Sophos UTM Reviews

Sophos UTM provides security for our network here and access through a VPN connection for our remote users. It also offers the flexibility to create different tools for accessibility.

I would like to see Sophos UTM add support for all the new threat-detection technologies and the ability to respond to novel security threats that come along every day.

I'm in the process of switching every UTM device in all branches to Sophos, so I need visibility into each branch to see the activity. I need alerts for any threat that enters the network. If there is unauthorized access or some specific action that can threaten my network, I want to be notified.

We've been using Sophos UTM for the last three years.

Sophos UTM is stable so far. 

I haven't had the need to scale up Sophos UTM so far, but I believe it's scalable.

We have excellent technical support. The company that supports us is highly experienced with Sophos.

We previously had Cyberoam. After Sophos acquired Cyberoam, we purchased new Sophos hardware devices.

Sophos UTM is priced in the middle range. Okay. It's a good value and a far better price than many competing solutions.

I rate Sophos UTM seven out of 10.

We use Sophos UTM for multi-site VPN, quarantine, sandboxing, and IPF. It blocks malware and other unauthorized apps. 

I've been using Sophos UTM for more than four years.

Sophos UTM is stable and ready for customization. 

Sophos UTM is scalable. We have around 100 users, including engineers, managers, and computer scientists. We plan to increase our usage in the future. 

Sophos customer support could use some improvement. 

We were using something else, but we switched to Sophos because it's politically neutral. 

Installing Sophos UTM is straightforward. The deployment itself doesn't take long, but you have to spend some time planning and waiting for the hardware to be delivered. 

Sophos UTM should be more open-source and reduce its license cost. 

I rate Sophos UTM 10 out of 10. If you're considering Sophos UTM, I would say go for it. 

Sophos UTM is a complete firewall we use to protect from internet threats and check traffic from our network to the internet. It's a firewall covering all layers of protection.

Sophos has some plugins that run on the cloud, but it's transparent to the end-user. For example, there is something to identify threats on an email system called SenseStorm, which is connected to the Sophos Cloud and identifies new threats then spreads the same pattern to all Sophos installations in real-time. I can say that almost 100 percent of our customer companies who have a file solution use Sophos.

The three most important features for us are web protection, web server protection, and network protection.

Sophos UTM sometimes falls short in high-availability environments. They used to launch firmware that didn't work very well in a high-availability environment. 

I've been using Sophos UTM for the last five years, but we started using Astaro Security Gateway, the predecessor to Sophos UTM, in 2002.

Sophos UTM is a strong solution. I give it a 10 out of 10 for stability.

Sophos UTM is scalable.

The initial setup is somewhat tricky. You need to understand networking concepts well, and the company must have good policies for internet access. However, it's not that complicated. I would say it's an intermediate difficulty, but I also have a lot of experience with this solution. It might be challenging for a new technician. We do all the deployment in-house, and it takes about three business days. Our team consists of two technicians and me, the manager. 

Sophos UTM isn't cheap. It's in the middle, so not the cheapest, but not the most expensive. It's average. If you buy the full suite, you don't need to pay for add-ons, but if you buy some partial products, you have to pay to deploy more features.

I rate Sophos UTM 10 out of 10. It's the most reliable solution in the firewall market. Considering the price and quality of the product, Sophos UTM is the best solution.

Mostly when we see that the client has no security product, we offer both of the products: firewall and endpoint security. We offer endpoint security solutions: EDR and XDR.

Most of the time, we offer Sophos UTM and firewall products, but when we see that the customer has a firewall already deployed, we pitch endpoint security. If they're already using a different product, we cross-sell a product. For example, if someone has an environment with just endpoint security and doesn't have XDR or EDR, we'll suggest upgrading to XDR or we'll upsell XDR.

The overall visibility of the console is what I find most valuable, plus it's very user-friendly. It can be integrated with other solutions such as SOAR, SIEM, etc., even when you have an existing firewall. I really like that the console can be integrated. You'll see everything on the same window, and the single window feature of the machine is so good. These are the features I really like.

I have no suggestions for improvement for Sophos UTM. It's been a decade and it has been a very good product throughout the Pakistan market.

Pricing could be improved. After-sales service is much better. Once you have a sales team and a technical team for any product, it definitely becomes very easy to pitch or get the revenues out of that product. Flexibility in pricing matters a lot.

This is the fourth year we've been implementing this solution.

Sophos UTM is stable which is why I like it.

I find Sophos UTM scalable and it is one of the reasons I like it.

For Sophos support: the distributor is responsible for providing maintenance, support, and after-sales service. Most of the time, we try to have an agreement between the customer and affiliates which is binding for two or three years.

The support team here is from the distributor. The first layer of support is really fine when compared to the support provided by other products, e.g. McAfee or Kaspersky. This means it doesn't go to the principal for resolution because the distributor or the partner experts try to fix it on their own before logging in to further complaints. We are good with this kind of solution for our customers, and we prefer those distributors who have their support team.

This is why I really like Softech, although everyone does this, Sophos relies on the Softech technical team. They fix the issues most of the time, so it's very rare for us to go to the principal solution. This is the first line of support we have here in Pakistan.

The principal response time is so quick. It took them only two or three hours maximum. I had the experience of addressing an issue to the principal and they were able to answer me in two or three hours maximum. They have a good TA team.

Although Sophos UTM is a good product, other products have more flexibility with their pricing. It is a very fine product, but when someone wants more relaxed pricing or more leverage in pricing, Sophos is more rigid.

For example, Kaspersky is successful in Fintechs because of its services, plus they offer flexible pricing to their end users. It's a comparative advantage here in Pakistan because Pakistan is a very price-conscious market. This is the reason why every time we pitch, we have to pitch more than one product here in Pakistan. They spend their money on SIEM and other kinds of security firewall, but for endpoint solutions, they say any low-budget product could easily be implemented. Most of the customers here in Pakistan like it this way.

We also implemented Kaspersky and McAfee.

We are a partner for all these products. We market these products to the end customers or the end users. We are both selling and implementing these products. We're partners with Sophos. There's a distributor in Pakistan called Softech Microsystems, and we have a silver-level partnership with them.

We've been working with Sophos since 2019.

In the financial market, however, Kaspersky is being used more than Sophos because of its credibility, integration, and extra features offered by Kaspersky. We always try to recommend Sophos as it's what we want, but sometimes, because we also carry a Kaspersky partnership, when a customer demands for Kaspersky, we have to let the customer test it and we have to give them a quote for Kaspersky. We also carry another product, e.g. McAfee, aside from Kaspersky and Sophos. Sophos UTM is a product I want to go further. I try to pitch Sophos UTM rather than Kaspersky or McAfee.

I'm giving this solution a nine out of ten.

Whenever we go for the public tenders, because there's no price flexibility, most of the time I find other products win. Although we have completed our POCs and all that, convincing customers to go with our product, but when it goes to the tenders: in the tenders they mention specification rather than mentioning a particular product, so we'll have to qualify. We qualify technically, but when it comes to the commercial opening or the financial opening, we fail.

During the pandemic, telework grew, however, so did attacks. There was a higher degree of ransomware and so on. With Sophos, we have not had any incidents this year. The security provided has been good. It has proven to be okay for our needs.

The initial setup is very simple.

The solution is stable.

the scalability is good.

The solution needs to do better at covering mobile devices, although they may have an integrated solution for that purpose. 

I don't really know how it behaves when it comes to web server protection. We have no web servers of our own. I don't know how it behaves if we open our servers to the outside. My sense is that the degree of protection must be higher.

We haven't used the solution for very long. We've been using it for less than a year at this point. 

The stability has been good. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

The scalability on offer is quite good. If a company needs to expand, it can do so. 

We are not a big company. We have about 70 or so people. 

Technical support is okay. It is provided by a local company, not Sophos directly.

Previously we did not have any integrated solutions. We had an antivirus of one kind, and a firewall of another. It was a good step for us to integrate all these features into one solution.

The initial setup was simple and straightforward. The deployment was fast. It only took about a week or so, maybe less. 

The pricing is reasonable. Of course, the customer would always like it to be lower, however, the quality to price ratio is positive.

I'm also aware of Fortinet options, however, they are more expensive if you look at Fortinet vs Sophos. 

We are customers and end-users. We came into the pandemic situation needing a VPN and the one offered by the Sophos behaves quite well. From the point of view of our users, it has been a positive experience.

I don't quite know by heart the version of the solution, however, it's quite recent. It's not the newest one. I saw that the brand new one which came out this year and we don't have that.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

We primarily used the solution to replace Cyberoam. For a client recently, we replaced their old SD device with the latest version, XG 210.

At the moment we have deployed the web filtering application as they have their own web servers and their email protection. The web filtering is great. At the moment, we haven't heard any negative feedback from the client.

There is plenty of documentation that can help you check scenarios or different situations that might you have.

The stability is great.

The cost of the solution is very reasonable.

I can't recall dealing with any missing features.

Lately, I've dealt more with Fortinet, and haven't focused too much on Sophos.

The initial setup may be difficult for those not familiar with the product.

If I recall correctly, I've been dealing with the solution for about five or so years. It's been a while at this point. 

The solution is very stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. 

We are actually in the process of discussing scaling with a client. We're working on the business planning aspect right now. We're looking at opportunities on how to protect their network, besides just the webserver and the email servers.

I haven't made any request for technical support previously. That is due to the fact that even the local authorized distributor here in the Philippines is very helpful in deploying and configuring the product. Therefore, we have no need to contact Sophos directly.

There's also lots of documentation to reference. 

Recently, I've used a lot of Fortinet products. 

Although I hadn't done a setup in a while, I quickly recalled the steps taken. If you've handled a setup before, you're likely to find the implementation process rather straightforward. I found I was able to adapt quickly and figure out the necessary configurations.

In terms of licensing, here in the Philippines, we just pay on a yearly basis. The renewal is up for this year in Q3. We are talking now with the distributor where we purchased the hardware for a possible renewal with the client.

Overall, they provide very reasonable pricing.

My company is a reseller of Sophos.

I haven't deployed one of their latest solutions yet. We just had a recent project for a basic firewall, and they were actually 210. That's the last project I had with Sophos.

We are in the process of taking up certification exams for Sophos.

I definitely recommend Sophos. It's one of our top products in the company.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

The primary use of the solution is to create a firewall, web filters, and load balance. We also use it as an IPS.

What I like about the solution is the ease of use.

In the next release, the solution should contain an administration security user to access the interface.

I have used the solution for one year. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is not scalable. In my organization, we have approximately 500 employees using it.

The technical support of the solution is good.

The installation of the solution is easy. It can be finalized in approximately five hours. 

The deployment of the solution was completed by a consultant. We have three technicians and two administrators that oversee the solution. 

It is necessary to pay for a licence to use the solution, but it is not very expensive. 

I will continue to use and recommend the solution.

I rate Sophos UTM a seven out of ten. 

We primarily use the solution for a number of use cases, including the firewall, web filtering, email filtering, and email encryption. UTM does it all. The only thing that we don't use it for is web application and protection. We don't really have any web servers in-house.

The web and email filtering are the two biggest and most valuable aspects of the solution for us.  

The solution overall has just been a good, cost-effective solution for us.

The solution offers a lot of functionality.

The solution scales well.

We've found the technical support to be helpful.

The stability and performance are quite good.

The ease of use could be a bit better. It's something they could work on.

The ease of configuration could be improved. It's not as simple as it could be just yet. However, it's kind of the nature of it.

They're kind of difficult to get set up sometimes.

Some of the detail in the web filter and the email filtering could be better outlined in the reporting. It is not as good as the two separate standalone solutions we used previously. However, it does also gives us a lot of other stuff that those two solutions didn't. It's a trade-off.

I've been using the solution for the last five years at this point.

The stability and performance are good. The solution is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's good.

We've been using the same hardware for five years and it's always had a very good performance. I would say it scales pretty well. We have around 80 users on the solution currently. We've had double that. Actually, until COVID hit, we did have double that, as of a year ago.

We've been very happy with Sophos, despite the fact that most of their support is based out of Europe. When you get them on the phone, they're actually very good. Their support is very good. We've been happy with them, and have no concerns about renewing the maintenance.

We currently use a few Cusco solutions. We had a SurfControl web filter previously - a standalone server for that. We also had an email filtering package, that was on a separate server by itself. We found that the Sophos UTM did both of those things, and it gave us a firewall, and it saved us money. That's largely why we switched. The downside to Sophos is the reporting wasn't as good, however, everything else was better.

There was nothing wrong with the other solutions that we had other than it would cost us twice as much money to get a lot fewer capabilities. We don't really have the manpower to fully utilize those other solutions in great detail, which is why a simple web filter and email filter that was built into the Sophos solution worked for us. Plus, it does a lot more than that. We could run everything through it. We could - and we may do this - move away from using the Cisco solutions altogether, and just use the two Sophos firewalls. Once we get the XG up and running, we can upgrade the UTM to XG also and have the two XG firewalls in our two locations, and use it for the LAN connection between the locations. I don't know that we'll do that, however, it's definitely something that we can do. It's just a lot of additional capability and flexibility. 

While the configuration can sometimes be tricky, it was pretty much straightforward to initially set everything up. It helped that we had paid support through Sophos, so their technicians helped us get it up and running.

The deployment took a couple of weeks in total. It wasn't too big of a deal.

We don't really have any staff dedicated to deployment and maintenance. I tend to handle those aspects myself.

I've watched a few webinars, even on implementation, and it's just that a lot of the stuff is really different. You need to work on it a bit to get the hang of everything.

We had Sophos directly assist us. They were great at helping us implement everything. We physically got it in place, and then got it up and running, and then finished it off with some assistance from Sophos.

We've found the solution to be cost-effective overall.

Normally we do a three-year license with maintenance on a firewall.

Beyond the standard maintenance fee, the solution doesn't require any other licensing costs.

We are a manufacturing company. We're not a technology company. We don't need to have the very latest state-of-the-art technology, however, we want to try to be close to it. For us, Sophos is perfect.

We also plan to use Sophos XG, however, we haven't implemented it yet. We're hoping it might be easier to configure and set up than UTM.

Our antivirus, actually, was the antivirus that was managed by the UTM. Now they've since retired that capability, and they've gone to endpoint security software being managed in the cloud. Sophos Central can manage all of the Sophos security products, including all the firewalls, the endpoint security. Basically, you end up with one web interface for all of your security stuff. That's actually going to be a big feature, especially moving forward with XG, due to the fact that, if XG detects anything fishy going on, you can shut down individual client networks, and not allow any traffic to go through.

 Our Exchange ActiveSync is actually behind a Cisco firewall. We have a Cisco ASA also.

We use the latest version of the solution.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We've largely been satisfied with the product.

As a company, you're looking to get the best solution out there. Once you have something in place, and it's worked well for you, and it hasn't cost you any excess money, you don't need to have too much contact with anyone. I rarely contact Sophos. That's a good indication of how good the product is working for us. If I was looking for something new, or if when maintenance comes up, and we've had hardware that's been in operation for a while, maybe we just need something new. Then you look and see if there's something out there that works better for you. That's basically it. We're not looking for anything new. We've actually been very happy with Sophos. I liked the way that there's a lot of good stuff there.