Sophos ZTNA Early Access – Now Available

Products•Sophos ZTNA

The highly anticipated Early Access Program for the release candidate of Sophos ZTNA is now available to everyone via Sophos Central.

Nov 25 2021 By

Sophos ZTNA is a brand-new cloud-delivered, cloud-managed product in the Sophos ecosystem to securely connect users to applications. It’s the ideal replacement for remote access VPN, with some significant advantages in zero trust security, ease-of-management, and a transparent user experience.

What’s New

If you participated in our previous EAP program, you’ll find a lot of great new enhancements in this release:

  • Sophos ZTNA gateways support clustering (up to 9 instances in a cluster) to improve high-availability, performance, and scalability
  • Sophos ZTNA gateways are supported in Amazon AWS environments
  • Sophos ZTNA gateways support single-arm and dual-arm deployments
  • Sophos ZTNA gateways will probe web-based applications to ensure they are reachable, aiding in troubleshooting and application down time alerting
  • Sophos ZTNA now support both agent and agentless access methods to resources
  • The Sophos ZTNA client is available for Windows 10, Windows 10 ARM, and Windows 11 providing ‘thick’ application support (TCP/UDP based applications).
  • The Sophos ZTNA client enables Synchronized Security with Sophos Intercept X to dynamically assess device health for use in policy to prevent compromised devices from connecting to applications
  • Sophos ZTNA supports both Azure and Okta IDPs for authentication. Azure AD and on-prem AD are supported for directory import enabling security group-based policies.
  • Enhanced alerting when gateways are unreachable, a cluster is degraded, or web-based applications are not reachable from the ZTNA gateway.

 

Getting Started:

  1. Register for the Sophos ZTNA EAP directly at https://events.sophos.com/ztna-eap
  2. Follow the instructions provided after signing-up to login in Sophos Central and activate both the early access program for ZTNA as well as the new Endpoint Protection Features program (detailed instructions)
  3. Review the Sophos ZTNA Deployment Checklist
  4. Get started adding your users, identity providers, gateways, policies and applications.

 

Providing Feedback:

The team would love to hear your feedback – so please take advantage of the convenient feedback tool provided within Sophos Central (shown below) to let the team know about your experience.  Have a look at our best practices guide for reporting issues to help the team as best you can.

 

Product Training and Assistance:

  • Consult the online documentation also available via the Help section (upper right of the console screen) within Sophos Central
  • We have some great product training available as well
  • Head over to the community forums for additional content (such as known issues) and to interact with other EAP participants and the Sophos team

 

Learning More about ZTNA:

 

Note the Early Access Program is expected to run until the end of the year with General Availability starting January 3rd, 2022.  Watch for additional news here on pricing and selling ZTNA.

Thanks for your help in making this release of Sophos ZTNA the best it can be!

About the Author

Chris McCormack is a network security specialist at Sophos where he has been focused on firewall and network protection since joining Sophos in 2008. When not evangelizing Sophos network security products, Chris specializes in providing advice and insight into the latest threats and network protection technologies and strategies.