Future of v17 and v18

Hey tom greene 

Make sure to keep an eye out on our Release Notes & News and Sub-groups for new updates and upcoming betas for future releases.

I'll also tag AlanT and talex in case they wanted to chime in with any further information.

Regards,

FloSupport | Sophos Community Engineer

Bump

I am in the same situation with regards to Sophos and what to choose. I have an XG Firewall (Love / Hate relationship) and use Webroot AV.

The Webroot expires soon and I was considering a change to Sophos but I cannot justify the additional spend and not many people speak good of it. So do I want all my eggs in that basket or branch out and look at others such as Crowdstrike, ESET or remain with Webroot.

The clock is ticking.... hmmmmm

For your info, ESET is NEVER on top.  Consistently or not.

Paul Jr

I will most likely just renew Webroot for 12 months until I can work out who to dump a stack of cash with.

Although I notice they no longer appear in any comparisons

By reading through this thread, we should be close to getting v18 by around February 2031

V18 will go EAP in July, v18 is expected to ship late this year best case and early Q1 next year in the worst case.

Emile

Common sense dictates you take XG for what it does right now, and do not expect anything new in a predictable future.  Meaning, if XG cannot do what you need right now, use something else 3 or 4 years, and check XG again only then.  Ironing bugs in v18 will take 3 years. Much like v16/v17 - one and the same - which is clearly not ironed yet.  

I'm more convinced than ever Sophos should scrap XG altogether and pimp up everyone's favorite: UTM.

Paul Jr

Hi Paul Jr,

v18 is supposed to be a complete rewrite of XG.

History. I have said this bofore in other threads from memory. When Astaro was running the show they employed a forum member oto review available takeover firewalls. When  Sophos took over they decided to but what is now XG against much advice from forum members and the person they employed to review the offerings.

The reason why Sophos wanted a newer product was because the UTM was becoming too bloated and adding features was becoming very time consuming. If you compare the number of default services etc in UTM compared to the XG you being to understand why the UTM was bloated but a much better product.

Now hopefully V18 will fulfil the promises about a better and more flexible product that was supposed to ben the earlier versions of XG.

Looking forward to trying V18.

Ian

Hello

Complete re-write ?  I'm perplex because to my understanding, most of XG/SFOS core/features is Open Source.  For example, the mail gateway is EXIM. https://www.exim.org/  I doubt they would re-write this. 

I would described XG (i.e. SFOS) as a GUI that implement some of the features of the Open Source code used behind the scene, via CLI/scripts.

I suspect that Open Source code already has many features we are cruelly missing.  It will become available only in v18.

My 2 cents.

Paul Jr

Hello Paul,

V18 is a full redesign and kernel do over from the ground up that was started shortly after the release of v15.

This was done so that the systems can be designed to support the ASIC based hardware and fully diverge from Cyberoam and truly be the Sophos Firewall OS. Everything between v15 and v18 was jus feature/function tests for v18 and what is release later this year is the culmination of the experience of Astaro and the ambition of Sophos in the NSG market.

You misunderstand the depth of rewrite, they aren't going to redesign exim or snort, that would be stupid. They are redesigning how the the entire system is put together.

Emile

Hey that sounds promising. [Y]

But two questions about that:

1. Do you know when the EPA program will be started? (Mid or end of July?)

2. Can a home user participate?

Thank you.

Hey that sounds promising. [Y]

But two questions about that:

1. Do you know when the EPA program will be started? (Mid or end of July?)

2. Can a home user participate?

Thank you.