Sophos UTM Retirement / EOL announced

Hello Amodin ,

Thank you for reaching out to the community, 

In the interest of transparency, and to provide a longer planning horizon, Sophos may sometimes provide specific partners (and customers) with advance notice of lifecycle milestones for products they have sold or own.

This privileged information is intended for the email recipients only and may not yet be reflected in our retirement calendar.

While we cannot prevent such early information from being shared, we ask for your understanding that we will not discuss such advance notifications on the community forum until we have had the possibility to adequately inform all impacted partners and customers.

Your local Sophos representative will be happy to discuss further details, should you have any questions or concerns.

About the SD-WAN Routes: christianelias  Did you create a Thread about your issues here in the community? 

I'm a Sophos partner in Austria and also got this mail. They also mentioned in this mail that about 600.000 installations were done.

The important dates in my opinion are:

• 30 June 2023 "Sale while stocks last or until further notice".
• 30 June 2024 "Final Order Date for 2-Year Renewal Subscriptions and Accessories". So keep an eye on the calendar if you still need devices.
• 30 June 2026 End-of-Life "End of support, subscription periods may not exceed this date"

After more then 20 years, RIP Astaro Sophos UTM!

Vivek,

Again - with all due respect here:

Vivek Jagad said:

In the interest of transparency, and to provide a longer planning horizon, Sophos may sometimes provide specific partners (and customers) with advance notice of lifecycle milestones for products they have sold or own.

I think this must be Opposite Day.  That's not 'in the interest of transparency', what you have here is the exact opposite of what transparency is.

Vivek Jagad said:

While we cannot prevent such early information from being shared, we ask for your understanding that we will not discuss such advance notifications on the community forum until we have had the possibility to adequately inform all impacted partners and customers.

I think the cat's out of the bag on that one.  You do realize that people on this forum are also 'your customers' and in some cases, partners, right?

UTM I'm sure has a big following and just as large of installations out there. I hate to toss out the 'people have a right to know' but we all know there's no such thing as rights - we can choose what we use.  But, at the same time there is some common sense and courtesy that needs to take place with handling customers, whether or not they are hone use license or paying customers.

Vivek Jagad said:

Your local Sophos representative will be happy to discuss further details, should you have any questions or concerns.

My local rep is this forum, as I don't have a subscription to support anymore - only a home license of which I've had for a very long time.  I've contributed my own personal time (as well as many others) to attempting to make this product better and function well for people asking for help.  I think the only way I could get any better would be formal training for certification in your product - which won't happen, I can't afford that.

I get what you are trying to say - really.  But quite honestly, Sophos' lack of not talking about it so people can prepare to move to XG, or another product if they choose to do so is putting them behind the curve in preparation of what's to now obviously come to our front doorstep.

Just because you don't want to talk about it, doesn't make your problem go away. At least extend your users the courtesy of not disrespecting them by not talking about it and essentially dismissing it as rumor.  We are all adults - we can take bad news.  We've seen it coming, the only thing we didn't know was when it was coming.  Now we can plan with or without input from Sophos, I guess.

The move to SFOS (XG) may be a good thing, and I hope it matures within the next three years for it to be a viable product for people.

The benefit to mankind would be to release the source code of UTM and make it open source once it reaches EOL. This probably won't happen but for such a great piece of software to be abandoned and lost and forgotten would be a shame. 

This is a mess. Please support existing installations with UTM beyond 2026. These appliances just do what they should and they do ist really good.

We will never sell XGS as long as no simple lets encrypt implementation will be available. Why? Replacing certificates every year for VPN, user portal, SMTP TLS and WAV is a stupid and senseless job. The UTM approach with lets encrypt is an intelligent solution. XGS is dead therefore for us. Some other competitors are more attractive.

There were also some other limitations with XGS (using port 443 with VPN and WAF was not possible even with several IP addresses or 2 WAN lines for some time, if I am not wrong, maybe this is fixed in the meantime, I don't know).

Nevertheless: UTM is still on demand and we would pay for.

BTW: will UTM Home be stopped also in 2026?

There is no difference in the product between home users and the commercial one, it's just a matter of license applied to UTM, which would also stop when EoL occurs.

So yes, home would be stopped.  You can use XG for it at least.  :\  I'm trying it out now.  Not sure if I will keep it or not yet.

Maybe EOL will be re-evaluated if more customers complain directly to Sophos?

There was a post on reddit indicating the early announcement (this thread) was a leak. Intentional or not, it's out there now. Does Sophos care if it loses the paying customers who refuse to to the XG route.... ?

this might be possible, just to see what would happen. In my case and that of my customers, transition away from Sophos to a competitor.

XGS is no solution for our concepts, as long as key features like a simple lets encrypt implementation is missing.

Did you reach out to your local Sales Rep to discuss your possibilities for the future for you and your customers?