SonicWall
More info
- Type
- Security company
- Released
- 1991
The firewall box that became the small office's default choice long before security was a boardroom topic.
It began in 1991 as Sonic Systems, selling Ethernet products for the Mac, then shifted name and focus to firewall and VPN appliances in the late 1990s and went public in 1999. The niche was small and mid-sized businesses: an affordable box that did several security jobs at once, in the same spirit as Fortinet and Barracuda.
Dell bought the company in 2012 and sold it on in 2016 to private equity, at which point SonicWall became independent again. The name still turns up in vulnerability bulletins — an appliance that sits in the middle of the traffic is as much a target as a shield.