Sophos UTM is a virtual appliance used for network security.
Sophos SG UTM had all the basic functionality that you needed. It is user-friendly and easy to manage for any integrator.
There were a lot of features and functionality in Sophos SG UTM but nothing was state of the art in terms of technology. You did not get the latest functions. It was very monolithic as it was based on an old Linux PuTTY system.
Everything has changed in the newer version of the solution from the SG to the XG. It was a completely new reborn version. You are not able to migrate from SG to XG using scripts. it is very difficult because of the differences. There was not a simple migration path from one to the other.
In the Sophos SG UTM version, you cannot have any other functions. Sophos will tell you "It's a closed version. We will not have any more functions." However, in the new version, you have a lot of new functions, and every two or three months you have new features. For example, you can use Sophos Central to synchronize both strategy policies and even security, if you are equipped with Sophos antivirus on workstation and server. If your antivirus on the workstation finds a threat, your firewall will have the information of the station, what issue it had, and what other stations it communicated with.
Sophos has to enable the Intercept X or an EDR function on the firewall because for the moment, the firewall is only equipped with sandboxing or something similar. Which, is quite good but there should be something easier for the user. For example, the logs at the moment are not as simple as they are in other solutions, such as Fortinet, it is very important to have a logging tool, log reporting, or a reporting engine. We need to see logs and find information within. However, 10 years ago, we do did not care about the logs but things have changed. We need them to analyze, to have a view of some of the layers but we do not have this. They could improve by providing better log functionality and features.
I have been using this solution for approximately five years.
For the whole life of Sophos SG UTM, it has been highly stable.
On the newer XG version, we have had a lot of small bugs on the very first version. We were having lots of small bugs on different functions and it had been a mess for a lot of integrators to make it work and to keep confidence in the XG. The XG had a lot of functions and all functions could have a lot of bugs. Even if everything is under control on one or several functions, there were some functions that had many, such as the VPN. However, in version 18 the stability was a lot better.
You rely on the stability of a firewall and if you have some bottlenecking from the communication from or to the internet. It is very difficult to be confident in Sophos and we lost some confidence in Sophos in the very earlier version.
Overall, we had more problems with the XG than with the SG version.
I have used other Sophos solutions, such as Sophos XG UTM.
The installation of Sophos SG UTM is very easy. There are detailed manuals that can help with the installation if you run into difficulties. There is some basic transferring training you can take that is not complicated.
It is very complicated to migrate everything you put in SG to another version. You need to redefine many aspects manually on the XG because you are not able to extract the configuration from a confidential file to import it into the XG. They are very different and will not work in the same way. It is very confusing for a new customer.
If customers want to buy the XG because it is the new version and they want to migrate through a Sophos or integrator, it will take a lot of days for engineers from SG to XG to implement because it is not the same solution anymore. It is very much similar to if you were migrating from SG to a Fortinet or to a Palo Alto firewall. You have to recreate the configurations manually on your side, with no migration paths. It is a very important point. We do not have migration paths from one to another.
The solution is very low cost compared to competitors. You have a good firewall, a lot of functions for less than the price of some omni firewall competitors.
I have evaluated other solutions, such as Sophos XGS.
There are two versions of the Sophos UTM. The old one is the SG, and the newer ones are the XG and XGS UTM, the next-generation firewalls.
Sophos UTM was a rebranded solution that was bought from the Astaro company. It was one of the first UTM and was a very stable solution. Everything was inside a small box, you could start to enable or disable some functions, such as TCP, HTTP proxy, or firewalling. It allowed you to manage everything you wanted in this Unified Threat Management solution. It was a very nice multi-functioning security tool. If you adapted to the way of working with the UTM you could do everything with it.
It was a nice solution. Sophos still allows the use of the SG UTM. For example, if you want to buy an XG Firewall, which is their new next-generation firewall, you still can purchase the older SG UTM. Sophos is able to still deliver this solution.
I rate Sophos UTM a seven out of ten.