Month: August 2020

We’re pleased to announce the addition of new reporting capabilities for Sophos Central Firewall Reporting (CFR). Customers of CFR Advanced will now see the option to save, schedule and export their favorite reports in Sophos Central, further extending your powerful custom reporting capabilities in the cloud

What’s New and How to Use it:

• Save Reports as Templates – Central Firewall Reporting Advanced lets you save custom report templates. First, customize a report with the columns, filters, and chart type you want. Then save it in your template library for quick access whenever you need to run it.
• Schedule Reports – Getting your favorite and custom reports is now even easier as you can schedule them to be delivered your inbox or picked up in Sophos Central at your convenience. The scheduler allows you to set a frequency for your reports including daily, weekly, and monthly options.
• Export your Reports – Reports can now be exported in HTML, CSV, and (coming next month) PDF formats. As an additional bonus, the exported reports provide up to 100,000 records in a report whereas the interactive reports in Central are limited to 10,000 records. Download your favorite report for offline viewing directly from Sophos Central or have it delivered directly to your inbox.

New options for exporting, scheduling and saving reports are conveniently located on every report screen.

You have complete control over the scheduling frequency, report format, and delivery

We will be covering Central Firewall Reporting in more detail in an upcoming article in our series on Making the Most of XG Firewall v18.

What You Need:

CFR Advanced is a new subscription license that offers additional storage for your Firewall log data for historical reporting, and now adding these additional new features for saving, scheduling and exporting reports.

CFR Advanced subscriptions are on a per-firewall basis, so each firewall you wish to report on in Sophos Central, will require its own CFR Advanced license

CFR Advanced licenses are purchased in 100GB storage quantities. You can use the storage estimation tool (at sophos.com/cfrsizing) to quickly determine the estimated storage required for your particular needs.

New to Sophos Central Reporting:

If you’re new to Sophos Central Reporting, you can try it for free… simply setup your firewalls for Sophos Central management and login to Sophos Central and give it a go.

You can learn more about what’s included with Sophos Central management and reporting on our website or download the PDF brochure. And if you’re new so Sophos XG Firewall, be sure to check out how you can add the best visibility, protection and response to your network.

One of the great new features in XG Firewall v18 that we covered in Part 3 of this series is the new SD-WAN application and user-/group-based link selection capabilities. In this article, we’ll review how you can take advantage of those as a part of another new feature in XG Firewall v18: route-based IPsec VPN.

Route-based IPsec (RBVPN) in XG Firewall v18 enables truly dynamic IPsec site-to-site VPN tunnels. With RBVPN, network topology changes don’t impact VPN policy and you no longer need to modify VPN policies if networks are added or removed from your environment. This greatly simplifies VPN policy creation and management, especially in larger and more dynamic environments.

RBVPN provides full control over routing with support for static, dynamic (OSPF, BGP, RIP) and SD-WAN policy-based routes with RBVPN policies. RBVPN implementation in XG Firewall v18 also provides flexibility to set up more complex network address translation using the new NAT rule configuration such as VPN NAT overlap scenarios.

XG Firewall v18 also supports RBVPN tunnel interfaces for SD-WAN policy-based routes to support IPsec and MPLS co-existence with SD-WAN. This makes it possible to enable IPsec and MPLS (even on a non-WAN zone) to both be active at the same time, with options for load balancing on VPN tunnels as well.

RBVPN is a well-accepted industry standard and interoperates nicely with other vendors’ route-based VPN tunnels, making it easier to tunnel to Azure/AWS and other cloud providers. Ultimately, route-based VPN is the preferred choice for today’s dynamic networks.

Making the most of route-based IPsec VPN tunnels in XG Firewall

This video provides a great detailed look at how to set up route-based VPN in XG Firewall v18:

Then, you can take full advantage of the new Synchronized SD-WAN policy-based routing for your VPN traffic, with options for user, group, application, and even Synchronized Application Control-discovered app-based routing for your route-based VPN.

Synchronized SD-WAN leverages the added clarity and reliability of application identification that comes with the sharing of Synchronized Application Control information between Sophos-managed endpoints and XG Firewall.  Synchronized Application Control can positively identify 100% of all networked applications, including evasive, encrypted, obscure, and custom applications – and now these previously unidentified applications can also be added to SD-WAN and VPN routing. This provides a level of application routing control and reliability that other firewalls can’t match.

To use Synchronized Application Control-discovered apps in your routing, when creating an  application object for SD-WAN or VPN routing, you can select “Synchronized Application Control” from the Technology drop-down box as shown below to see all the relevant applications.

Here’s a summary of the resources available to help you make the most of the new features in XG Firewall v18, including the new route-based VPN capabilities:

If you’re new to Sophos XG Firewall, learn more about the great benefits and features XG Firewall can deliver to your network.