Name: Protect your Network Security with Sophos
Uploaded: 2025-02-20T05:31:34.660Z
Duration: 57 min 48 s
Description: Protect your Network Security with Sophos

Transcript for "Protect your Network Security with Sophos": Hello. Welcome, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. We've got some great content lined up for you in this lovely Thursday afternoon. My name is Rob Mottrom, and I'm the senior manager of channel and distribution here in ANZ. Joining me today is mister Chris Goldsmith, our national manager of sales engineering. And today, Chris is gonna cover off the Sophos network security stack, followed by myself, where I'm gonna go over a new sales program and the latest promos to see out the Sophos fin year. Then at the end, for a bit of fun, we're gonna have a kahoot and give out a couple of prizes. The q and a will be open throughout the session, so please do pop your questions in as we go, and we'll do our best to get to them, or if not, at the q and a at the end. And the session is being recorded, so if any of your team couldn't make it, that's all good. They can watch it later on. And so with that, I'll hand over to mister Chris to kick us off. Alright. Thanks, Rob, and and welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming along today. As Rob mentioned, we're gonna be taking you through an overview of Sophos' security stack with the network, and how you can practically implement, processes and procedures into protecting the network stack. We've got quite a lot to cover in today, but if you do have any questions, please feel free to pop them in the, the Q and A panel there, and we'll do our best to answer those, either through the session or at the end. So what is network security? It means a lot to a lot of different people. And what are we trying to achieve, when we're looking to protect the network stack? So when it boils down to it, there's quite a few different challenges or problems that we see within network security today. These are just a few of these, things like managing too many products, complexity with infrastructure, and also supporting businesses and organizations with things like remote workers, isolated offices, or even just, different devices and types of devices. Often there's a trade off between performance as well as protection. A lot of people think that you can't have both. It's often, thought that you need to trade one for the other. But then also things like lack of visibility, and being able to actually respond or act when there is a threat on the network. And to be honest, just the complexity. Network products have become way too complex. We see quite often IT teams and customers struggling to keep on top of and keep up to date with the latest technologies. And these are just some of the things that we look to address throughout the network solution. So many of you would think you know, firewall is the, is the network. There's so much more that in play here. And within Sophos, we have, services and products across that network stack that range from firewall, some of the non traditional things you may not be aware of, things like NDR, ZTNA, but also SASE and infrastructure products like switches and, and a wireless, all culminating up to a central management platform, which is so far central. And that's what we're gonna be focusing on today. So network security, as I mentioned, is is a complex situation. We see a lot of changes, in technology as well as well as how businesses are operating on a day to day basis to support, obviously, the business and users. So we see a lot of things come into play outside of just your traditional network stack, like your firewall and potentially switches. Things like ZTNA or ZTNA, Sophos DNS, remote access. But then also being able to manage all this infrastructure, all these services on an ongoing basis and get better clarity and visibility across, the network infrastructure. So as a suite of products, one of the challenges that we do meet is around being able to, uniquely integrate these products together, getting the benefits of each of these products working together, but also working in with what our current customers are wanting to support. But at the same time, balancing security and protection with performance at a very good price point. Again, having visibility, being able to protect and respond to threats and incidents, and then simplifying. So really making those complex network managements, tasks, and visibility simple and easy to manage. We're going to start with the firewall being, being the head of the head of the house or the perimeter for most points. And we start with, you know, the Sophos firewall, which is actually much more than just a firewall. We incorporate a lot of those, features and functions to be able to address some of those concerns and problems that we saw earlier on. Being able to have the products perform, at a higher level and actually, step in and take action when need be. But then also supporting some of those other challenges around being able to work from anywhere safely and securely. And again, balancing those, performance with protection and being able to manage that through a simple solution, single console. But a firewall is is is much more than just a firewall. So as we know, in this day and age with hybrid, networks, we have external and internal influences. So sitting at the edge being the the firewall, we also see that a lot of this integrates with what's happening inside the network. So again, when we talk about, things like ZTNA or remote access, wireless, switching, and then also the end users. Again, being able to integrate these seamlessly and much more effectively allows us to have better visibility and better control and securing, a network infrastructure. So apart from the standard things you would expect from a next gen firewall, which we talk about protections, so being able to, encrypt or inspect encrypted traffic, IPS, web and application control, as well as being able to identify and, block zero day threats. What we're looking for is a more seamless way, and an easier way to to be able to get visibility and insights into what's happening within the network as well as, externally for remote access and then manage that through a single pane of glass. So being able to perform those actions and, tasks that you may need to do, whether it be on a daily basis, basis, a weekly basis, or so forth, being able to manage, those remote access users through things like SD WAN, VPN, or the ZTNA. But Sophos firewall also delivers a lot more capability that you just can't get anywhere else. In particular, things like an automatic response to threats. So many of you may or may not be aware of a terminology around synchronised security or even active threat response. And I'll go through some of these, details a little bit later on. But again, being able to get visibility is one thing. Being able to manage and simply manage your, your infrastructure or your environment, including, users is super important. And tying that back into having that, capability no matter where your, end users are being supported from. We'll go into some of the architecture around some of the developments and changes that we've released to market. It is quite extremely unique to to Sophos around the performance, including things like our, extreme fast path or dual processor architecture. And then also bringing it, together with a single main single pane of glass or management console, Sophos Central, which is powerful, but simple and easy to use being able to, allow, simpler management across the product stack. So let's start with the XGS. I spoke about, you know, some of the new developments that we've released. And back in 2021, we released what we call extreme fast path technology back in the version 18 of our Sophos. And it really brought state of the art technology of being able to, provide that performance as well as the security without having to trade off. So whether it be, a small office all the way up to a large campus, whether it be, you know, multiple offices spread across the country, being able to get visibility and control, effectively, is super important, especially in this day and age. And being able to accommodate and adapt to those different scales quickly and easily is also important. So our XGS appliance series, is powered by that extreme, fast path technology, which allows trusted traffic and applications to be, pushed off to a fast path to help reduce latency and improve that performance while at the same time allowing us to, inspect and and improve the security by things like TLS inspection. And then obviously being able to adapt that, means that we are flexible enough to accommodate a number of different scenarios within an organization. So, again, whether it be, the desktop models or our, firewall models or things like our switching and our APs, being able to bring that together and work as a holistic solution, allows both partners and customers to manage the network infrastructure a lot more, cleanly and simply. So if you're not familiar with this, we have a quite a broad, appliance stack. So you'll see there everything from our SMB or branch office, desktop models, through to our distributed edge, and then also our large models between enterprise and campus. We've also just recently released our Gen two for our desktop models. So another series of models, which also brings a number of benefits, within the platform. We also offer virtualization, so you can deploy this through your own hardware or through cloud solutions such as, AWS or Azure. So I mentioned the desktop session the desktop, appliances. So what's new? Our desktop second gen appliances, which covers everything from our XGS 88 through to our one three eight, provides a number of performance, enhancements with up to two times the speed of our previous models. It's also, allowed us to introduce, our fanless models. So our 88, XGS eighty eight and one hundred and eight, are perfect for those smaller environments that are sensitive to noise, and also are still wanting to provide that, peak speed. And then obviously, as we know, being able to, design that and filter that through, and adapting to the ever changing increased needs or increasing needs of customers. Things like throughput and, things like Wi Fi six being able to support those as well as things like five gs with our new five gs modules. We've also increased not just on the, OS side, but also physically we've induced, increased things such as port density and support for additional ports such as 2.5 gig, as well as some of our newer models, which will support 10 and even higher. So you'll see here as we start to walk through that flexibility in being able to meet your customers, needs no matter where they are and what technology they're currently using, whether it's a gap that they have or whether something we need to integrate with. So why upgrade a desktop appliance? Well, again, as I mentioned, we're constantly striving to improve things like performances and operational, requirements as well. So high speed connectivity, we see, quite often customers are going for higher and higher bandwidths. They're requiring a lot more SaaS applications. So So it's really imperative that we keep that at a premium. Then also being able to adapt and run efficiently as well. So whether that's through, our connectivity, extension modules, or whether that is connectivity through things like additional services, which I'll come to in just a sec. And we spoke about, the need for, for security, but also throughput. So we've made a number of enhancements around, the threat protection throughput. So if you see, especially around the models between our previous OSs and platforms XG to XGS, you'll see that we've made, enhancements sometimes up to three times, the speed and performance increase. And that continues across as we start to see more and more of that come through with new, versions of our Sophos or operating system through XGS. And again, this continues throughout all of our models. So not just our desktop models, also our one up models, our rack mounts. You'll see there we've added additional ports. All of our models with the exception of, our one zero eight's and, 80 eight's come with that fast path technology, that dual architecture, which I'll go to in just a moment, which allows us to be able to, provide and, deliver up to line speed, throughout a lot of our, models. You'll see there we've also increased things like memory, as well as being able to offer additional ports. So quite often you can actually, provide your customers a solution that is, able to expand and flexible enough, as a business grows. And then not to forget our really top end of the models, which I spoke about earlier on around the enterprise and distributed edge. We're talking the XGS series, the 7,500 and the 8,500, which deliver both powerful protection, but also performance, at scale. So again, that industry leading return on investment, to be able to provide excellent price for performance ratio. So let's have a look. I mentioned quite a bit around our extreme architecture. What is it and how does it work? We may or may not have seen this. And really going back to how we evolved this architecture, I mentioned before we released our extreme fast path back in 2020 in version 18 of our operating system. So this new data plane, really introduced revolutionary, technology into the market around the next gen firewall space, where we're able to virtualize what we call fast path, which means offloading trusted traffic, to a separate firewall path so that the primary path can be reserved for a lot of the high processing needs. And then we extended and we keep building. We keep building on that through version 18. You'll see there '19 and as we are today, 2021. So there's quite a lot that we can actually, build upon and improve and increase using the fast path technology. So you'll see here, the virtualization of the fast path on the left hand side, for those smaller models, as I said before, for our desktop models or for our larger models where we can actually replicate that through the hardware. And again, the hardware, we're able to increase, and push more stuff through that fast path, which allows us to, improve and keep improving, the performance and speed of the XGS hardware. Not just is it the fast path, but it also contains the dual processor architecture. So your main CPU, as well as what we call the extreme flow processor, which is our programmable fast path acceleration. So freeing up the main CPU to be able to perform some of those resource intensive tasks such as the routing, deep packet inspection or TLS inspection. So how does that look? We know that with the fast path technology that we can offload some of that trusted traffic, things like void, quality of service traffic. It doesn't necessarily need to be inspected to allow that through and, at any line speed while still reserving the primary path to be able to inspect a lot of that suspicious traffic or traffic that requires to be investigated. Now, in in a lot of the cases we'll see that will get passed through a number of different what we call engines. So whether it goes through the primary pass or the fast path, you'll see here as we start to look through how that integrates and how that works with a lot of the other technologies, not just on its own. So things like ZTNA, we're able to fast path user sessions or VPN through user sessions through the firewall, giving users access, quick access, lightning quick access to things like local applications or SaaS applications while still providing the security services and control that a lot of IT admins are wanting and visibility as well. You'll see that the primary path allowing us to, utilize the primary path to perform a lot of those resource intensive actions such as, DPI, deep packet inspection, web filtering, and so forth, as well as other, other services such as sandboxing. So one example that I gave you was around fast path applications. So being able to, offload that trusted traffic, that, application trusted application, the fast path, while still reserving the right to inspect, allows us to provide that seamless transition, and reduce the latency for user experience accessing those, applications. I mentioned before around our, TLS inspection encryption, you'll see, you know, performance is based on the XGS, around five times quicker, performance when it comes to TLS inspection, as well as being able to support. And I'm pretty sure we're only one of, two vendors that support, you know, the latest protocols such as TLS 1.3. Again, allowing us to provide ultra fast performance while still providing the level of security that, is required in today's day and age. And again, come back to the threat protection while being able to, enjoy or provide that top level performance through the appliance, we're also being able to streamline the, the protection side of it. So the best protection, whether it be, our third party threat ingestion, threat feeds, which I'll discuss a little bit later on, all the way through to some of our other, engines here, deep packet inspection, our AV, IPS, web and applications. Again, the IPS. So being able to, inspect, nowadays, you know, a lot of, organizations, using TLS inspection by default and IPS. Again, being able to, balance that with the performance, and also out of the box, being able to, apply policies around IPS without having to do a lot of, configurational customization yourself. Again, being able to, control this granular levels through categories makes it easy to fine tune and also gives that balance between performance and protection. And of course, web protection. So again, providing that enterprise grade web filtering, that again helps to meet some of those growing demands from customers across both things like enterprise or even education institutions. So again, we have a number of prepackaged policies that are available that, you can utilize. You can easily customize or change the policies at any time. We have policy testers. But, again, being able to apply these, in a much easier way and then manage them, down the track as well as getting visibility across, the activity that's been happening. I mentioned visibility and management. So again, coming back to Sophos Central, being able to manage, all the network stack from a single point through Sophos Central allows you to one, streamline and simplify the management and day to day operations of the network stack, but also provide visibility across the environment. So from everything from deployment to management, to remediation or response, is a very easy step and that's across the full network stack. I mentioned group firewalls as well, within central. So being able to perform steps and actions without having to log on to each individual firewall. For those of you who manage larger networks that may have, you know, multiple files, head offices, branch offices, again, being able to easily, perform actions like backups and firmware management or updates, deployments, things like zero touch and rapid deployments, as well as being able to create and modify things like groups and rules, and keep them in sync across your environment. Again, the challenges that we spoke about at the start, being able to reduce the complexities when it comes to managing your network stack. And of course, visibility, you know, being able to see at a glance and easily everything that, you need to cover within the security stack. So what are my active threats? What endpoints are at risk? What applications are being used? Are they, are we aware of those applications? Are they new? What users are performing risky, steps or risky actions such as downloading or, browsing? But then also being able to turn that around and identify areas where we could potentially, help, mitigate some of those risks, whether it be through, policies or rule sets. And again, getting access to that information is crucial and important. So being able to identify risks on the network, again, while we're providing these services, it's not just about the speed and obviously the user experience, but also protection. So identifying risks, within the environment easily, and then being able to remediate those risks. And of course, it comes back to the reporting, being able to understand, what's being blocked, what's being processed, malicious or not, things that are suspicious, that impact both, the business and organization through, throughput or security, is imperative. And then obviously providing that back, to the business, to be able to highlight the, the position and the, maturity of the environment where areas can be improved, what needs to be addressed. And of course, I'll be remit if we didn't mention AI. So again, being able to, incorporate a lot of the the good stuff around AI. I know there's a lot of buzzwords around AI and a lot of, backwards and forwards. But it's so fast we we really took, a consultative approach to understand how can it improve, how can we use it to, improve both our customers and our partners experience when managing, things like our firewall. So, you'll also see, we've released a new, generative AI application category within the firewall, in the web filtering. We've also, been able to then use that to, enable things like the monitor accelerator or block, again, giving control and granularity back to, the administrators. And of course, simplicity in a managed being able to deploy a firewall, and utilize existing prepackaged protection policies, policies that incorporate things like SSL inspection, web filtering, IPS, application control, traffic shaping, and web, application firewall means that deployment and management can be quite simple. Now I mentioned at the start of the firewall is just one piece of the puzzle. When we talk about, network stack, we'd be remiss in in, not just discussing SD WAN as well. So being able to incorporate, and get visibility again and flexibility in how we can manage your environment, across the globe, whether your users or whether your customers are spread across, the country or mobile countries, that interconnection and operability between the offices is extremely flexible. So whether it's a Sophos firewall site or whether it's one of our SD reds, connecting those sites, being able to get visibility as well as things like redundancy, throughput, quality of service, again, leads to a lot more better user experience and easier to manage. And again, reporting. So getting visibility across the, the stack. So the entire network, it's flexible. You're able to run live dashboards at a glance and see, any risks, any performance hits, anywhere that potentially requires some intervention. But then also understand where those risks are coming from, in regards to anything malicious going on. We spoke about ZTNA. So remote workers, we know in this day and age that a lot of organizations struggle with, managing and, supporting remote access and users. You've only got to have a look at the news quite recently of, a lot of vulnerabilities and a lot of attention is being paid by threat actors to remote access services. It allows them to get easy access and unfettered access in a lot of the cases into an environment, where potentially there may be, holes or gaps in a organization's security. And that's really where ZTNA comes into. For those of you who aren't aware, we we have actually, incorporated the ZTNA gateway appliance on the firewall. So you can now use Sophos firewall, along with the Sophos, ZTNA as a service to, offer or provide secure, remote access to your users, whether it be on premise, resources or, additional services on top of the SASE. So, you'll see there the next generation or, further expansion of that. So being able to deploy easily, incorporate that into your policies all from a single pane of glass, so all again from Sophos Central. So how does that play into pieces? We talk about the, the network stack, we talk about the firewall. Again, simply don't have to deploy the, the gateway. It's there there on the device. It's there on the firewall. We enable it. We, create our resources. We can either use our endpoint agent as our, resource or agentless. But, again, it allows organizations to provide a much more secure way for users to access those resources that they require with inside the organization safely and securely. So as an example, of a use case for, ZTNA, you'll see here, when a threat comes in through a particular user, you'll see that we're able to identify that particular device. So ZTNA allows us to authenticate the user, the device, and obviously only offer access to the resources that is available to that particular user. In the network stack, we're able to utilize that to apply controls around, prevention. So if a user tries to access, something that they shouldn't, and the device is being compromised or identity is being compromised, we can isolate that activity off and we can utilize that across the network, including things like the firewall. And we'll go into more around active threats in just a moment. We also have the network switch. So we have both when I say we have both, to understand there are an unmanaged and managed switches. So far switch plays in the managed switch place. And this is usually to allow devices in an organization to connect to the network and be able to provide that security control, even remotely. So again, being able to provide that level of performance as well as security across the network stack no matter where, those users may be accessing resources from. So the Sophos switch stack, we work at the access layer. So again, providing access to those devices that are connecting to the network from end endpoint devices, and being able to utilize this as part of the network stack to help segment and also, bring into and take advantage of things like our sync synchronized security or active threat response, which I'll go through in just a moment. So as I said, we act at the layer two and we have some layer three functionality, but Sophos switch stack supports where that device, physically connects to the network or where things like your wireless access points. And you need a way to be able to read that information on, on the network. We support a number of different so far switch models. So you'll see there everything from our smaller eight port, models all the way through to our 48 port module or models. As well as, we've just released a new model, which is a gigabit, 10 gigabit switch as well. So again, offering a much flexible solution no matter what size the organization is, and also being able to support a lot of that throughput and traffic that we're seeing, the demand from, from customers. And the great thing about it is with the ecosystem with Sophos, each switch leads into another solution or another story. So we see here, you know, leading from a firewall to switch to potentially access points to maybe Sophos threads or even things like NDR and XDR or even MDR, as well as things like Sophos ZTNA. Now I've mentioned this a few times. And again, if you're not familiar with Sophos, synchronized security is a cross product automation. It allows us to use the telemetry and data or condition of a device or a particular appliance to affect the security controls. So in the example here, we can instantly identify threats, whether a threat was first detected on the firewall or an endpoint, and we can use what we call the heartbeat status and then share that across the Sophos products, which can clearly identify the source of the threat. We can then use that to automate a response. So the firewall, the wireless access points, zTNA can all limit the activity from that compromised host, and, obviously access to, to any sort of policy. But not just a response, we can also use it to be able to, identify and share important information about unknown applications, and control that routing. So again, visibility, balancing that with protection. So as an example, if we have a look at our synchronized SD WAN sequence and events here, you'll see that we can identify a particular applications. The firewall observes this application doesn't quite match its signature. The endpoint can pass all the details about that application directly to the firewall. We can even categorize that, in the firewall. So the firewall doesn't have to guess based on, telemetry what that application is. We get much more clearer visibility and details around that application from the endpoint. Then from there, once it's automatically, correlated and categorized, we can then take the next steps to apply a policy, whether we want to allow or block. We can also use that to reliably wrap that over a particular preferred SD WAN connection. So again, coming back to that flexibility, being able to leverage synchronized application control in this case, for operations and supporting remote access or redundancy and throughput. I've spoken, I mentioned this a few times, our active threat response. So one of the key, issues that we highlighted at the start is being able to identify and convict something that's malicious quickly and easily and get visibility across that and take action. With active threat response, we have that built into, our cross product. So from firewall to switch to, access points allows us to automate the response. So being able to ingest, telemetry coming in, we can trigger a response, through Sophos Central that, will allow us to segment or automatically respond to those threats. So the firewall can automatically block the threat or communication from those parts of the network, can automatically coordinate and manage the endpoints to block the traffic from that compromised host. We can also utilize, the features within the Sophos switch and IP six to automatically block and compromise those devices at the access layer, so within the LAN segmentation. And again, when we have a look at this as an extension of, our MDR and XDR services, being able to provide that automated response, using additional threat feeds, so not just the information that's coming from, the endpoints or, infrastructure within the network, but also coupling that with external threat feeds to correlate the information to apply additional or similar sorts of automated responses. So blocking threats, communicating out of the network, coordinating endpoints to block traffic from those compromised hosts, preventing ZTA connections, to certain applications altogether, Also preventing things like lateral movement. So all these things, being able to allow the products to work together in providing that instant response before a human's even needed to be, involved. I mentioned third party threat feeds. So again, if you're not familiar, we have recently introduced the, the ability to be able to ingest, not just the third party threat feeds externally, but also for, MDR customers as well. So being able to inject MDR feeds into the firewall to help build that, third party threat feed and response actions. Great thing about this is that it's on the fly. There's no firewall rules that are required. So we can identify and block threats through DNS, IPS, and web based on the latest threat and telemetry and, and information without, again, having to rely on manual, configuration or any intervention from a system admin. And again, visibility, we talked about complexity. So again, being able to, easily identify and see this activity, and the risks allows us to either take steps to proactively manage or reduce or mitigate these risks. And again, providing that simplicity, performance, but also security and, and awareness. Now almost getting to the end here, but I really wanted to identify there's quite a few unique things to Sophos when it comes to being able to, take action, not just from the visibility and the ingestion, but also, the different services. So I mentioned we're leveraging things like XDR and MDR. So, you know, we have that unique product automation, and cross pollination. Being able to identify a threat no matter where it comes from within the network or remote users, identify that compromised host, then take the automated threat response, to either block or neutralize and segment, that threat. And then again, being able to utilize this across the board. So if you're taking this example, being able to isolate that particular machine in that particular part of the subnet without affecting anyone else. Traditionally, we we typically would have either, removed that subnet or blocked it, which would affect quite a few users. Now we can be quite precise and, just, isolate the offending machine. Alright. And we can see here again, no matter where that threat comes from, there's a number of different steps that can be taken to help isolate and neutral neutralize the threat, as well as prevent, any additional, threats on the network, things like lateral movement, privilege escalation, and those types of things. And each of these control points all form part of that security posture using synchronized security. Also across, not to mention the, the switches and the AP sixes. Again, no matter how our users are connecting in this day and age, whether it's physically connected or through things like wireless, remotely through ZTNA, having the granular visibility control over the security as well as the management means it's a lot easier and a lot more simple to be able to, employ an effective, security policy. So again, coming back to what do you get? So again, there's a lot more than just beyond the firewall itself. We have, you know, things like our automated response, our active threat response to help prevent things like lateral movement or access to network, or network controls. We balance that protection and performance of providing the best in breed protection, while still maintaining and improving performance using things like our extreme architecture, and also being able to augment that by things like cloud services. Integrating those, additional services, things like ZTNA, support for remote work from anywhere, again, simply and easily. So whether it's a VPN, whether it's ZTNA, whether it's SD WAN, being able to deploy, manage, get visibility, and configure, is simply, as simple and at your fingertips. And again, being managed through that single console. So management plane, single console, being able to share telemetry, get insights and visibility, take action, all from that single, pane of glass. Now don't just take my word for it. We've gone through quite a lot of information there. And I'll remind you, if you've got any questions, please feel free to pop them through. But, you know, we are, one of the only vendors, if not the only vendor that, scores extremely high across multiple, Gartner peer reviews. You'll see we're one of the highest rated as well as the most rated, especially in firewall, but also our MDR, EDR platforms and mobile. And these are our peer reviews from, Sophos customers. And again, when we're looking at solutions and reviews, not just file, but the full network stack, understanding, you know, again, balancing and, addressing those challenges that we see in the market, the complexities, performance over security is really, at the foundation of a lot of our product and the way that we develop, things like our synchronized security, our active threat response to address those challenges that we see within the market. Alright. For those of you who are after more information, and there'll be some more slides, and I'm, sure that this will be shared out. We We do have a number of different, resources there. So I encourage you to to take a look. We also have a lot of services, around. For those of you who are looking to potentially migrate from or, migrating from our XG to XGS platform or you wanna know more around x g, I encourage you to jump on, take a look. We have some great res resources there that you can utilize. If not, you can also reach out to your account team. We'd be more than happy to, just jump on a call and have a discussion around it, answer any questions that you may have. And on that note, I think we'll hand back to Mr Rob. Awesome. Thank you, Chris. Some very cool content there. I hope you all enjoyed that and took plenty of notes. Don't forget questions. If you do have any, throw them in the chat as we go. Or if you remember something after the session, that's all good. Just flick it through to your disti or directly to us, and we'll get those answers for you. At the start of the session, I did mention that I'm going to talk about a new sales program that we're releasing. I'd like to introduce, the Sophos if I get the slide change. Someone can change that slide for me. Thank you. Sophos Powerplay. So this has been this has been set up to run to for the rest of this quarter. So this quarter is the end of our financial year. So we've brought this out for a bit of fun to throw some extra bonuses at everyone and try and close off the year as hard as we can. It's made up of three different activities, the first one being the XGS takeover, which is the top two highest number of XGS firewalls sold in each partner level. Those individuals will win themselves a Sophos branded bar fridge. And while you're selling the XGSs, you always wanna be looking for the bolt ons, the add ons, the stack, the would you like fries with that. Of course, the best thing to do with a firewall is a switch, so activity two, switch for a switch. When you do that, if you sell 10 switches, you'll receive a Nintendo Switch. If it's a new logo, you should always be doing Doctor, deal registration. So activity three, if you have a $50,000 deal reg that you close off or more, then you also net yourself a $250 voucher as well. So they're all designed to work with each other and stack on top of each other as well. So you can win as one of them or all of them as you go. So to further help that, we've got four network promotions that I wanna talk about at the moment. The first one there is the new firewall business. Now this promo has been around for a while, but do take advantage of it with your XGSs. You get 99% off the XGS hardware and 1% off the three year Xtream licence that goes with it. Of course, if it is an XG that you're lifting to an XGS, reminder, the XGs are end of life at the March. So any XGs out there, you do need to move them to XGS as soon as possible. So use this promo, which will, again, will give you the 99% off the XGS and an additional 33% off the three year Xtream licence. As I mentioned before, you wanna add on the switches, so we've got a promo for that one as well. So when you add your switches, we've got three for the price of one. You do have to have a twelve month support license with those switches, and the eligible models are the CS one zero one, one 10, and two ten. And, of course, if you're selling switches, you also wanna be talking about APs. So the AP sixes, if you include three of those on the same order, you will net yourself an additional 30% off the APs. So, again, all designed to work together, maximising the the revenue that you can make, the margins, and, obviously, the product stack for the customer to get the best coverage. Further to that, we've just released you hopefully saw this come out last week. If it's a new logo or a new customer deal, you get your deal registration, so make sure you deal register registering your deal. And then on top of that, you can add an additional 10% to whatever level you're on based on gold, platinum, silver, etcetera. Now this product 10% extra promo is valid until the September, so you got plenty of time to take advantage of it. And the best part is it's stackable on top of those promos on the previous slide. In fact, the only thing that you can't stack this 10% deal reg booster onto is the any existing deal reg booster. Okay? So it's good to use on the, promos from the previous slide as well. Speaking of deal reg, if you don't know how to deal reg, hopefully you do by now, but if you don't, there's three main ways that you can do it. The best way and the fastest way is to jump into partner portal, go to the sales section, throw your details in there, and get get it registered. The other way is you can also reach out to your disti. So when you reach out to your disti, give them all the details, ask for the quote, they'll deal reg it, remind them about the, the wonderful 10% deal reg booster as well, and they'll put all that through you. And the other option is you can reach out to partner carer and your the Sophos channel team, and we can give you a hand with that Doctor as well. Further to that, I wanna highlight or remind people some of the services at no cost that we have on offer for all of our partners to help you close sales and, work through some of the bigger and more complicated, opportunities. The first one I'll point out there is the RFP desk. So when you have those, you know, those big tenders and you need all that information from Sophos to backfill the tender itself, the RFP desk will give you a hand doing that. The wireless desk, so as you add in all those APs onto your onto your deal, get a copy of the customer's floor plans for their office, and we can do a heat map to work out exactly which APs you need and where to put them. And the third one I really wanna point out is the firewall sizing desk. So as you're selling all of those amazing XGSs and you, unsure the exact size to have or you're moving from XG up to XGS, XGS, you've got to make sure you get the right size, and fit for purpose for the customer. The firewall sizing tool and the team will help you make sure that that is the right firewall for the job. And, of course, there's the migration desk to help you win with any questions of moving from XG to XGS, ZTNA desk to help you, architect that solution correctly, and don't forget the cybersecurity assessment allowing you to make sure that the customers have the best, platform and that there's no holes in it. So So take advantage of those. If if you need any more information on them, again, you're disty. Reach out. They've got the details, and they can put you in touch with the right people. Now I mentioned before the XG end of life. I can't stress enough. XG end of life March 31. So if you do have any customers out there still on the XG hardware or if you're unsure which customers have XG still, reach out to your Dizdi. They've got a full list of all the, hardware and which customers they go with. They will help you quote it all up and get and get those upgraded as fast as possible. To make your life easier, we've collated all the resources around XG into a resource center that's located on the partner portal. In there, you'll find all sorts of information, everything you need, you know, from marketing information, data sheets, competitive intel, the whole lot. And we also got a video explaining the overlapping licenses for the XG and XGS, where we've extended the licenses to make sure you've got complete coverage and a seamless transition between the two products. So make sure you log in to partner portal and check out those resources. Again, any more info that you think is missing or we can't find, reach out to us or Udiste. Alright. Speaking of the, March 31, the end of the Sophos financial year, every year we do this, there is a compliance audit. This is where we double check all of your certifications to make sure that you have what is required and everything's up to date to maintain your current level, so, silver, gold, platinum, etcetera. And, of course, if you're eligible for for a promotion, any required certification you need to do, this all has to be done by March 31. You can see all what you require in the partner portal, and, of course, your disty will give you a hand and tell you exactly what it is that you need in order to be compliant. So please make sure you jump on that one and check it because you don't wanna get to March 31 and then find that you need a couple of certs to be done. For those who are newer to Sophos and unsure about training certification, it is all online. It is in the partner portal, so make make sure you're registered. It is self paced. We can do classroom style as well if you need, and there's four different types of certifications that you can do. There's two sales certifications. There's engineering certifications and our industry certifications, which is architect and technician, which are required for the the higher levels. But please jump into partner portal and check out all those, certs. Again, reach out to you this year if you need any help with that one. Alright. Tonnes of really cool information that we've we've, thrown at you. Lots of information about networking, some cool promos, a a bar fridge up for grabs. So we're gonna wrap it up with a bit of trivia. So I'm gonna invite Dale up to the stage, who's gonna run through the Kahoot. And I also just wanna mention, thanks to Blue Chip and Leader, they've both thrown in $250 of their hard earned money for a bit of a for a bit of a prize for the top two people. Dale, take it away. Do we have Dale? I think we're just having a bit of a technical difficulty getting Dale on stage. So, yeah, it should be there a moment. No worries. Just wanna remind everyone while they're waiting too. As Rob's mentioned, that cutoff date of the March 31 for x g, micro end of life. And I can see this just coming up now, so please scan. It it is a cutoff. So, if you're curious as to what happens, we do have some articles and some resources there around It is imperative, that we look to plan those migrations, and, we can assist in any way to get them across the XGS platform by, the March 31. Oh, I can see we've got some people coming in. Just a reminder on this one as well, do use your real names because otherwise it makes it really difficult to, give you the voucher. Yeah. We can see a few I can't give that out. Yeah. So it's usually people updating it as much And if you're wondering if you're wondering that Chris, it's not me. Okay. So Sophos employees can't, can't participate. So that is not me. We're keeping it as fair as possible. We still got, quite a few 10 registrations, 10 people. We still got quite a few there. So please, jump on, join in, win some great prizes. He's dial man at the hour. Good afternoon, everyone. So, yes. Again, thank you. Thank you Blue Chip and Lita for sponsoring our vouchers today. So I give it another twenty seconds for people to register. Hey. Let's, give it another five seconds. So just a quick five questions today. Pretty simple. We covered it all in today's content. Understand we've got six minutes left of this webinar. So any any questions, we will revert back to you guys on email and follow-up. But, thank you all for attending, and, let's start. So what are the top problems with network security today? Too many products, complexity with remote workers, offices, and devices, performance versus protection can't have both, lack of visibility and no action when there's a threat, networking products have become way too complex or none. Five seconds left. Okay. So the answer was everything except, obviously. So 11:15. So a true and false Sophos Central is a single cloud management console for all Sophos products. Simple. And the answer is true. Steven, John, and Johnny. So extreme architecture, which XGS desktop model uses virtual fast path acceleration? So all gen one extra XGS desktop models, all gen two, all gen two accept the XGS one three eight, or all gen two desktop except the non wireless. So, yes, it is the all gen two models except the XGS one three eight. And that has a dual core processor, so, it uses fast path acceleration. Steven, Johnny, and John, so it is the top two, guys. Where do partners go for Sophos sales resources and collateral? Sophos partner portal, Sophos Central, Google, or TikTok? And yep. So Sophos partner bottle. And final question, when is the Sophos partner compliance deadline? 04/01/2025, yesterday, never, 03/31/2025. And, yes, it is 03/31/2025. So our top two partners, and we'll be in contact over the next, next day. Second place, Johnny l. And congratulations, Steven Burgess. So I've got a couple of minutes left. Again, we might, finish off here. Big thank you for all of you to attend, our distributors. Please, if you've got any questions, reach out to your distributor or ourselves. We've got Sophos Powerplay, so there's a lot of rewards this quarter around our networks. The tally boards did start from January 1, so all sales already this quarter have been counted. And we've got quite a few deal reg 250 load vouchers already, closed. So I'll be in contact as you close those out. But thank you again, and thanks to our presenters. You all have a great day.