With XG Firewall v18, there are a variety of great upgrade options that you can take advantage of to significantly enhance your network protection, performance, and management capabilities.
Protection upgrades
Do you 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 you don’t currently have Sandstorm as part of your license, reach out to your Sophos partner for a quote – it costs a lot less than you might think. In fact, we’ve made this ultra-important protection extremely affordable to ensure everyone can benefit from it.
You can quickly check if you already have the Sandstorm license for your XG Firewall: in the console, go to the Administration > Licensing tab to be sure. If you don’t have this protection, make sure you subscribe as soon as possible. It provides critically important threat protection against today’s ransomware and other advanced threats.
If you already have Sophos Sandstorm Protection, you 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 you can take advantage of this great multi-layer protection from the start by purchasing one of the Sophos Plus bundles (EnterpriseProtect Plus or TotalProtect Plus).
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 lineup to be ready for XG Firewall v18 and all the new capabilities it provides. If you have any locations 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 to 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 take full advantage 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 been using one of the RED 15 or 50 devices for a number of years or still rely upon the much older, end-of-life RED 10, now may be the time to refresh your network infrastructure with one of the exciting new models that 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 to 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 have all the storage you need by checking out our convenient storage calculator. It’s extremely affordable, and having all your 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 recently announced the EAP for v2 with SSL VPN support on Windows platforms. Sophos is unique among firewall vendors, as we offer unlimited free remote access VPN connections that other vendors would most certainly charge you 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.
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