Sophos Firewall v21 introduces groundbreaking improvements in VPN, authentication, and routing speed performance.
VPN enhancements
- Bulk activation and deactivation options are currently available for connections (refer to the screenshot below).
- The enhanced filtering feature on the VPN’s website has streamlined data retrieval across multiple pages.
- Free-text and value-based searching are now supported in Virtual Private Network (VPN) configurations for community, subnet, and customer-based deployments of remote access and site-to-site VPNs.
- A new, interfaces-specific view has been introduced on the Interfaces webpage, enabling effortless filtering of RBVPN interfaces.
Website to website VPN enhancements
- Fully qualified domain name (FQDN)-based distant gateways have undergone significant optimization efforts to boost scalability in large-scale distributed environments.
- DHCP relays currently support transmission over XFRM interfaces, enabling seamless access to remote DHCP servers situated behind a firewall located at a distance.
- RBVPN deployments experience a substantial surge of up to 20 times in XFRM interface uptime, thereby significantly reducing the impact of disruptions resulting from tunnel flaps, high-availability failovers, or system reboots.
Authentication enhancements
- Seamless Google Workspace integration is achieved through the combination of LDAP shoppers and Google Chromebook SSO compatibility, enabling Single Sign-On (SSO) functionality for Google LDAP in Chromebook environments.
- Significant improvements have been made to burst login handling for Radius SSO, STAS, and Synchronized Consumer ID, enabling the processing of thousands of concurrent login requests across diverse SSO environments featuring a combination of these protocols.
- When HSTS enforcement is enabled, AD SSO now features enhanced expertise for clear protocol handling, facilitating seamless Kerberos and NTLM handshake transactions over both HTTP and HTTPS channels.
Static and dynamic route administration
- With the introduction of the new Handle feature, customers are now empowered to effortlessly replicate, toggle on/off, and annotate static routes within the dashboard, as illustrated in the accompanying screenshot.
- There’s now a black hole route choice feature and ECMP (Equal-Cost Multi-Path) assistance for load balancing.
- Dynamic routing now offers a fresh opportunity to redirect BGP routes into OSPFv3 seamlessly.
- With dynamic routing, HA failovers no longer introduce any latency or performance degradation.
View this concise demonstration video to visualize its functionality and straightforward setup procedures.
Commence leveraging the advanced features of Sophos Firewall v21’s latest capabilities. To complete the registration process, simply click on the link provided in your email and follow the prompts to download the firmware update package, which can then be installed on your Sophos Firewall.
