Sophos today introduced a new version of the Sophos Firewall with Xstream Software-Defined Wide Area Network (SD-WAN) capabilities and Virtual Private Network (VPN) enhancements. The innovations significantly increase network performance and flexibility.
"Today's globally distributed networks and the explosion of cloud-based applications are forcing many organizations to rethink their traditional WAN architectures," said Raja Patel, senior vice president of products at Sophos. “The new SD-WAN and VPN capabilities built into the Sophos Firewall represent a key pillar of our Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) strategy, giving organizations not only the flexibility to make these necessary changes Leverage wide area network connections and improve resiliency and performance of cloud applications.”
Sophos Firewall Control Center Version 19 (Image: Sophos).
Key new SD-WAN capabilities include
- Xstream FastPath Acceleration of Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) VPN Traffic: New FastPath controls automatically route critical SD-WAN tunnel flows through the Xstream Flow Processors in XGS Series appliances to accelerate trusted traffic. This improves performance and protection by freeing up resources for TLS and deep packet inspection.
- SD-WAN Orchestration: A new Sophos Central Management capability enables easy, automated orchestration of complex SD-WAN overlay networks across multiple sites, simplifying a task that previously would have taken hours to minutes.
- SD-WAN profiles with multi-gateway support: A new SD-WAN link management solution enables traffic to be routed seamlessly and efficiently across multiple WAN-link gateways without affecting active connections in the event of a disruption.
- SD-WAN Performance Monitoring and Logging: New performance monitoring and logging tools enable real-time and historical monitoring of SD-WAN link performance and routing metrics, including latency, jitter, and packet loss.
VPN advancements for easier orchestration of secure encrypted site-to-site and remote access tunnels include
- VPN Performance Improvements: IPsec and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) VPN capacity has been increased by up to five times, depending on the hardware model.
- Improved VPN usability: Streamlined management, new step-by-step wizards, and VPN logging improvements make day-to-day VPN management and setup easier and more intuitive.
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) hybrid network integration: A new import tool makes it easy to connect hybrid on-premises and AWS Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) networks.
Sophos Firewall is integrated with Sophos ZTNA (Zero Trust Network Access) under a unified management umbrella. This is a key pillar of Sophos' SASE strategy, which launched earlier this year and offers a simpler and more scalable solution than traditional remote access VPNs. The network solution is also part of the Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem, which integrates the entire Sophos portfolio of products, services and threat intelligence for faster, contextual and synchronized detection, protection and response.
Availability
Sophos Firewall is now available exclusively through Sophos partners and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) worldwide. Sophos Firewall can be managed alongside other solutions via the cloud-native platform Sophos Central, where users can monitor installations, respond to alerts and track licenses and upcoming renewal dates from a single, intuitive interface.
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About Sophos More than 100 million users in 150 countries trust Sophos. We offer the best protection against complex IT threats and data loss. Our comprehensive security solutions are easy to deploy, use and manage. They offer the lowest total cost of ownership in the industry. Sophos offers award-winning encryption solutions, security solutions for endpoints, networks, mobile devices, email and the web. In addition, there is support from SophosLabs, our worldwide network of our own analysis centers. The Sophos headquarters are in Boston, USA and Oxford, UK.