Sophos News

Switching to Sophos Central for your firewall management

If you’re one of the many organizations already managing your network through Sophos Central, you’re intimately familiar with the benefits it provides for easy management and reporting.

Sophos Central makes group firewall management and central reporting easy.

If you’re still managing your XG Firewall customer networks through Sophos Firewall Manager (SFM) or using iView for central reporting, you probably realize that these platforms are aging, struggling to stay current, and difficult to learn and use.

SFM and iView are nearing end-of-life.

These legacy platforms are being retired with end-of-life coming up soon. These aging platforms are not scalable, do not meet our standards for security, and are difficult and expensive to maintain.

Now is the time to switch to Sophos Central for all your firewall management and reporting needs. Sophos Central offers a completely modern platform with the ultimate in security, scalability, and performance, all while enabling us to accelerate feature development to add tremendous time savers for you and your team.

Why Sophos Central?

Have a quick look at all the great central management capabilities in this short video:

Why customers love Sophos Central:

Features and capabilities you get today with Sophos Central:

What’s next?

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.

SD-WAN orchestration – giving you point-and-click options to establish multiple site-to-site VPN networks.

Below, you can see a full list of features in Sophos Central today, what’s coming soon, and compare that with the legacy SFM/CFM platforms. Sophos Central already includes much requested features that that are missing today in the legacy platforms, and more enhancements are coming soon.

Central management platform comparison, with green features being new or enhanced in the coming weeks and months.

Making the switch

If you haven’t already, now is the time to make the switch. Migrating management and reporting for your XG Firewalls to Sophos Central is as easy as 1-2-3…

  1. Register your firewall to Sophos Central
  2. Enable Management and Reporting
  3. Approve the management in Sophos Central

Detailed Instructions

Enabling Sophos Central Management is literally as easy as flipping a switch on your firewall, providing your credentials (if you haven’t already), and approving the process 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, your nearby Sophos Partner can provide all the help you need, or you can reach out to our Professional Services team.

If you want to learn more about Sophos Central and what it can do for you, check out our website for more information.