Sophos Firewall v23 Early Access

Sophos Firewall v23 brings many of your top-requested enhancements in one feature-packed release. These include new AI-powered assistance, a modern REST API to streamline rule management, stronger high-availability capabilities, expanded identity support, and simpler day-to-day administration. Sophos Firewall v23 is designed to make your firewall easier to manage, automate, and scale, while further strengthening its Secure by Design foundation.

The new firewall rule management screen is just one of your many top-requested enhancements in Sophos Firewall v23

While there are dozens of enhancements across all areas of the firewall, the highlights fall into five key areas:

1. AI & Automation

With Sophos Firewall v23 and Sophos AI Defense, you and your customers gain better visibility into AI usage across your organization and can easily implement appropriate controls, while the new API enables you to automate firewall management. Also, be sure to take advantage of the new AI assistant to help with constructing firewall rules.

What’s New:

• Enhanced AI governance and visibility support with Sophos AI Defense
• Modern REST API with token-based authentication and a built-in API guide
• AI-powered Firewall Assistant in Sophos Fusion

2. Simplified Management & Greater Resilience

Sophos Firewall v23 makes day-to-day administration easier and helps keep your customers’ networks running smoothly, even under demanding conditions. Whether you’re managing your customers’ firewalls or they do, everyone benefits from a redesigned rule management experience, improved visibility, faster performance, and significant enhancements to high availability.

What's New:

• Completely redesigned firewall rule management experience
• Hardware-aware high availability monitoring and faster failover detection
• Improved HA stability under heavy load
• Automated firmware update scheduling in Sophos Fusion
• Faster and more responsive administration interface
• Improved navigation and firewall status visibility for administrators

3. Secure by Design Enhancements

Sophos Firewall continues to build on its strong Secure by Design foundation with enhancements that further reduce your attack surface, improve security visibility, and simplify protection. New capabilities help secure DNS traffic, provide greater transparency into automated security updates, and make it easier to stay protected with the latest firmware and platform improvements.

What's New:

• DNS over HTTPS (DoH) support for stronger DNS security
• Support for DNSSEC to authenticate DNS responses
• Visibility into applied hotfixes and security updates
• Modernized routing architecture and management
• Improved threat response event handling
• Additional platform hardening and security enhancements

4. Modern Identity & Access Integration

As you and many of your customers continue to adopt cloud and hybrid identity services, Sophos Firewall v23 expands integration options and simplifies authentication. You can more easily connect users across on-premises and cloud environments while improving MFA onboarding and extending support to a wider range of devices and deployment scenarios.

What's New:

• Entra ID support for Synchronized Security
• Google Workspace identity provider integration
• More secure MFA onboarding via email
• Chromebook single sign-on support
• Enhanced support for terminal servers and shared-user environments

5. Scalability, Networking & Application Protection

Sophos Firewall v23 includes a wide range of infrastructure and networking enhancements designed to support growing network environments. From major Web Application Firewall enhancements and a redesigned DHCP service to expanded IPv6 support and improved service discovery, v23 delivers better scalability, performance, and flexibility.

What's New:

• Major Web Application Firewall performance and scalability improvements
• Expanded WAF rule capacity and routing capabilities
• New DHCP service architecture
• mDNS reflector for education, campus, and segmented network environments
• Enhanced IPv6 and IPoE connectivity support
• Additional cloud platform deployment options

Summary:

Sophos Firewall v23 delivers over 30 of your most-requested enhancements, helping you to manage and secure your customers’ networks more effectively. It makes Sophos Firewall easier to manage while continuing to strengthen its Secure by Design foundation. Whether you manage your customers’ firewalls or they manage their own, you'll benefit from improvements that save time, simplify administration, and strengthen protection.

More Details:

Review the What’s New Guide for more details.

Join our upcoming Partner Academy session this October to learn more. Registration opens soon.

Get Started Today:

You can download the upgrade package or installer for v23 from the Sophos Firewall v23 EAP Registration Page. Simply submit your details and the download links will be emailed to you straight away.

All support during the EAP will be through our forums on the Sophos Firewall Community.

Please provide feedback using the option at the top of every screen in your Sophos Firewall interface, as highlighted below in red, or via the Community Forums.