Sophos - XG version 18 now available

Sophos has now released the latest version of the XG firmware. Here you can get a quick overview of the new features and which firewalls can update to the new firmware at all.

New features

• Xstream SSL Inspection: New visibility into encrypted data movement, support for TLS 1.3 without downgrade, powerful policy tools and extremely strong performance.
• AI-based Threat Intelligence: Significantly improved protection with multiple industry-leading machine learning models to effectively defend against zero-day threats and emerging ransomware variants, as well as unique insight into suspicious files entering the network.
• Application Acceleration: Optimises network performance by sending critical application traffic through the firewall via the fast path and reliably routing it over the preferred WAN connection.

Sophos Central.

XG Firewall v18 also supports new centralised management features, reporting and deployment types to be rolled out in Sophos Central next week:

• Group Firewall Management: easily keep the entire firewall inventory consistent with groups that automatically synchronise policies, objects and settings.
• Central Reporting: Data about network activity and operations on all firewalls is instantly accessible in Sophos Central, thanks to several pre-configured reports and flexible reporting tools that can also be used to create custom reports.
• Zero-touch deployment: New firewalls can now be easily and conveniently deployed in Sophos Central: Once the configuration is exported and loaded onto a flash drive, the new firewall automatically connects to Sophos Central.

What else is new?

You can also expect a host of other new features that further improve security, visibility, management and network flexibility:

• Synchronized SD-WAN leverages the power of Synchronized Security to reliably route application and user-based traffic over preferred WAN connections.
• Firewall, NAT and SSL inspection rules and policies are now even more powerful, flexible and user-friendly
• Plug-and-play high availability (HA) facilitates seamless business continuity and ensures maximum reliability. All your customers need to do is connect two XG Series appliances together and the deployment is ready to go
• Real-time data flow monitoring provides at-a-glance information on active bandwidth-hungry hosts, applications and users
• Advanced notifications and alerts ensure your customers never miss an important network security event - whether it's a threat, a service or a key performance metric
• To ensure a smooth transition to the new version, we list below which hardware models can be upgraded to v18 and in which cases new hardware is required.
• All models of the XG and SG series with at least 4 GB RAM can be upgraded. Of course, a valid licence is required. The XG 86 and 106 models were introduced by Sophos for this very reason.

Restrictions with older revisions

• Models with less than 4 GB RAM cannot be upgraded to v18!

Hardware support policy for v18

• Models not supported in v18 will continue to be supported in v17.5.
• Only models supported up to v18, such as older revisions of XG/SG, can remain on v18 and will continue to be supported in accordance with Sophos policy.

If you are not sure which revision you are running, you can tell from the silver label usually found on the bottom of the appliance.
Alternatively, you can find out the revision by looking at the serial number. To do this, simply compare your serial number with the following table from Sophos: https://community.sophos.com/kb/en-us/118143

The following tables provide an overview of the XG/SFOS hardware support policy of current and older XG and SG hardware.

Current XG series models