Sophos Expands Its Firewall Portfolio

Security software and hardware company, Sophos, today announced the expansion of its next-generation firewall portfolio with two new high-end, enterprise-grade XGS Series appliances. The new XGS 7500 and 8500 models provide protection for large enterprises and campus deployments.

“Large enterprises are under incredible pressure to support tens of thousands of users, all while protecting against complex cyberthreats and demonstrating clear return on IT infrastructure investments amidst today’s challenging economic climate,” said Daniel Cole, Vice President of network security product management at Sophos.

“For our channel partners, we’re creating new opportunities to support distributed organizations needing everything from managing an office of one to the most complex environments protecting tens of thousands of distributed users,” he added.

The new XGS 7500 and 8500 models deliver industry-best modular connectivity; highly scalable software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) features; trusted traffic and application acceleration; high performance Transport Layer Security (TLS) inspection; threat protection; and enterprise-grade, high-availability and redundancy capabilities. Featuring high performance Xstream flow processors and central processing units (CPUs) with enterprise-grade acceleration, the models offer roughly 50% faster throughput than industry averages in their class:

Up to 190 gigabits per second (Gbps) firewall throughput
Up to 141 Gbps Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) virtual private network (VPN) throughput
Up to 93 Gbps intrusion prevention system (IPS) throughput
Up to 76 Gbps next-generation firewall (NGFW) throughput
Up to 34 Gbps threat protection throughput
Up to 24 Gbps Xstream Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and TLS inspection
Support for up to 58 million concurrent connections
Support for up to 1.7 million new connections per second

“We’ve already got a customer running XGS 7500, and we’ve seen firsthand what it’s capable of. The surprising speed boost over previous models blew us away, and will now enable us to better compete in high-end markets with QSFP speeds that enterprises require.” says Brooks Roy, President at Communications Consulting, Inc, one of Sophos’ partners.

“Ingram Micro is one of a handful of worldwide partners – and the only distributor – that had early access to these new models. We especially appreciated the IPS and decryption capabilities, and the joint performance delivered by the internal CPU and proprietary Xstream processor is top notch,” Alessandro Amadori, senior manager, cybersecurity and datacenter, CoE leader, at Ingram Micro, said.

Sophos Firewall is a key pillar of Sophos’ SASE strategy. It provides a more simplified, scalable and secure solution over traditional remote access VPN, and integrates with Sophos ZTNA (zero trust network access) under one unified management plane.

The network solution is part of the Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem, which integrates Sophos’ anti-ransomware endpoint solutions, as well as its entire portfolio of products, services and Sophos X-Ops threat intelligence for faster and more contextual and synchronized detection, protection and response.