Sophos Expands Firewall Portfolio with Enterprise-Grade Appliances

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 unrivaled performance and protection for large enterprise and campus deployments, broadening market opportunities for the channel partners that serve them.

“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.

“Sophos is shaking up the competitive enterprise firewall landscape with these new high-performance appliances, providing best in class price per protected megabit per second (Mbps). Network performance, reliability and security are top of mind as customers grow and expand their infrastructure needs, and these platforms enable organizations to grow and scale without having to compromise on security, which is often the case in larger, more demanding environments. 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.”

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.

“Sophos has long been a leader in the SMB market; with these new firewall models, it’s making it clear that it’s also a leader in the large enterprise market,” Alessandro Amadori, senior manager, cybersecurity and datacenter, CoE leader, at Ingram Micro. “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.”

“Our experience with the XGS 7500 during the early access program showed that these models have the necessary throughput to target much larger deployments,” said Lars Kröllken, IT security team leader at Bechtle IT-Systemhaus Dortmund. “We will now be able to position Sophos in larger projects where we would have previously had to look to other vendors. By broadening the total addressable market, we can now pursue new opportunities with Sophos beyond the traditional SMB and mid-market sweet spot, which will be mutually beneficial for our already successful business relationship.”

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.