Software Update: Sophos Firewall OS 19.0

Sophos recently released a new version of its Firewall with 19.0 GA as the version number. This software is delivered on physical hardware, in a soft appliance for VMware, Hyper-V, Xen and KVM, or via the cloud marketplaces of AWS, Azure or Nutanix. In addition to the paid variants for businesses, Sophos offers this firewall for home use at no cost, such as on this page can be read. For the various image and update files you can visit the MySophos Portal† The list of changes in this release is as follows:

Sophos Firewall OS v19 is Now Available

Networking has evolved substantially over the last few years with more users working remotely, networks becoming more distributed, and cloud application usage exploding. Sophos is ensuring you keep pace with new products like ZTNA for remote workers, and now an extremely powerful and helpful Sophos Firewall release with Xstream SD-WAN.

SFOS v19 delivers greatly enhanced SD-WAN, VPN, and networking capabilities, enabling you to easily meet your networking goals, while making day-to-day management even easier.

SFOS v19 Highlights:

• Xstream SD-WAN utilizing the powerful performance of the Xstream Flow Processors in all XGS Series appliances to put IPsec traffic on the FastPath resulting in up to a 5x VPN performance improvement
• Performance-Based Link Selection ensures your most important traffic is routed over your best performing WAN connection, based upon latency, jitter, or packet loss
• Zero-Impact Transitions between WAN links ensures end-user applications are not impacted by ISP outages or disruption
• SD-WAN Orchestration in Sophos Central enables you to quickly and easily setup complex site-to-site VPN overlay networks with just a few clicks
• VPN Enhancements make it much easier and more intuitive to manage your site-to-site and remote-access VPN connections including a new AWS VPC import tool
• New Search Capabilities allow you to quickly find exactly what you’re looking for, both in the product, and in your networking objects when building rules

The full list of new features is available in the What’s New PDF and you can take a quick tour of the new features in this video†

How to Get the Firmware, Documentation and Training

As usual, Sophos Firewall OS v19 is a free upgrade for all licensed Sophos Firewall customers and should be applied to all supported firewall devices as soon as possible as it not only contains great features and performance enhancements, but also important security fixes.

You can manually download SFOS v19 from Licensing Portal and update anytime. Otherwise, it will be rolled out to all connected devices over the coming weeks. A notification will appear on your local device or Sophos Central management console when the update is available allowing you to schedule the update at your convenience.

Sophos Firewall OS v19 is a fully supported upgrade from v17.5 MR14 and later, v18 MR3 and later and all previous versions of v18.5 including v18.5 MR3. Please refer to the Upgrade information tab in the release notes for more details.

Check out the SFOS v19 release notes for full details.

Update training (for v18.5 to v19) is available on the Sophos Training Portal.