In a move that we believe highlights our ongoing commitment to innovation and market leadership, Gartner has named Sophos as one of only two Visionaries among 18 vendors included in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls.

A defining strength of Sophos XG Firewall is Synchronized Security, our XDR-style integration that enables our endpoint, firewall, and other next-generation security solutions to share information and automate detection and response in ways that isolated point solutions cannot. Customers say that they would need to double their security headcount to maintain the same level of protection without Synchronized Security. They also tell us that they experience fewer security incidents and can identify and respond quicker to issues that do occur.

Extended Detection and Response (XDR) capabilities that reduce the complexity of security configuration, threat detection, and response have emerged as one of the most critical needs as security and risk management leaders struggle with too many security tools from different vendors with little integration of data and a lack of orchestrated response.

“The primary value propositions of an XDR product are to improve security operations productivity and enhance detection and response capabilities by including more security components into a unified whole that offers multiple streams of telemetry, presenting options for multiple forms of detection and concurrently enabling multiple methods of response”  Gartner, “Innovation Insight for Extended Detection and Response” (2020).

We believe Gartner’s recognition demonstrates our innovation in XDR and clear understanding of what security leaders need to achieve greater visibility, easier management, and better threat detection and response across their entire ecosystem.

Staying ahead of the evolving threat landscape

Advanced adversaries continually change and escalate their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) to circumvent legacy security controls, prolong or evade detection, and execute successful attacks. In 2020, in particular, adversary groups and malware strains have evolved, as evidenced with Maze, WastedLocker and other modern ransomware attacks.

Keeping pace with sophisticated attackers requires constant innovation. Earlier this year, we introduced a new “Xstream” architecture for Sophos XG Firewall, ushering in a host of new and enhanced features, including:

• Inspection of TLS 1.3 to detect cloaked malware: New port-agnostic TLS engine doubles crypto operation performance over previous XG versions
• Optimized critical application performance: New FastPath policy controls accelerate – up to wire speed – the performance of SD-WAN applications and traffic, including Voice over IP, SaaS, and others
• Threat analysis with SophosLabs intelligence: Protection against zero-day threats and emerging ransomware variants with multiple best-in-class machine learning models and unmatched insights into suspicious files entering your network.
• Adaptive traffic scanning: The newly enhanced Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) engine dynamically risk-assesses traffic streams and matches them to the appropriate threat scanning level, enhancing throughput by up to 33% across most network environments
• Comprehensive cloud management and reporting in Sophos Central: Centralized management and reporting capabilities in Sophos Central provide customers with group firewall management and flexible cloud reporting across an entire estate without additional charge

Visit our website for more information on XG Firewall and the Xstream architecture.