As you know, Sophos SG Series appliances with UTM 9 firmware are our industry leading and award-winning unified threat management (UTM) platform. Sophos UTM has a long and successful history that extends back many years.

Now, with the introduction of Sophos XG Firewall and our XG Series appliances, people may ask if Sophos UTM and the SG Series are going away. The answer is simple: No!

Existing partners and customers who are familiar and happy with their Sophos UTM can continue to sell it and use it, and we will continue to develop and support Sophos UTM 9, with a couple of new releases already in the planning stages.

Sophos customers who need specific features of Sophos UTM 9 that are not yet available in Sophos XG Firewall can rest assured that we will continue to develop the Sophos UTM 9 platform. When customers are ready to switch to XG Firewall, they can use their existing SG Series hardware and upgrade for free.

Sophos XG Firewall runs perfectly on all Sophos SG Series hardware appliances, as well as the same Intel compatible hardware and virtual environments as UTM 9. While we are confident that most Sophos UTM 9 customers will want to take advantage of many of the great new features and benefits of XG Firewall over time, there is certainly no rush to migrate, and customers don’t have to migrate if they don’t want to.

We plan to release some migration tools early next year to help customers upgrade an SG Series running UTM 9 to XG Firewall, if and when they are ready to do so. You can read more about this in our UTM 9 to XG Firewall migration FAQ.

One important point is that customers using UTM Series hardware appliances will need to refresh hardware in order to migrate to XG Firewall. Please talk to you account manager or Sophos partner for help with this process.

Finally, the new release includes new XG Series hardware appliances. These are entirely based on our award-winning SG Series and as such have identical technical specifications to the SG Series – they just come preinstalled with different firmware, which is why we’ve given them a new name to differentiate.

• SG Series = UTM 9.x preinstalled
• XG Series = XG Firewall with new SF-OS 15 preinstalled

Keep an eye on this blog for more information on Sophos UTM releases and for news and updates related to all Sophos products. Sign up for the Sophos Blog newsletter by entering your email address in the sign-up field in the upper right corner of the blog homepage. You can also sign up for our RSS feed.

Sophos UTM is very much alive and kicking. With Sophos UTM or Sophos XG Firewall you can rest assured your business and network security is in good hands with Sophos.

Read the UTM 9 to XG Firewall migration FAQ.

Υou can read the original article, here.