Communications Consulting, Incorporated (CCI) recently assisted Civil & Environmental Consultants, Inc. in upgrading our routing/security infrastructure from Cisco integrated services routers (ISRs) to next-gen Sophos XG appliances. Since we have 20+ years of experience and success with Cisco hardware, we were hesitant to change. However, when we attempted to upgrade to the latest Cisco XE ISRs, the new hardware required changes to the VPN and firewall configurations at our 23 sites. With the amount of effort required to do such an extensive change, along with the fact that all of our existing hardware is reaching its end-of-life expectancy, we decided to look into alternatives. We have been very pleased with our switch to the Sophos Platform. From design, to proof of concept, and testing, to final implementation, the process was very unobtrusive and executed efficiently with minimal network downtime. CCI also sent its employees across the country to replace our legacy equipment with various models of Sophos XG appliances – also incurring only minimal downtime at each site. Most sites were down less than 10 minutes while the physical equipment was exchanged. The Sophos XGs have been installed for more than a month at many of our sites, and our experience has been positive, to say the least. We are able to combine our NetMon software, OpenDNS filtering, and Cisco routing hardware in a single, easy-to-administer appliance. We are also now able to utilize the entire range of bandwidth for which we have contracted and paid. Our legacy hardware CPUs operated at 80%–100% capacity with the amount of VPN tunnels that were being utilized. By comparison, the Sophos XG at our sites hardly ever exceeds 20% capacity during peak times. This is the kind of efficiency that we require to keep doing business productively.