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Sophos Firewall v21 Early Access Announcement

Sophos Firewall v21 Early Access

We are excited to announce the Early Access Program (EAP) for the latest and greatest Sophos Firewall release. This update brings exciting enhancements and top-requested features, including…

Active Threat Response with 3rd Party Threat Feeds: 

  • Active Threat Response has been extended with support for third-party threat feeds to enable easier integration with 3rd party SoC providers, MSPs, industry specific security consortium
  • Now, you can easily add additional vertical or custom threat feeds to the firewall which will monitor and respond in the same automatic way – blocking any activity associated with them – across all security engines and without requiring any additional firewall rules

Setup and monitor your third-party threat feeds under the Active Threat Response menu 

  • Synchronized Security’s automated response to active threats is also extended to third-party threat feeds. Firewall presents threat analysis after corelating threat attempts with managed endpoint.

Enhanced Scalability:

Sophos Firewall v21 includes several enhancements to networking providing improved performance and scalability for many organizations:

  • Google Workspace integration via LDAP client and Google Chromebook SSO are now supported.
  • Authentication Enhancements – Performance for burst login handling is improved up to 4x for Radius SSO, STAS, and Synchronized User ID enabling the handling of thousands of simultaneous login requests even in multiple SSO environments (mix of STAS, Radius SSO, and Synchronized User ID).
  • High-Availability (HA) deployments gain added resilience and more seamless transitions for reduced down-time
  • IPsec VPN gains improved manageability, configuration and performance
  • Web protection and performance enhancements

New Backup restore assistant:

Sophos Firewall v21 includes helpful features first introduced in v20 MR2 that make firewall upgrades to the latest XGS Series easy.

  • The new Sophos Firewall backup and restore assistant adds flexibility and enables firewall configuration to be easily restored on a different firewall model.
  • Port Mapping support makes it easier to upgrade to an appliance with a different port configuration

Streamlined Management and Quality of Life Enhancements:

As with every Sophos Firewall release, this version includes quality-of-life enhancements that make day-to-day management easier.

  • Let’s Encrypt Certificate Support – A long-requested feature, Let's Encrypt certificate support enables the automatic deployment and renewal of certificates based on certificate signing requests (CSRs). Let’s Encrypt certificates are supported for WAF, SMTP, TLS configuration, hotspot sign-in, the Web Admin console, user portal, captive portal, VPN portal, and SPX portal.
  • Expanded Object Reference - Offers added visibility into network object references (usage) for interfaces, zones, gateways, and SD-WAN profiles. It also supports XML API support to retrieve object reference (usage) counts, offering visibility into unused objects.
  • Static Route Management - Users can clone static routes, turn them on or off, and add descriptions. There’s now a blackhole route option and support for Equal-Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) for load balancing.
  • Multiple user-experience enhancements including the Refreshed Web Admin Console, Improved Control Center with Card Views as well as VPN configuration optimization

The refreshed Sophos Firewall Control Center sports new card views and the latest design 

And many more!

Download the full What’s New Guide for a complete overview of all the great new features and enhancements in v21.

 

Getting Started Today

You can download the upgrade package or installer for v21 from the Sophos Firewall v21 EAP Registration Page.  Simply submit your details and the download links will be emailed to you straight away.

Sophos Firewall v21 EAP is a fully supported upgrade from all supported versions of v20, v19.5 and v19.0; including the latest v20 MR2.

NOTE: Sophos Firewall v21 does NOT include support for XG and SG Series appliances. XG Series EOL is March 31, 2025.

All support during the EAP will be through our forums here on the Sophos Community.

Please provide feedback using the option at the top of every screen in your Sophos Firewall as shown below or via the Community Forums.

Thanks for your support in helping make this release the best it can be.

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