UTM 9.5 coming soon

News from Sophos Partner Portal:

The product team is hard at work on the next release of Sophos UTM with the upcoming beta for UTM 9.5, expected to be available in March. UTM 9.5 improves protection, performance, and management with some of your most requested features for the web application firewall, Sandstorm sandboxing, and much more. Here’s what’s new:

Web Application Firewall:

Web Server Protection in Sophos UTM includes a full-feature web application firewall (WAF) that is a leading replacement for Microsoft’s discontinued Forefront TMG product. And believe it or not, there are still lots of customers out there who haven’t yet replaced their TMG installation with something offering modern protection. Sophos UTM provides the ultimate TMG replacement solution, and it gets even better with UTM 9.5:

• WAF URL Redirection enables the UTM to automatically redirect traffic for a protected URL to an alternate back-end path that greatly simplifies back-end system setup
• WAF Policy and Authentication Templates for common Microsoft business applications provide faster and easier deployment for common servers, such as Exchange and SharePoint
• WAF True-File-Type (TFT) protection can block downloads or uploads based on MIME type rather than just extension, providing better control and protection
• WAF TLS version allows the option to specify the required TLS version required for a virtual server, which enables PCI compliance by excluding TLS1.0
• WAF proxy protocol support uses the client IP inside the Proxy Protocol header to make policy decisions and logging

Sophos Sandstorm

Sophos Sandstorm has been one of our fastest growing products since it was introduced in UTM 9.4, and justifiably so, as it provides essential cloud sandboxing protection to catch the latest advanced threats like ransomware before they can enter the network. It’s effective, simple, and affordable. UTM 9.5 delivers some highly requested Sandstorm features, including:

• Sandstorm data center selection, which enables a preferred regional data center to be manually selected for Sandstorm analysis
• Sandstorm scanning exceptions, which enables certain file types to be excluded from Sandstorm analysis
• Sandstorm activity reporting, enhanced to include files processed via e-mail protection

Management Enhancements

Sophos UTM already provides industry leading performance and usability, but we’re making it better than ever with UTM 9.5. Check out some of our new improvements:

• New 64-bit PostgreSQL Database architecture update for the reporting database to improve report generation performance, especially with larger data sets
• Single archive log download, enabling the convenient export of all UTM logs in a single archive file which allows for easier import into Sophos iView
• Certificate expiration notification, providing a 30-day warning for certificates due to expire – enabling renewals to be made in advance, maintaining continuity
• Support access via SSH, which provides an extension to the existing remote support access feature without the need to share login credentials
• SMTP proxy listening address support, enabling better control over the SMTP proxy behavior without the need to rely on firewall rules
• SNMP monitoring, extended to full file system, enabling file system usage to be available via SNMP