If you’re one of our many XG Firewall partners already managing your customer’s networks through Sophos Central, you’re intimately familiar with the benefits it provides for easy management and reporting.
Urgent Notice: If you’re still managing your XG Firewall customer networks through our legacy Cloud Firewall Manager (CFM), or have customer using Sophos Firewall Manager (SFM) or iView, you need to take action urgently. These legacy platforms are being retired with End-of-Life coming up soon.
- CFM is EOL and going dark at the end of this year which is coming up fast.
- iView is also EOL at the end of this year.
- SFM is EOL next July.
This is actually good news because these legacy platforms are not scalable, do not meet our standards for security and are difficult and expensive to maintain.
A much better solution exists that you can switch to for free with Sophos Central and most of our partners and customers have already made the switch and finding that Sophos Central has dramatically reduced their management time and overhead.
Sophos Central offers a completely modern platform for management and reporting with the ultimate in security, scalability, and performance all while enabling us to accelerate feature development to add tremendous time savers for you, your team, and your customers.
Why Sophos Central?
Have a quick look at all the great central management capabilities in this short video:
What you get:
- Better usability – workflows are more intuitive, streamlined, efficient, and task oriented.
- Better security – there’s no exposed services, no VPN, and no open ports and it’s been built-from the ground up with security in mind.
- Better reliability – with a modern cloud architecture scaling to millions of users.
- Better features – with a modern development platform and architecture we can accelerate our roadmap to deliver more features – faster.
- Better integration – you can not only centrally manage your firewalls but all your other Sophos products from a common interface and this integration is essential for Synchronized Security, XDR, MTR, ZTNA and the future of cybersecurity.
Features and capabilities you get today with Sophos Central:
- Group Firewall Management – makes managing multiple firewalls easy including recently added support for HA pairs.
- Zero-touch deployment – saves time and money deploying new firewall devices
- Backup management – a central repository for all your firewall backups
- Central inventory – see all your firewall devices under management at a glance
- Central secure access – with full control over which admins can access which firewalls so you don’t need to expose your webadmin access to the WAN
- Firmware updates and scheduling – with one-click ease and new scheduling options
- Audit logging and tracking – with a full change log history and synchronization status
- High-Availability management – supported as of v18 MR3 to manage HA pairs together
- Central Firewall Reporting – with useful built-in reports, flexible custom report building tools, and export/scheduling options
What’s Next? – Before year end:
Firmware update scheduling – update scheduling is already included in Sophos Central, but you need v18 MR3 running on your firewalls to take advantage of it, making it helpful for the next firmware update.
Partner dashboard integration – We are bringing many of these features to the partner dashboard as well, allowing you to easily make changes to multiple customer firewalls at once with new firewall group templates.
Roadmap – What’s coming in the first half of next year:
Partner Dashboard Inventory and Status – offers full inventory and status at-a-glance of your entire estate (see mockup below). You can also easily schedule firmware updates and store backups for all your customers.
SD-WAN Orchestration – giving you point-and-click options to establish multiple site-to-site VPN networks.
You can see a full list of features in Sophos Central below, what’s coming soon, and compare that with the legacy CFM/SFM platforms. Sophos Central already includes much requested features that that are missing today in the legacy platforms and more enhancements are coming soon.
Making the Switch:
If you haven’t already, now is the time to make the switch. CFM is EOL and going dark at the end of the year which is coming up quickly. Fortunately, migrating management and reporting for your XG Firewalls to Sophos Central is as easy as 1-2-3…
- Register the Firewall to Sophos Central
- Enable Management and Reporting
- Approve the management in Sophos Central
If you have many firewalls to migrate, there is an open-source tool available to help automate the process.
If you require assistance with migration, our Migration Helpdesk can provide guidance, assist with setting up a migration strategy and even guide you through the first few migrations. Log in to the Sophos Partner Portal to get in touch with the team.
If you want to learn more about Sophos Central and what it can do for you, check out our website for more information.
