Sophos UTM Reviews

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.

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. 

Sophos is a unified solution. We have anti-virus protection, firewall rules, knotting, and DACC all in one box. With Fortinet, everything is separate with multiple devices and solutions.  

We are very happy with Sophos. I can't think of any pressing issues that need to be addressed.

We have been using this solution for roughly five to six years.

Both the stability and scalability are great.

We don't need to contact their technical support. We have our own skilled team of IT experts.

The initial setup is very simple.

I think the pricing of Sophos is very fair.

Sophos is good for small and mid-sized organizations. Big companies need solutions with layered security.

Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give Sophos a rating of eight.

The most valuable features of this solution are the firewall application and application control.

Monitoring and reporting are areas that need improvement.

I have been using Sophos UTM for five years.

It's a stable solution for 90% of the time.

There are some things that are not quite 100% and it could be improved.

Technical support is very responsive.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It's reasonably priced.

This is a good product but there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

We use Sophos UTM to protect our infrastructure.

There are things missing when it comes to policies.

The web filtering capability should be improved.

Anti-phishing functionality should be improved.

We have been using Sophos Unified Threat Management (UTM) for two years.

This is a very stable product.

Scaling this solution works fine.

The initial setup is complex.

Our licensing fees are paid on a monthly basis.

Overall, this product is very good and I recommend it for other users.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

We use this solution ourselves and we also deploy to our clients. It is a capable, general-purpose firewall with VPN tunneling built in, and a lot of web features if you're hosting a website. We are resellers of Sophos and I'm a partner in our company. 

We haven't changed our procedures as a result of using this product but maybe the flip side is the case. We haven't had to change our procedure because we have this great tool that keeps the bad guys away.

I would say the email for sure and the basic firewall functions are great features. It also has advanced firewall scanning. If you receive a file, you can have it scanned through Sophos. It's a really complete product.

Sophos has a very small crew of people who continue to work on enhancing the UTM. At some point, they had actually stopped enhancing it and the word on the street was that they weren't going to enhance it any more because everybody was going to go over to XG, but they found that 50% of their users were still on the UTM and that was five years after they'd come out with the XG line. They decided they were going to rebuild some core parts of XG, and that would take a while. It's been six years and they're still not there. The updates come out agonizingly slowly. They just trickle out and when there's a problem with an update it takes a while to sort out. It's still a viable product but the more they improve XG, the less you have a need to stick with SG.

I've been using this solution for 15 years. 

There are some legacy things that were probably fine back in the day when it was invented in Germany, things like the IPS, the Intrusion Protection engine. It's terrific and it works really well, but it can be a little bit slow. Because of the way that some pieces are built, for example the core for the IPS runs on only core, even if you have a multi-core CPU. 15 years ago that wasn't a big deal because your weak link was going to be your computer. But nowadays, you could have a fast enough computer if they could just let it work with multi-cores. They clearly aren't interested in rewriting large portions of the code because they're going to the XG so all they do is fix it or maybe add a feature that's in the marketplace. Over time, they've been adding more ways to do a VPN tunnel but some things they need haven't been added because it would require a big rewrite and they don't want to go there.

The scalability has worked great for us. Everyone in our company uses it even though some may not know that they're using it. One of our larger clients, with a super computing center and some of the fastest computers in the world, use Sophos, so I would say that it does the job.  

Technical support have been very good. They are very knowledgeable but it can take too long to make contact. They're great once you do get hold of them. They've solved every problem we've had. 

We've tried numerous other solutions. Cisco, and some of the other major ones that were out there, but once we started using this, it was so much better in so many ways, we just dumped all the others.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward. They have a template which takes you through and asks what you want protected. There's still a lot to do after that because there are variations which require more work. For example, if I have clients who need to block certain email addresses, I have to go through and set those up. If I need to allow conversations which require specific ports open in order to get to a particular business or credit card processing, that has to be set up. There is a lot of HIPAA detail in it and it also has credit card compliance things which require a manual set up. The setup requires a knowledge base. 

The solution is 100% free. You can just download the software for up to 50 IP addresses. It is a hundred percent free. Throw it on your own machine. Right, it's a native Linux product, a hardened Linux product and it's free for that sort of user.

The solution has email firewall built in with all sorts of functionality, it is an absolutely excellent firewall, the logging is really good, you get great information about what's going on. It does things like GeoIP tracking and you can make decisions based on where people are coming from. It's just really a complete firewall. I would say if you're just starting right now, get the XG. Not that the UPM isn't outstanding, but it's disappearing. You might as well learn the XG. The product still works really well, although it's getting a bit long in the tooth. The sooner that they come out with the XG that can do everything that the UTM does, the faster the rest of the world will make the jump.

I would rate this solution an eight out of 10. 

We primarily use the solution for perimeter security in order to protect content. We also use it for the XG firewall.

The content filtering is the solution's most valuable aspect.

The initial setup is pretty easy.

The solution is pretty easy to manage.

There needs to be some improvement in the IPsec VPN. There is implementation only support. I have version one. I'd be most interested in having IP version two from the protocol.

I've been using the solution for about five years or so at this point.

The stability of the product is quite good. We haven't had any issues with bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze on us. We trust its reliability.

We don't really have scalability in mind right now. I need proof of all that. It's a single device that we have.

We don't plan on increasing usage with this device. In fact, we're considering a switch to Sophos XG.

We've never directly worked with Sophos' technical support. We've always dealt with the Sophos partners.

We also don't really have any experience with online community support or documentation.

I previously worked with Microsoft BMG. At the time we switched, Sophos was the better option. We needed a solution that was easy to manage and Sophos fit the bill in that sense. Microsoft didn't really offer any support. Sophos also was integrated with a directory and a single sign-on.

We're actually looking at switching to Sophos XG in the near future. The main difference between the two lines of Sophos products is the level of support provided. XG offers more of what we need. We may also eventually move to a Huawei firewall.

The initial implementation is not complex. We found it to be very straightforward. It was easy.

The deployment took approximately one week. It didn't take too long.

We had two people on staff that handle deployment and maintenance.

We had a consultant help us manage the implementation. hey were very good and quite knowledgable. We were satisfied with the assistance they provided to our team.

We pay for the service on a yearly basis. The last time we paid was in June, for a year. At the time, it was about $20,000.

There are no costs above a standard licensing fee.

We're just customers. We don't have a business relationship with Sophos.

I can't remember the exact version of the solution I am currently using, however, I believe it to be around version 9.

It's a good product, and I would recommend it, however, I would advise other potential users to instead maybe consider Sophos XG.

Overall, I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten.

Our primary use cases include: 

• Remote SSL connection
• Web-filtering
• Web server protection
• WAF application.
• Firewall rules

We have securely deploy systems accesible only behind encrypted ssl vpn and all user can access without the risk of data exposure.

The most valuable feature is the price. I've been requesting prices all over these years between different solutions like Fortinet, Palo Alto, and Check Point and Sophos has been the cheapest and the best of all of them that I have tried. I have been working with Fortinet, it's a fact that the sophos price is surprisingly better.

I have also worked with Check Point and it's not far enough from what Sophos can do. In terms of quality and functionality, Sophos is very useful and better than the competition.

Sophos should improve its ability to check something like bandwidth consumption for users or something more real-time.

real time trafic graph most show specific info from user, ip and bandwith, in my personal opinion i have seen better traffic graphs in open source firewalls.

I have been using Sophos UTM for six years.

It's very stable. In all the time I have been using it, I haven't seen it fail or gets stuck.

Scalability is not a complex issue and is something you can do within 20 minutes. I've been managing three UTMs, one with 50 users, another one with around 150, and the biggest one has 3,000 users.

i used PFSense, the capabilities of UTM sophos y very much higher and powerfull.

The initial setup was straightforward. It depends on the rules, but a basic setup can take up to seven to 15 minutes max.

Based on cost compare with other vendor who bill per license and OTP users, the ROI have been set as far as 6 moths.

SOphos is the best alternative in features, specifications and lower price.

yes i did, Fortinet, Checkpoint, Palo Alto, Meraki.

It's a good solution, I would say to go for it. 

I would rate Sophos UTM a nine out of ten.