ADT Teams Up with SonicWall for SMB Security Services

SonicWall and ADT Cybersecurity, the managed services arm of ADT, best known for delivering physical security monitoring, today announced a partnership to offer cybersecurity services for small-to-midsized businesses.

Security service offerings for SMBs have been on the rise in the past year or two as these organizations increasingly have suffered cyberattacks. 

Bill Conner, president and CEO of SonicWall, says the partnership between the companies stemmed from an acquisition ADT made last year of Secure Designs, Inc. (SDI), one of the MSSPs from which SonicWall sold its SMB security products. According to Conner, ADT will concentrate on sales and security monitoring, and SonicWall will provide its layered security offerings, including network security via SonicWall TZ series firewalls, secure email from SonicWall Hosted Email Security, and encrypted traffic protection via SonicWall SPI-SSL technology.

SonicWall will also provide its patent-pending Real-Time Deep Memory Inspection (RTDMI) technology, designed to deliver more protection than traditional sandboxing. "What's happened is that with large corporations doing a better job on security, the bad threat actors are moving to SMBs," Conner says. "The idea behind this partnership is to give the same kind of protection that large corporations get from MSSPs at a price that SMBs can afford."

Martha Vazquez, a senior research analyst at IDC, says SMBs have become the sweet spot for the industry to address.

"More than 50% of these businesses plan to outsource their security functions to a third party such as an MSSP," Vazquez says. "These organizations are becoming more aware than ever of the security challenges as they become more reliant on the Internet and face ongoing advanced security threats."

Vazquez says while it's too soon to call the ADT Cybersecurity/SonicWall partnership a trend, she believes that cable companies and other service providers will form partnerships with security vendors – and it's possible that other home security companies will look at the IT security space as well.

Meanwhile, SonicWall's 2019 Cyber Threat Report found nearly 75,000 "never-before-seen" threats in 2018 alone. In an analysis of data from more than 200,000 malicious events and malware samples, SonicWall found:

Related Content