Sophos Firewall v20 Early Access

We are pleased to announce that the Early Access Program (EAP) is now underway for the latest and greatest Sophos Firewall release. This update to Sophos Firewall brings a number of exciting enhancements and top-requested features, including…

Active threat response

• Extending Synchronized Security to MDR and XDR provides a direct feed for security analysts to share active threat information with the firewall to enable it to automatically respond to active threats without creating any firewall rules.
• Dynamic threat feeds introduce a new threat feed API framework that is easily extensible, enabling threat intelligence to be shared from the Sophos X-Ops team, other Sophos products like MDR and XDR, and ultimately 3^rd party threat feeds in the future.
• Synchronized Security now extends the same Red Heartbeat automated response that Sophos Firewall has always had to MDR-/XDR-identified threats to ensure compromised hosts are not able to move laterally or communicate out, while details including host, user, and process are readily available for follow-up; Synchronized Security has also been enhanced with added scalability and reduced false missing heartbeats for devices that are in sleep or hibernated states.

Remote worker protection and SASE

• ZTNA gateway integration makes ZTNA deployments even easier by integrating a ZTNA gateway directly into the firewall. This means any organization that needs to provide remote access to applications hosted behind the firewall doesn’t need to deploy a separate gateway on a VM: they can simply take advantage of the gateway integrated into their firewall.  When combined with our single-agent deployment on the remote device, ZTNA couldn’t possibly get any easier – it’s literally zero-touch zero-trust.
• Third-party SD-WAN integration makes it easy to onramp SD-WAN traffic onto Cloudflare, Akami, or Azure backbone networks to take advantage of their enormous infrastructure, reach, and networking and security services.
• Sophos DNS protection is our new cloud-delivered web security service that will be available separately in early access very soon. It provides a new Sophos-hosted domain name resolution service (DNS) with compliance and security features that are fully supported by Sophos Firewall. This service provides an added layer of web protection, preventing access to known compromised or malicious domains across all ports, protocols, or applications – both unencrypted and encrypted. More news on this new service coming soon.

Network scalability and enhancements

• New VPN portal provides a new containerized hardened self-service portal for end users to download VPN clients and configuration, auto-provisioning, and clientless VPN bookmarks.
• IPsec enhancements include seamless HA failover, tunnel status monitoring via SNMP, unique PSK support for the same local and remote gateway connections, and DH Group 27-30/RFC6954 support.
• SSL VPN enhancements include FQDN (fully qualified domain name) host and group support for both remote access and site-to-site SSL VPN.
• SD-WAN scalability increases SD-WAN gateway scalability by 3X to 3072 gateways and the number of SD-WAN profiles to 1024.
• IPv6 enhancements include DHCP Prefix Delegation to seamlessly integrate with your ISP and new enhancements to the dynamic routing engine now support BGPv6 for improved IPv6 interoperability.

Quality-of-life enhancements

• Interface enable/disable delivers a top-requested feature to easily disable or enable network interfaces on the firewall without losing any configuration.
• Object reference lookup addresses another top requested feature to find where a given host or service object is used in rules, policies, and routing.
• Hi-res display support adds increased horizontal scalability to the management console, taking advantage of high resolution displays to reduce horizontal scrolling.
• Auto-rollback on failed firmware updates reduces any disruption, including high-availability deployments.
• Backup and restore now includes the option to restore a backup from a firewall with integrated Wi-Fi to a non-Wi-Fi model.
• Azure AD SSO for captive portal adds support for user authentication on the captive portal using their Azure AD credentials.
• Azure group import and RBAC add support for a new import assistant for Azure AD groups and automatic promotion for role-based admin changes.

Other enhancements

• Web Application Firewall (WAF) enhancements include geo IP policy enforcement, custom cipher configuration and TLS version settings, improved security with HSTS enforcement, and X-Content-Type-Options enforcement.
• Azure single ARM deployment support enables the choice of a smaller instance size to save on infrastructure costs and reduce network and operational complexity.

Get the full list of what’s new

Download the full What’s New Guide for a complete overview of all the great new features and enhancements in v20.

Getting started

Please note that the early access program has ended – we expect to announce general availability very soon! A special thanks to all who have participated in the program.