Sophos is pleased to announce that the early access program (EAP) for XG Firewall management through Sophos Central is now available for you to take a test drive.

As you probably know, Sophos Central is the ultimate cloud-management platform for all of your Sophos products, and it now includes XG Firewall. It makes day-to-day setup, monitoring, and management of your network protection easy. You can quickly and easily add all your XG Firewalls into Sophos Central, giving you secure access to your entire estate from anywhere.

With XG Firewall joining Sophos Central, you can now manage all your Sophos Synchronized Security products from a single cloud console. Intercept X and the rest of the Sophos suite of protection are all there, at your fingertips: mobile, email, wireless, and more.

How to get started in three easy steps:

Check out this step-by-step knowledgebase article for full details, but it’s really as simple as 1, 2, 3:

1. First, you’ll need a Sophos Central account if you don’t already have one. Head on over to cloud.sophos.com to create a trial account or login, and while you’re there, enroll in the Early Access Program by clicking your account in the upper right corner of the console.
2. Next, login into your firewall and add your Sophos Central credentials to the Central Synchronization screen and select the option to Manage from Sophos Central.
3. Then, return to Sophos Central and confirm adding your Firewall. That’s it! Now you can securely access your firewall from anywhere through Sophos Central.

Join the EAP Community Forum to share your feedback with the Sophos team and others.

Additional features coming soon

Over time, additional features will be added to Sophos Central management of your XG Firewall including:

• Backup management and storage for your regularly scheduled firewall backups
• Firmware update management to make multiple firewall updates easy
• Light-touch deployment to enable easy remote setup of a new firewall

And much more!

FAQ

Below are the most frequently asked questions about Sophos Central Management of XG Firewall. You can add your own to the EAP Community Forum where our team will do our best to answer.

Question: Is there a limit on how many firewalls or what type can be managed by Sophos Central?

No, there is no limit. Sophos Central can manage any XG Firewall, hardware, virtual, software or Azure as long as it has a WAN internet connection to connect to Sophos Central.

Question: Is there a charge for Sophos Central management of XG?

No, there is no charge and no special license required for either the EAP or when this capability is generally available. Anyone can setup a Sophos Central account at no charge to manage their XG Firewalls.

Question: Do I need other Sophos products to take advantage of Sophos Central Management of XG Firewall?

No, you don’t need any other Sophos Product to take advantage of Sophos Central Management of your XG Firewalls.

Question: How does the connection and information sharing work between XG and Sophos Central?

XG Firewall initiates a secure TLS encrypted connection with Sophos Central to share information. Since the connection is outbound from the firewall, it is completely secure and a simple way to manage firewall devices remotely without exposing the management interface login on the WAN. No port or other configuration is required. Since there is no storage of the configuration or log or reporting data in Sophos Central, there is no synchronization required – any changes made through Central are taking place on the device as they are made.

Question: Does Sophos Central copy or store any of the data from my Firewall in the cloud?

No, all your Firewall data and configuration information remains on your Firewall.

Question: What version of firmware is required on XG Firewall to manage it from Sophos Central?

XG Firewall v17.5 (or later) is required. This was released in late November and is currently being rolled out in stages to customer systems. If you haven’t already received the automatic update notice in your Firewall console, you can download the firmware update from MySophos.

Question: What are the various central management products that are available for XG Firewall and their differences?

Sophos Central is ideal for Sophos customers who want to monitor and manage their firewalls conveniently alongside their other Sophos products in Sophos Central: It offers a full list of all your firewalls under management along with quick access to manage any of them individually (one-at-a-time). It does not yet offer any policy template tools or alerting and monitoring like Sophos Firewall Manager.

Sophos Firewall Manager (SFM) is our on-premise product that enables rich powerful multi-device management features. It is ideal for organizations managing a large number of devices or those who want to take advantage of the policy template and other multi-device management tools.

You can read the original article, here.