Bottom Line
Sophos Firewalls are good candidates for mid-sized and distributed enterprises and those already using Sophos’ endpoint protection solution. Dedicated remote branch devices and an easy-to-learn management interface are also strengths.
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Company Description
Founded in 1985, Sophos addresses endpoint, network, encryption, web, email, and mobile security. The company protects more than 500,000 organizations and millions of consumers in more than 150 countries. It is headquartered in Oxford, England.
Product Description
Sophos was named a Customer’s Choice in the April 2022 Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer: Network Firewalls report. It provides next-generation firewall protection that’s relatively easy to set up and manage. It blocks unknown threats; automatically responds to security incidents by isolating compromised systems; and exposes hidden user, application, and threat risks on the network.
Sophos also includes synchronized security (links endpoints and firewalls to enable them to communicate and share information, identify compromised systems, and isolate them until cleaned up), a web application firewall, email protection, ransomware protection, phishing prevention, all firewall rules unified on a single screen, and a secure web gateway.
Features
- Security and Performance: Very Good. The Sophos Firewall offers a good price per protected Mbps (megabit per second) with its new XGS Series hardware appliances using integrated Xstream Flow Processors to offload key network traffic flows.
- Value: Good. Customers see good value, as the company boasts an above average retention rate. Centralized management and reporting are included at no extra charge.
- Implementation: Very good. Users report relatively easy implementation.
- Management: Very good. Reporting and the short learning curve of the management interface get high marks.
- Support: Good. There is an occasional complaint about responsiveness, but users appear generally satisfied with support.
- Cloud features: Good. Cloud app visibility is a nice feature, and support for AWS and Azure is also available.
Markets and Use Cases
Sophos Firewall is primarily targeted at SMB and mid-market organizations; although, its value proposition also appeals to many larger organizations. It is also popular in the protection of infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services running in Microsoft Azure and AWS.
Intelligence
Sophos Firewall integrates with its Sophos Central Endpoint and Root Cause Analytics solutions to provide deep analytics in malware attacks. Machine learning is also integrated into its cloud-sandbox solution, enabling better detection rates and lower numbers of false positives.
Delivery
Sophos Firewall is available in a variety of hardware models with different levels of performance as well as for virtualization platforms, as a software appliance for x86 hardware, and in Microsoft Azure and AWS.
Agents
Sophos Firewall integrates with Sophos Central Endpoint and Intercept X, which use agents.
Pricing
Pricing starts at around $500 for the XGS 87 and around $30,000 for the 6500.
