Sunnyvale, Calif. - March 7, 2001 - SonicWALL, Inc., (NASDAQ: SNWL) a leading provider of Internet security solutions, today announced that BellSouth has deployed its Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) products to enable high performance secure transaction processing at BellSouth.com. With this solution, the BellSouth Web site has been able to significantly increase secure transaction processing capabilities, with more accelerated growth expected in the future.

Today SonicWALL also announced it has joined the Cisco Service Provider Solutions Ecosystem, a community of technology and deployment partners delivering products and solutions that enable service providers to accelerate time to market with packet-based services. As a content networking member of the program, SonicWALL will provide SSL acceleration and offloading products to joint Cisco and SonicWALL customers.

In the BellSouth implementation, SonicWALL's SSL-R accelerators work together with content switching solutions from Cisco Systems, Inc. to offload SSL traffic from the Web servers and accelerate the processing of SSL sessions to run more simultaneous transactions.

SonicWALL's unique SSL acceleration and offloading technology completely removes the burden of encryption and decryption processing from Web servers, boosting site performance and increasing network efficiency. SSL offloading allows Web sites to offer privacy and security to their clients without compromising the performance of the site. Additionally, SSL offloading offers a convenient method for digital certificate and key management, a task that quickly becomes unwieldy as a company's Internet presence expands. Most importantly, SonicWALL's SSL acceleration and offloading products allow content switches to work in an environment that had previously rendered content switching ineffectual. With the ability to act on decrypted, layer 7 data, secure content switching offers greatly enhanced site performance.

"SonicWALL was able to deliver a solution that integrates their SSL accelerators with our Cisco CSS11000 Content Services Switches," said Chris Wilson, Architecture Manager for BellSouth's Internet Delivery Services Group. "This solution allows us to scale the BellSouth.com and Cingular Wireless eStores to support the demands of marketing campaigns, while delivering the availability BellSouth customers expect."

"We are pleased that BellSouth has chosen our SSL technology for secure transaction processing," said Sreekanth Ravi, President and CEO of SonicWALL. "SonicWALL's security solutions will provide BellSouth with the high performance, scaleable encryption/decryption solutions its Web site needs to support on-line customers."

"The addition of SonicWALL to our Service Provider Solutions Ecosystem strengthens our offerings in content networking, a key area of growth for today's service providers," said Steve Hoch, director of marketing for Cisco. "Through interoperable, best-of-breed technologies, Cisco and SonicWALL can deliver enhanced content networking capabilities to boost revenue opportunities for our joint customers."