New Options for XG Firewall

Products•Sophos RED•Sophos XG Firewall
Jul 10 2020 By

With XG Firewall v18, there are a variety of great upgrade options that customers can take advantage of to significantly enhance their network protection, performance, and management capabilities.

Protection Upgrades

Do your customers have Sophos Sandstorm Protection?  It’s a must have.

Sandstorm Protection is available as an add-on subscription and is also part of our ‘Plus’ bundles, EnterpriseGuard Plus, and FullGuard Plus. If any of your customers don’t have Sandstorm as part of their license, please do them the courtesy of reaching out and adding it as soon as possible. We’ve made this ultra-important protection extremely affordable to ensure everyone can benefit from it.

You can quickly check if they already have the Sandstorm license for their XG Firewall: In the console, go to the Administration > Licensing tab to be sure. If you don’t see this protection, make sure they subscribe as soon as possible. It provides critically important threat protection against today’s latest ransomware and other advanced threats.

If they already have Sophos Sandstorm Protection, they should upgrade to v18 as soon as possible to take advantage of the critical, new protection technologies included in the enhanced Sandstorm subscription at no extra charge. The new AI-powered, static threat-intelligence analysis greatly expands on the zero-day threat protection that Sandstorm provides. It uses multiple machine-learning models to render a verdict in seconds and convict never-seen-before ransomware and other attacks BEFORE they get on the network. It also adds in-depth reporting on suspicious and malicious files entering the network that no one should be without.

For new customers purchasing and deploying an XG Firewall for the first time, ensure that they get this great multi-layer protection from the start by purchasing one of the Sophos Plus bundles (EnterpriseProtect Plus and TotalProtect Plus).

The Threat Meter provides at-a-glance threat analysis results.

 

XG Series Upgrades and TLS Inspection  

Last year, we introduced the new XG 86(w) and 106(w) models with added RAM to the XG Series line up to be ready for XG Firewall v18 and all the new capabilities it provides. If you have any customers running older XG 85/105 models, now is the perfect time to refresh to a newer model and take advantage of all the great new capabilities in v18.

With the new streamlined, encrypted-traffic inspection with TLS 1.3 support in the new Xstream architecture, now may also be a great time to refresh aging hardware. Take full advantage of the new visibility and protection you can get with XG Firewall v18 by enabling TLS inspection on important traffic flows. TLS inspection is critically important to get the most out of the Sandstorm Threat Intelligence features mentioned above since many files are now downloaded over encrypted connections.

 

SD-RED upgrades

In April, we announced the new SD-RED devices. If you’ve previously deployed any of the RED 10, 15, or 50 devices over the last several years, now may be the time to refresh that infrastructure. These exciting new SD-RED models offer greater performance, flexible connectivity, and redundant power supply options.

Sophos Central

Sophos Central management and reporting for XG Firewall is free for all XG Firewall customers and partners. In addition to the free reporting capability, we recently announced the option for customers to extend their firewall reporting storage. Customers can dramatically increase their historical reporting options by housing up to a year’s worth of firewall log data in the cloud for instant access via the flexible new reporting tools in Sophos Central. Make sure you and your customers have all the storage needed by checking out our convenient storage calculator. It’s extremely affordable, and having all the network traffic data in Sophos Central is super convenient with all the flexible reporting options it provides.

 

 

Working Remotely

For customers and organizations working remotely, we have a couple of important reminders. First, we are now approaching one-million installations of our free Sophos Connect VPN client, and we recently announced the EAP for v2 with SSL VPN support on Windows platforms. Sophos is unique amongst firewall vendors, as we offer unlimited, free remote-access VPN connections that other vendors would most certainly charge extra for.

Next, we’ve also recently announced XG Firewall support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) for organizations that may be migrating to or utilizing additional infrastructure in the cloud. Ensure any cloud infrastructure is properly secured with XG Firewall, which now supports both AWS and Azure.

Working from home or remotely has never been easier with XG Firewall.

 

 

 

 

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.