Sophos Partner Roadshow 2023

After three years, we finally attended a Sophos Partner Roadshow again. After the pandemic, we stopped going to offline events, but we wanted to meet people in person again and see them without beauty filters. There were not many new announcements, but there are a few upcoming features to look forward to.

Agenda

As at an Apple keynote, the session began with thanks to everyone involved, followed by growth figures and market forecasts for the coming years.

This was followed by storytelling and analogies to make the threat landscape and the possible protection technologies easier for the audience to understand.

Then there was an outlook on the roadmap, but more on that later.

Finally, several presentations examined possible cyberattacks in detail and explained how Sophos products can help.

Managed Detection and Response

We all remember the time when Sophos heavily promoted Intercept X. Now the focus is on MDR. Feedback from existing customers suggests that Sophos is actively running phone and email campaigns to promote MDR, which is annoying some people.

But as energetic as Sophos’ marketing may be, the product and the service are genuinely excellent, and we can recommend them without reservation.

Sophos Threat Advisor was still mentioned in the presentations, even though the product goes End of Sale next month.

Sophos WiFi 6 Access Points

The Wi-Fi 6 Access Points will be available in August. We expect to be able to share pricing in July. If you do not want to lose any time, you can use our contact form to join the waiting list, and we will send you an offer or availability information as soon as we have the prices.

We are dedicating a separate post to the Sophos AP6 Access Points, where we explain all the details in depth. We have had a test unit since January and have already been able to gather practical experience.

The most important data on the new Access Points:

A total of five new Access Points with Wi-Fi 6 standard will be available.

2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency band

• Sophos AP6 420
• Sophos AP6 840

6 GHz frequency band

• Sophos AP6 420E
• Sophos AP6 840E

Outdoor with 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz frequency band

• Sophos AP6 420X

The new Access Points can no longer be managed through the firewall. Management is available only via Sophos Central, directly through the Access Point web interface, or through the app.

Sophos Central is, of course, the recommended path. However, as with the Switches, there is a subscription, which will cost about 10% of the Access Point price.

Roadmap

The roadmap is a very sensitive topic for certain people at Sophos, though not for the technical teams, who tend to be more relaxed about it. If you move in the tech bubble, you know the pattern from large companies: there is a keynote, and people talk openly about which software features can be expected by the next keynote in the following year.

Sophos is more cautious. There is a roadmap, but Sophos does not want it to be public because some of the features listed there may never arrive. We have seen this several times in the past. Some customers find that difficult to accept, and some Sophos employees struggle with it as well.

I know many readers would like a little more substance here, to understand what is happening at Sophos and with the products they have purchased. If nothing happens for a long time and you wait release after release for improvements that never arrive, switching to a competitor at renewal time quickly becomes tempting. Fortinet is currently doing well and is also in a strong position at Gartner.

Since we are not allowed to disclose details here, and because we have been muzzled and are tired of defending our position to Sophos, I will leave it at that. Instead, I will summarize information that is known, though perhaps not to everyone, and also say what is not coming.

Firewall

The next major release, Version 20, should arrive within the next seven months. The Early Access Phase will start toward the end of the year.

• Finally, the GUI will also be adapted for widescreen monitors, and the annoying white space will disappear.

All that remains is the annoying jumping assistant, which fortunately can be deactivated.

• The ZTNA Connector will then run directly on the firewall, making the topic interesting for many smaller companies without a hypervisor or KVM. Unfortunately, the connector is limited to a rather stingy 15 GB of traffic per user per month, which makes it unattractive again for many.

Switches

The Sophos Switches have been available since December 2021. Unfortunately, there is no news on MDR or Synchronized Security integration. Many would also like to see a core switch, but that is currently not a topic at Sophos.

Conclusion

For us, the roadshow was great because we could finally have relaxed conversations with people again without delay or poor camera quality. Of course, we already knew the product information. That is the standard we set for ourselves, because we work with Sophos products every day.

Even so, our feelings are mixed. On the one hand, Sophos has developed a solid ecosystem that is now being actively worked on and continuously improved. On the other hand, Sophos has annoyed many customers with long development cycles, a lack of visibility, product discontinuations, and price increases.

Nevertheless, we are currently confident that, now that legacy products have been or will soon be phased out, future developments will arrive faster and no longer take years. The foundation of the platform has been laid, and individual products such as MDR are already phenomenal. Others, such as Switches, ZTNA, and Firewall, still need a few updates, but they can get there too.

Feedback

We welcome detailed feedback on what you currently like and what features you miss. We are happy to forward the feedback to Sophos, collect all suggestions, and create a blog post with the most frequently requested features, or more precisely, the features that would make Sophos products better.