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Enhancing performance, security, reliability, and management

By Chris McCormack

XG Firewall v18 Maintenance Release 4 (MR4) is packed with enhancements to performance, security, reliability, and the management experience. XG Firewall MR4 also enables great new Sophos Central Management capabilities.

New Sophos Central enhancements

• New Partner Dashboard enabling Sophos partners to do group policy management across their customer base – make a change once and have it automatically replicate across multiple firewalls
• New group policy import enables one firewall to define the group policy during group setup, making it easy to migrate from legacy CFM or SFM platforms
• Scheduled firmware updates enables MR4 to be the first firmware you schedule using this new option
• Full HA support enabling easier management and improved fail-over support

With legacy SFM and CFM platforms coming to end of life soon, Sophos Central provides the ultimate platform for managing all your firewalls moving forward. If you haven’t already, now is the time to switch.

Enhancements in XG Firewall v18 MR4

High availability:

• Improved FastPath performance for active-passive pairs
• HA support in Amazon Web Services using the AWS Transit Gateway (coming soon to the AWS marketplace)
• Improved high-availability setup and upgrades

VPN enhancements:

• New advanced options for IPSec remote access (replacing scadmin)
• Sophos Connect VPN client downloads now available from the user portal
• Enforcement of TLS 1.2 for SSL VPN on site-to-site and remote-access connections

Security enhancements:

• Stronger password hash – which will prompt you to change your password when upgrading to take full advantage of this important feature (see prompt)
• Web filtering – Websites that are identified as containing child sexual abuse content by the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) will be automatically blocked when any web filtering is enabled. See www.iwf.org.uk for more information on the IWF.
• Cloud Optix integration – Cloud Optix is now XG Firewall-aware, enabling the two solutions to work better together (full details).
• Synchronized Application Control – a new option will automatically clean up discovered apps that are over a month old
• Authentication – users can now be created for RADIUS using UPN format

Full release notes

Full release notes are available on the XG Firewall Community Blog.

While we always encourage you to keep your firewalls up to date with the latest firmware, over the next few months we are recommending you rapidly apply maintenance releases to ensure you have all the important security, performance, and feature enhancements applied as soon as possible.

Also ensure you have automatic pattern updates enabled so that you can be assured you have the latest protection updates.

XG Firewall v18 MR4 is an easy and fully-supported upgrade from XG Firewall v17.5 MR6+ (including the latest MR15 release). Please refer to the upgrade matrix for more details.

How to get it

As usual, this firmware update is no charge for all licensed XG Firewall customers. The firmware will be rolled out automatically to all systems over the coming weeks, but you can access the firmware any time to do a manual update through the Licensing Portal. Please refer to the documentation for more information on how to apply firmware updates.

Learning more about upgrading to XG Firewall v18

And if you still haven’t upgraded to v18, or are still exploring many of the new features, be sure to take advantage of all the resources available, including the recent “Making the Most of XG Firewall v18” article series that covers all the great new capabilities in XG Firewall v18:

• Xstream architecture, DPI engine, and TLS inspection
• Xstream TLS Inspection for a modern encrypted Internet
• FastPath Application Acceleration and SD-WAN Routing
• Zero-day threat and ransomware protection
• Network address translation (NAT)
• Route-based IPsec site-to-site VPN
• Switching to Sophos Central for Firewall Management