Sophos Packs a Punch
May 31, 2018
Sophos Packs a Punch
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Sophos Endpoint Protection
In October of last year, our then IT consultants advised our Los Angeles office to switch from AVG to Sophos Endpoint protection. We were told that Sophos Endpoint Protection is a superior virus protection program. AVG had given us a number of problems by frequently detecting false positives and quarantining programs we use quite often in our organization. So AVG along with Malwarebytes were both uninstalled from all our workstations & our servers replaced by the single protection program Sophos Endpoint Protection.
- Sophos Endpoint Protection provides a web portal for the administrator to login. Here the administrator can examine and track which computer devices are being protected from virus attacks.
- The Sophos Endpoint Protection web portal provides a dashboard entry page that shows a summary of what viruses may have been detected and quarantined. In addition this dashboard landing page shows a summary of alert messages sent from the protected computers like when a reboot is needed from a server after software updates.
- From the Sophos Endpoint Protection web portal various agents like for workstations as well as for servers can be downloaded for deployment. Here you can quickly find and install the agent for the Windows OS, Mac OS and even how to proceed with mobile device protections.
- Though the Sophos Endpoint Protection agent for workstations is fairly competitive in cost, especially when with one agent we're protected from both viruses & malware intrusions, the agent to protect our servers are doubled in price. In order for Sophos Endpoint protection to compete with other comparable products, the price for server protection should be lowered.
- Though Sophos Endpoint Protection is supposed to be a superior antivirus protection program, we did encounter slowness specifically when attempting to open PDFs using the Adobe Acrobat program. Further research did show that Adobe Acrobat with "Protected Mode" enabled may cause this problem. The solution was to switch to other PDF applications and the problem was resolved.
- Unfortunately, Sophos is just not as well known as some of its competitors like AVG & Symantec. Perhaps more marketing from the company would help make this very powerful virus protection program become more of a household name.
- Sophos Endpoint Protection had a positive rate of return because of the many capabilities offered to manage the product on their web portal. This really saves IT staff a number of man hours by being able to check computer deployments & protections directly from an internet connection instead of having to be physically in front of the devices to be protected.
- Sophos Endpoint Protection did have a negative impact when staff started to complain of slowness with opening PDFs using Adobe Acrobat. It took hours from IT staff to research & then narrow down the problem being related to the Sophos protection agent. We found this link from Adobe Acrobat to be most helpful in narrowing down the problem: https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/protected-mode-troubleshooting-reader.html. Fortunately, a quick and simple solution was found by replacing Adobe Acrobat with other free PDF readers like Nitro Reader & Foxit.
- Sophos Endpoint Protection had a positive impact on our office because with the same software, it can be deployed to protect not only our wired devices but also all our wireless devices. This way we don't have to rely solely on our firewall to prevent virus attacks & malware intrusions.
With a single software agent from Sophos Endpoint protection, it's able replace the features offered by two programs AVG & Malwarebytes. This is one major reason why we switched to Sophos. Also we didn't want to continue to deal with the false positives we were getting from AVG which impeded our staff's productivity.