Sophos Firewall v19.5 Now Available

Products•SFOS v19.5•Sophos Firewall

The latest Sophos Firewall release adds a boost in IPsec performance, new Xstream TLS FastPath acceleration, and powerful OSPFv3 routing. Plus, you’ll gain added resiliency and redundancy with SD-WAN load balancing. New high availability (HA) enhancements also provide easier management, plus there’s Azure AD integration and enhanced search capabilities.

Nov 17 2022 By

We are pleased to announce that Sophos Firewall OS v19.5 is now released and generally available. This update to Sophos Firewall brings a number of exciting enhancements and top requested features.

What’s New:

 

Xstream SD-WAN:

  • SD-WAN Load Balancing builds on the powerful SD-WAN capabilities introduced in v19 to add load balancing across multiple SD-WAN links for added performance and redundancy.
  • IPsec VPN Capacity is also significantly increased enabling up to double the number of concurrent tunnels depending on your XGS Series model.
  • Dynamic Routing with OSPFv3 (IPv6) which has been one of our top requested features bringing enhanced routing, flexibility, security, and performance.

 

Xstream Protection and Performance:

  • Xstream FastPath Acceleration of TLS encrypted traffic takes advantage of the hardware crypto capabilities in the Xstream Flow Processor to accelerate TLS encrypted traffic flows on the FastPath on the XGS 4300, 4500, 5500, and 6500. This provides added performance headroom for traffic that requires deep-packet inspection.

 

High Availability:

  • Several Status, Visibility and Ease-of-Use Enhancements improve the operation of high availability (HA) configurations.
  • Redundant Link Support enables your high availability devices to be connected with multiple redundant HA links to add resiliency and reliability.

 

Quality of Life Enhancements:

  • Azure AD integration for SSO web console login offers an alternate and easier method of authentication.
  • Host and Service Object Search enables you to perform free text searches for host and service objects by name or value.
  • Enhanced .log file storage enables advanced troubleshooting.
  • Enhanced 40G Interface Support with auto-detection of advanced port configurations on XGS 5500 and 6500 models.

 

Partner Resource Center

Be sure to visit the Partner Resource Center to get more information and everything you need for this release: documentation, training, videos and more!

 

How to get the firmware, documentation, and training

As usual, Sophos Firewall OS v19.5 is a free upgrade for all licensed Sophos Firewall customers and should be applied to all supported firewall devices as soon as possible, as it not only contains great features and performance enhancements, but also important security fixes.

This firmware release will follow our standard update process. You can manually download SFOS v19 from the Licensing Portal and update anytime. Otherwise, it will be rolled out to all connected devices over the coming weeks. A notification will appear on the local device or Sophos Central management console when the update is available, allowing you to schedule the update at your convenience.

Sophos Firewall OS v19.5 is a fully supported upgrade from any v18.5 firmware as well as v19, including the recent v19 MR1 build 365 release, and the v19.5 EAP build. Please refer to the Upgrade Information tab in the release notes for more details.

Full product documentation is available online and within the product.

Update training (for v19 to v19.5) is available on the Partner Resource Center.

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.