Switching to Sophos Central for your firewall management

November 15, 2020 - 5 minutes read

If you’re one of the many organizations already managing your network through Sophos Central, you’re intimately familiar with the benefits it provides for easy management and reporting.

If you’re still managing your XG Firewall customer networks through Sophos Firewall Manager (SFM) or using iView for central reporting, you probably realize that these platforms are aging, struggling to stay current, and difficult to learn and use.

These legacy platforms are being retired with end-of-life coming up soon. These aging platforms are not scalable, do not meet our standards for security, and are difficult and expensive to maintain.

Now is the time to switch to Sophos Central for all your firewall management and reporting needs. Sophos Central offers a completely modern platform with the ultimate in security, scalability, and performance, all while enabling us to accelerate feature development to add tremendous time savers for you and your team.

Why Sophos Central?

Have a quick look at all the great central management capabilities in this short video:

Why customers love Sophos Central:

  • Better usability – workflows are more intuitive, streamlined, efficient, and task oriented
  • Better accessibility – check on your network from anywhere, at anytime
  • Better features – with a modern development platform and architecture, we can accelerate our roadmap to deliver more features faster
  • Better integration – you can not only centrally manage your firewalls, but all your other Sophos products from a common interface – and this integration is essential for Synchronized Security, XDR, MTR, ZTNA and the future of cybersecurity

Features and capabilities you get today with Sophos Central:

  • Group firewall management – makes managing multiple firewalls easy, including recently added support for HA pairs
  • Zero-touch deployment – saves time and money deploying new firewall devices
  • Backup management – a central repository for all your firewall backups
  • Central inventory – see all your firewall devices under management at a glance
  • Central secure access – with full control over which admins can access which firewalls so you don’t need to expose your webadmin access to the WAN
  • Firmware updates and scheduling – with one-click ease and new scheduling options
  • Audit logging and tracking – with a full change log history and synchronization status
  • High-availability management – supported as of v18 MR3 to manage HA pairs together
  • Central Firewall Reporting – with useful built-in reports, flexible custom report building tools, export and scheduling options, and multi-firewall reporting

What’s next?

Firmware update scheduling – update scheduling is already included in Sophos Central, but you need v18 MR3 running on your firewalls to take advantage of it, making it helpful for the next firmware update.

SD-WAN orchestration – giving you point-and-click options to establish multiple site-to-site VPN networks.

Below, you can see a full list of features in Sophos Central today, what’s coming soon, and compare that with the legacy SFM/CFM platforms. Sophos Central already includes much requested features that that are missing today in the legacy platforms, and more enhancements are coming soon.

Making the switch

If you haven’t already, now is the time to make the switch. Migrating management and reporting for your XG Firewalls to Sophos Central is as easy as 1-2-3…

  1. Register your firewall to Sophos Central
  2. Enable Management and Reporting
  3. Approve the management in Sophos Central

Detailed Instructions

If you have many firewalls to migrate, there is an open-source tool available to help automate the process.

If you require assistance with migration, your nearby Sophos Partner can provide all the help you need, or you can reach out to our Professional Services team.

If you want to learn more about Sophos Central and what it can do for you, check out our website for more information.

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