Why Sophos - why not ...

Christian,

I can't really comment on experiences with Kaspersky, I was eval'ing it at a previous company I was employed by in an effort to replace Symantec; but after I left I do not believe it really took off; I can give it credit on what looked to be a clean management inteface but as for performance, reports etc, I didn't really get that far.

I can however comment on McAfee, in that I have seen nasty reports and been victim to false positives on their definitions (granted no vendor is perfect *cough* AVG *cough*; this being said, is something I have not found with those pushed down from Sophos. This is obviously quite frustrating in a branch office scenario ;-)

Is there anything specific that you are looking for a second opinion on that I can assist with?

Regards

Andy

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AndyB wrote: Is there anything specific that you are looking for a second opinion on that I can assist with?

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Thanks, Andy. And no - right now it doesn't look like someone would suggest changing horses, but you never know. Only the guys' talk was very intriguing, made you wonder why not everyone's already using it.

Christian

At the end of the day everyones out to sell their services, Symantec may be great for one environment, Kaspersky for another, Sophos for ours. I suppose one of the key factors lies in what you are comfortable working with, the after market support and what other systems you already have in place inside your network.

In my opinion, if you have an estate comprising of namely Symantec products for various things like encryption, nac etc it probably wouldn't make much sense switching to another vendor; if you have Sophos NAC and Sophos SafeGuard; it's probably a waste of time to go out and buy Symantec Anti-Virus unless they have this awesome...... "thing" that you just can't live without.

I get stressed with the sheer amount of management console that I currently have, I don't need another, especially when keeping them by the same shop will either already have a single console or be working towards one.

I have been using Sophos for many years within a business environment (Sophos Administrator) and in all honesty used many other Anti-virus vendors for personal use.

Everyone compares Anti-virus products on detection and false negatives, which I totally agree with, But also miss one other important factor.

One clear positive with Sophos is the low overhead on resources; the client installation sits in the workstation and really has little affect Memory or CPU. Almost all other products I have used have dramatically reduced my resources to the point where I have considered running with the appropriate services stopped. An Anti-virus application that is less memory grabbing is more important in a business environment as the last thing you want is user(s) (local admin) stopping important services relates to Sophos to speed up the clients performance. I would certain recommend Sophos on performance!

Another great thumb’’’’s for Sophos is the Central Admin for clients, especially handy when you have remote sites. I really believe remote sites are easy to administer is they are configured correctly.

These are just a few positives I would personally recommend Sophos for.

If you have to deal with Macs as well then that precludes Kaspersky. Norton, McAfee, CA and Sophos is about your lot.

I have never felt comfortable with McAfee (my brother actually works for them so I should really be more supportive) due to some bad experiences with uninstalls and corrupted installations, also there was a recent update that screwed some PCs as well. We gave it a fair crack when evaluating between the above 4 but it seemed very cumbersome on the management side, I think you have to be willing to go the whole nine yards for all your AV/Spam/Encryption etc accross all you platforms and entry points or it just doesn't work. If you are taking a more layered approach than you may wish to pick a more focused and lightweight product.

As for scan testing take a look at Virus Bulletin site, particularly the RAP testing graph.

Sophos can be slow to provide full support for new platforms, I am still waiting on a console that will run on Windows 7.

Best bet is to actually do some testing and see which one fits, Sophos came out top for us overall though it is not the perfect solution, it does actually work which is more than I can say for CA's offering.

Hello everyone,
In my opinion Sophos has good antivirus, spyware and adware solutions for small businesses . Sophos is a good corporate security solution, combining virus, spyware and adware protection. I have been using the Mac client for several months and I wasn't dissapointed.

Best regards!