Networking has evolved substantially over the last few years with more users working remotely, networks becoming more distributed, and cloud application usage exploding. Sophos is ensuring you keep pace with new products like ZTNA for remote workers, and now an extremely powerful and helpful Sophos Firewall release with Xstream SD-WAN.
SFOS v19 delivers greatly enhanced SD-WAN, VPN, and networking capabilities, enabling you to easily meet you and your customers’ networking goals all while making day-to-day management even easier.
SFOS v19 Highlights:
- Xstream SD-WAN utilizing the powerful performance of the Xstream Flow Processors in all XGS Series appliances to put IPsec traffic on the FastPath resulting in up to a 5x VPN performance improvement
- Performance-Based Link Selection ensures your most important traffic is routed over your best performing WAN connection, based upon latency, jitter, or packet loss
- Zero-Impact Transitions between WAN links ensures end-user applications are not impacted by ISP outages or disruption
- SD-WAN Orchestration in Sophos Central enables you to quickly and easily setup complex site-to-site VPN overlay networks with just a few clicks
- VPN Enhancements make it much easier and more intuitive to manage your site-to-site and remote-access VPN connections including a new AWS VPC import tool
- New Search Capabilities allow you to quickly find exactly what you’re looking for, both in the product, and in your networking objects when building rules
The full list of new features is available in the What’s New PDF and you can take a quick tour of the new features in this video:
How to Get the Firmware, Documentation and Training
As usual, Sophos Firewall OS v19 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.
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 or customers to schedule the update when convenient.
Sophos Firewall OS v19 is a fully supported upgrade from v17.5 MR14 and later, v18 MR3 and later and all previous versions of v18.5 including v18.5 MR3. Please refer to the Upgrade Information tab in the release notes for more details.
Full product documentation is available online and within the product.
Partner SFOS update training is available on the Sophos Training Portal:
- Engineer Delta Course (v18.5 to v19)
- Architect Delta Course (v18.5 to v19)
- Technician Delta Course (v18 to v19)
Full partner course updates are expected to be available in the next two weeks.
Updated Sales Tools
We’ve prepared a number of updated sales tools to help you promote the product and this release:
- Updated Sophos Firewall Website
- New Sophos Firewall SD-WAN Webpage
- What’s New Video
- Public v19 Announcement (you can re-use on your own blog)
- Feature Articles covering v19 highlight features you can copy/share
- A What’s New in v19 PowerPoint
- An updated Sophos Firewall Master PowerPoint you can pick/choose slides from
- Updated Sophos Firewall Brochure
- Updated Sophos Firewall Solution Brief
- Updated Sophos Firewall Features List