Sophos XG Firewall: UTM Overview and Analysis

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Key Takeaways

Gartner rates Sophos a Leader because of its ease of use and feature-rich security and integration with the company’s endpoint security product. It is particularly strong with lower-midrange businesses, but prices start low enough for the smallest businesses. While the company is executing well on an aggressive roadmap, SaaS discovery and CASB integration are two needs.

Company Description

Founded in 1985, Sophos has a portfolio of endpoint, network, encryption, Web, email and mobile security solutions. More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos for fast protection against sophisticated threats and data loss. Sophos products are available through a global channel of more than 26,000 registered partners. The company is headquartered in Oxford, UK, and is publicly traded on the London Stock Exchange.

Product Description

Sophos XG Firewall was launched in 2015 as a new entrant to the UTM market to address some of the problems with network protection, visibility, and control. Sophos XG Firewall provides next-generation firewall protection, blocking unknown threats, automatically responding to security incidents by isolating compromised systems and exposing hidden user, application and threat risks on the network. It provides firewall, intrusion prevention system (IPS), advanced threat protection (ATP), Web protection, application control, email anti-spam and encryption, and a Web application firewall with reporting. It also enables Sophos Synchronized Security, which shares health status and other information between Sophos endpoints and XG Firewall.

Markets and Use Cases

Sophos XG Firewall is a modular network security platform that can be configured as a next-gen firewall (NGFW) or a UTM. It is primarily targeted at SMB and mid-market organizations, although it also appeals to larger organizations. It also protects infrastructure as a service (IaaS) solutions in Microsoft Azure.

Metrics

Up to 140 Gbps firewall throughput and 11.8 Gbps NGFW throughput.

Intelligence

Sophos XG Firewall includes a suite of reporting on-box at no extra charge. It also integrates with Sophos Central Endpoint and its root-cause-analytics solution to provide analytics into the root cause of malware attacks. Machine learning is integrated into its cloud-sandbox solution, enabling better detection rates and lower false positives.

Delivery

Sophos XG Firewall is available in a variety of hardware models to suite every performance need, as well as for popular virtualization platforms, as a software appliance for x86 hardware, and in Microsoft Azure.

Agents

No

Pricing

Pricing starts at $249 per year for an entry-level XG 85 appliance. Pricing depends on the performance and features required.

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