SonicWall firewalls sit in thousands of small business networks across the country, and for a long time, that made sense. They are affordable, well known, and widely sold by IT resellers. But 2025 was a hard year for SonicWall’s reputation, and it is worth understanding why, along with what a managed alternative actually looks like in practice.
What happened with SonicWall
In September and October 2025, SonicWall confirmed that attackers had broken into the cloud portal where customers store firewall configuration backups, eventually admitting that every customer who used the feature was affected, not the small fraction the company first reported. Separately, a Texas-based fintech company was breached in August 2025 through a known, unpatched SonicWall firewall vulnerability, exposing the personal data of more than 670,000 people, with Texas residents hit hardest of any state.
Neither incident means SonicWall hardware is inherently bad. It means the responsibility for keeping that hardware patched, monitored, and correctly configured sat with the customer, and when that responsibility gets missed, even briefly, the consequences can be severe.
The core difference: who is actually watching
This is really the heart of the comparison. A self-maintained firewall like a typical SonicWall deployment puts the ongoing work on you or your IT provider: applying patches the moment they are released, checking security advisories, monitoring for unusual activity, and keeping backups current and tested. When that ongoing work slips, even for a few weeks, a known vulnerability can sit open and unaddressed.
Connect is built around a managed model from the ground up. Updates are pushed out as part of the service. Monitoring runs continuously in the background. If something looks wrong, you get a notification on your phone, not a surprise months later when a regulator or a customer tells you first.
A side-by-side look
| Typical Self-Maintained Firewall | Connect | |
|---|---|---|
| Firmware updates | Manual, depends on someone remembering | Delivered as part of the managed service |
| Monitoring | Often none beyond basic alerts | Continuous, with plain-language notifications |
| Device visibility | Requires technical dashboards | Simple mobile app view of every device |
| Setup | Often requires an IT professional | Guided, scan-and-go onboarding |
| Remote access | VPN configured separately | Built in, works around common connection issues like CGNAT |
Why this matters more for a small business than a large one
A large enterprise usually has an internal IT team whose entire job is watching for exactly this kind of gap. A small or medium business rarely does. That gap between “the equipment is capable of being secure” and “someone is actually keeping it secure” is where most real-world breaches happen, and it is the gap a managed service is built to close.
The honest tradeoff
Self-maintained hardware can be a reasonable choice for a business with a dedicated, attentive IT resource watching it closely and consistently. For everyone else, especially owners and office managers who did not sign up to become part-time network administrators, a managed approach removes that burden rather than asking you to carry it.
If you want to see what a managed setup looks like for a business your size, take a look at our Business page.
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