I have been using Sophos Firewall for more years now in my company, and honestly it has become a big part of my daily work. The thing I like most is the single dashboard control. Everything I need VPN, Web filtering, IPS, application control, reporting — is in one place. I don't have to jump between different consoles like I had to do with some other firewalls I used before joining this company. The Sophos Central integration is something I use every single day. Since our company has multiple branch offices, I manage all firewalls from one central login instead of logging into each device separately. This alone has saved me a lot of time. Earlier I used to spend almost half a day doing manual checks on each branch firewall, now with Central I can see the health status of all devices in a few minutes. Synchronized Security (Sophos Heartbeat) is another feature I rely on a lot. It connects the firewall with our endpoint protection, so if a system in our network gets infected, the firewall automatically isolates that device from the network. I have seen this work in real situations — once a laptop in our sales team got infected through a phishing email, and the firewall cut off its access before it could spread further. That gave me real confidence in the product, not just something written in a brochure. Daily, I work a lot with the following features: Site-to-site VPN and SSL VPN for remote users, since after COVID many of our staff still work from home Web filtering and application control to block unwanted or risky websites IPS (Intrusion Prevention System) to catch suspicious traffic Web Application Firewall for protecting our internal web apps ATP (Advanced Threat Protection) for catching malware traffic Reporting module to make monthly security reports for management The reporting feature deserves a special mention. Earlier I used to manually collect logs and prepare reports for management, which took hours. Now the built-in reports give me graphs and summaries directly, and I just export them. This one change alone probably saves me 4-5 hours every month. Performance-wise, the throughput has been stable even during peak hours when many users connect through VPN. We haven't faced major slowdowns even with heavy traffic load, which was a problem with our older firewall. An unexpected benefit I found was the ease of firmware upgrades. I was worried initially that upgrading firmware would cause downtime, but the process has been smooth almost every time, with minimal disruption to the network.

Excellent performance in terms of speed when used as a VLAN gateway for network segregation. The integration with clients and web applications is functional and has proven effective.

Firewall with excellent perimeter security and a fast, intuitive console that allows you to control everything easily. The connection with clients is also good.