Sophos ZTNA Early Access – Now Available

The highly anticipated Early Access Program for the release candidate of Sophos ZTNA is now available to everyone via Sophos Central.

Sophos ZTNA is a brand-new cloud-delivered, cloud-managed product in the Sophos ecosystem to connect users to applications securely. It’s the ideal replacement for remote access VPN, with some significant advantages in zero-trust security, ease of management, and a transparent user experience.

What’s New:

If you participated in our previous EAP program, you’ll find a lot of great new enhancements in this release:

• Sophos ZTNA gateways support clustering (up to 9 instances in a cluster) to improve high availability, performance, and scalability
• Sophos ZTNA gateways are supported in Amazon AWS environments
• Sophos ZTNA gateways support single-arm and dual-arm deployments
• Sophos ZTNA gateways will probe web-based applications to ensure they’re reachable, aiding in troubleshooting and application downtime alerting.
• Sophos ZTNA now supports both agent and agentless access methods to resources.
• The Sophos ZTNA client is available for Windows 10, Windows 10 ARM, and Windows 11, providing ‘thick’ application support (TCP/UDP-based applications).
• The Sophos ZTNA client enables Synchronized Security with Sophos Intercept X to dynamically assess device health for use in policy to prevent compromised devices from connecting to applications.
• Sophos ZTNA supports both Azure and Okta IDPs for authentication. Azure AD and on-prem AD are supported for directory import, enabling security group-based policies. 
• Enhanced alerting when gateways are unreachable, a cluster is degraded, or web-based applications aren’t reachable from the ZTNA gateway. 

Getting Started: 

1. Register for the ZTNA EAP directly at https://events.sophos.com/ztna-eap
2. Follow the instructions provided after signing up to log in to Sophos Central and activate the early access program for your account (detailed instructions).
3. Review the Sophos ZTNA Deployment Checklist
4. Get started adding your users, identity providers, gateways, policies, and applications.

Providing Feedback:

The team would love to hear your feedback – so please take advantage of the convenient feedback tool provided within Sophos Central (shown below) to let the team know about your experience.  Please have a look at our best practices guide for reporting issues to help the team as best you can.

Product Training and Assistance:

• Consult the online documentation also available via the Help section (upper right of the console screen) within Sophos Central
• We have some great product training available as well
• Head over to the community forums for additional content (such as known issues) and to interact with other EAP participants and the Sophos team

Learning More about ZTNA:

• Visit the new Sophos ZTNA website at sophos.com/ztna for more information
• Download the Six Advantages of ZTNA vs. Remote Access VPN white paper
• Review the ZTNA FAQ

The Early Access Program is expected to run until the end of the year, with General Availability starting January 3^rd, 2022. 

Thanks for your help in making this release of Sophos ZTNA the best it can be!