Sophos Firewall v20: Streamlined Management

With Sophos Firewall v20 now available for early access, we will be covering some of the top new features every week leading up to launch. In this article, we will have a look at how SFOS v20 streamlines management with some nice quality-of-life enhancements.

For a demo, check out this short video covering the many management experience enhancements in v20…

Here’s a quick overview of the key new management and quality of life enhancements:

Interface enable/disable – A popular feature carried over from our SG UTM product line, you can now quickly and easily disable or enable interfaces on the firewall without losing any configuration. A new status of “Turned off” is shown directly on the Control Center for disabled interfaces. It is not possible to disable alias or tunnel interfaces, or interfaces that are individual members of a LAG or Bridge, however you can disable the entire LAG or Bridge interface.

Object reference lookup – You can now see the usage count of all host and service objects as well as a full list of all locations where that object is referenced, such as in rules, policies, routing, etc. You can also directly edit or remove objects for many entities without switching context from the hosts and services list.

Hi-res display user interface scalability – The management console now takes advantage of high-resolution displays, scaling the interface and enabling tables to utilize full HD width (1920 pixels) to display more information, reducing the need to scroll horizontally.

Auto-rollback on failed firmware updates – If a firewall device fails to complete a firmware upgrade for any reason, including devices in a high-availability cluster, the device (or cluster) will be rolled back automatically to the previous firmware version and an alert will appear in the Control Center.

Backup restore enhancements – Backups from a Sophos Firewall with integrated Wi-Fi can now be restored to a device without integrated Wi-Fi if the associated wireless networks are first removed before running the backup.

Check out all the new features in v20 – Sophos Firewall v20 includes a ton of great new capabilities. Check out the full list of what’s new in this What’s New PDF download.

Early Access Program

Check out all the great new features in SFOS v20 today and help us make this release the best it can be by participating in the early access program. Visit the SFOS v20 EAP registration page to get started.

Sophos Firewall v20 EAP1 is a fully supported upgrade from any previously supported firmware version, including the most recent v19.5 MR3 release.

Once you’re up and running, please provide feedback through your Sophos Firewall’s feedback mechanism (top right of every screen on your Firewall). Also visit our EAP community forums to share your experiences with others.