM.

• Account Lockout feature, designed to prevent unauthorized access to the NSMenvironment and other brute-force attacks, social engineering, and phishing. This disables the user account if incorrect passwords are entered after a specified number of failed attempts during a given period. Admin can set the lockout duration until the locked account is released either after a specified time or manually done by an administrator when three unsuccessful log in attempts in 15 minutes are exceeded.

• Multi-Device Upgrade Feature to upgrade multiple firewalls from a group of devices in NSM instead of manually upgrading each firewall. Admins can execute them using NSM APIs as well.

• High Availability that allows two identical NSMs to be configured to provide a reliable continuous connection to the public internet.

• Closed Network support feature is ideal for customers that run one or more private networks that are completely shut-off from the outside environment. Customers can license the NSM managed firewall without contacting License Manager (LM) or MySonicWall (MSW), when onboarding and patching SonicWall firewall to preserve the privacy and security of the closed networks.

• Security feature to grant admin rights based on specific IP address ranges. The IP restrictions can be added in 3 formats - single IP, an IP range, or a specific network with a subnet mask.

• Two template types for the devices SonicOS and SonicOSX. This is apart from a master golden configuration template for large customers, to take configuration from baseline devices and apply it to the other devices or groups.

• Configure or edit virtual or network interfaces using templates.

• Certificate management feature that enables a user interface to facilitate the management of digital certificates for all NSM managed firewalls. This enhances trust established between parties in a secure communication session.

• Schedule EXP and TSR Backups feature enables the admins to restore the firewall back faster and easier in an event of SW/HW failure.

• Azure and KVM hypervisor deployments

NSM can manage both Gen6 and Gen7 SonicWall firewalls. SonicOS 6.5.4.6 is the recommended version, but NSM can on-board the older Gen6 Firewall versions as well. The 7-day reporting has minimum version requirement of SonicOS 6.5.4.6.