July 2023: End of Life for SESC and all other on-premise products

It sounds like Sophos is aggressively pushing out their cloud suite.  I wonder if there will be options to continue using the on-premise products for the companies that need to keep their environment information in-house.

Hello MEric,

seems that we are the only ones that are, err, worried - I'd have expected some more comments.

Sophos is aggressively pushing out their cloud suite
the were already doing it for quite some time. This is no longer pushing out Central this is throwing out SESC, admittedly still three years but nevertheless. Wonder why they didn't communicate it with the release of 5.5.2.
Less than one year ago my account manager assured me that there are no plans to withdraw SESC in the near future (well, you could argue that three years aren't near future), that not only 5.5.2 will be available in 5.5.2 but Q1 2020 will bring 5.5.3 and that new features are in the works. Turned out it was 5.5.2 that came Q1, the only new feature besides support of newer OS and SQL versions was 2FA/MFA (if you don't count Hide computers). Nevertheless it looked like development finally regained momentum, the Retirement calendar for Sophos Endpoint & Server products, Management Consoles and PureMessage, updated on 25 Feb when 5.5.2 came out, said No plans to retire as recently as 16 June. The EOL and the retroactive retirement of 5.5.0 and 5.5.1 might have come as a surprise even to SESC Development. Mind you, this is mere speculation.

I wonder if there will be options to continue using the on-premise products
I don't think so, wouldn't make much sense for Sophos economically. What premium would on-premise customers be willing to pay for nothing more than virus data and perhaps one or the other engine update. continue using [SESC] would not be the same as the Extended Support option for legacy platforms - even if no features are added at least endpoint OS support would have to be guaranteed, wouldn't it?
As an aside - are there vendors that still offer an on-premise solution? Everything's Next-Gen and even your electric kettle's consulting its AIs - for the exact boiling point at the current barometric pressure, or?

Christian

Hello MEric,

seems that we are the only ones that are, err, worried - I'd have expected some more comments.

Sophos is aggressively pushing out their cloud suite
the were already doing it for quite some time. This is no longer pushing out Central this is throwing out SESC, admittedly still three years but nevertheless. Wonder why they didn't communicate it with the release of 5.5.2.
Less than one year ago my account manager assured me that there are no plans to withdraw SESC in the near future (well, you could argue that three years aren't near future), that not only 5.5.2 will be available in 5.5.2 but Q1 2020 will bring 5.5.3 and that new features are in the works. Turned out it was 5.5.2 that came Q1, the only new feature besides support of newer OS and SQL versions was 2FA/MFA (if you don't count Hide computers). Nevertheless it looked like development finally regained momentum, the Retirement calendar for Sophos Endpoint & Server products, Management Consoles and PureMessage, updated on 25 Feb when 5.5.2 came out, said No plans to retire as recently as 16 June. The EOL and the retroactive retirement of 5.5.0 and 5.5.1 might have come as a surprise even to SESC Development. Mind you, this is mere speculation.

I wonder if there will be options to continue using the on-premise products
I don't think so, wouldn't make much sense for Sophos economically. What premium would on-premise customers be willing to pay for nothing more than virus data and perhaps one or the other engine update. continue using [SESC] would not be the same as the Extended Support option for legacy platforms - even if no features are added at least endpoint OS support would have to be guaranteed, wouldn't it?
As an aside - are there vendors that still offer an on-premise solution? Everything's Next-Gen and even your electric kettle's consulting its AIs - for the exact boiling point at the current barometric pressure, or?

Christian

Come on over to Central QC :) 

Hello Jak,

I'd like to, maybe, but our environment is, well, rather complicated ;). And it's anyway not my decision 
We'll see, we'll see ...

Christian

Hi Christian,

I am very curious about the exact roadblocks that would prevent your migration. 

If you are willing to discuss - send me a private message.

Sincerely

Richard

Hello Richard,

thanks for the offer. I'll send you a PM but want to mention a few things here.

We're running two SEC servers, on for a more or less segregated domain (several hundred endpoints) the other for "all the rest". While we (the IT department) provide central services, manage the domain, its devices and users, and a workgroup environment with several hundred desktops the majority of the desktops/laptops and their users (several thousand) and a number of servers are managed by the respective departments.

The separation is not absolutely necessary and the setup is admittedly from before Sub-Estates became available. But running an independent instance in the rather homogeneous AD environment has its advantages and simplifies administration.

Endpoints and their users are in principle "unknown", so we can't really leverage user-based policies. Not an obstacle but an untapped feature - like some others. As we don't have stewardship we can't enable Tamper Protection and consequently enforce policies. We also can't use too restrictive policies. Mind you, we're nevertheless trying the "educational approach" and pay heed to policy compliance but we can't hold users off from making (temporary) changes.

Last but not least "the Cloud" is not embraced by the higher-ups for various reasons and the general policy is to keep as much as possible on-premise.

Christian

Hi Richard,

As you can see I'm a bit behind on the news!
This does concern me, we do not allow information from any of our endpoints to go out of the business and nor do we host any information in the cloud. All of our services are in house.
Sophos moving to cloud only would be a blocker for us and we would have to find another anti virus vendor.

Are Sophos going to be proving an on-prem solution for AV?

Kind Regards

Andrew

Hello Andrew,

we would have to find another anti virus vendor
good luck! There are no longer many that offer an on-premise solution, are there (mind you, I'm talking about managed products)? If you find one ...

Christian