What is the future of Sophos Home License?

Hi Jasp,

I think you need to expand your question because basically AMD devices are intel compatible. Do you means AMD none intel devices used in specialist applications?

Ian

I checked the XGS2100 and it uses a AMD Ryzen 1505g which is based on the X86 architecture.

My comment was based on LuCar Toni saying that software image wasn't supported on AMD processors. I can't find the comment now but read it last week when I was messing around trying to get Home to run on XGS hardware. I appreciate that AMD processors are Intel 'compatible' but they are not identical and when you are using them at a very low level there may be differences that are significant.

Whatever the case with AMD support, there is more to the question than just this and it would be nice to hear where Sophos think Home is going in general. For instance, XGS hardware uses a UEFI boot but this is still not implemented in Home and from posts in this forum, this is becoming more and more of an issue for people trying to find compatible hardware.

I also think it a shame that Sophos have now locked people out of running Home on XGS hardware. Finding compatible hardware has always been a bit of an issue for Home, especially as Sophos don't publish a hardware requirements document for it. I've setup home for a few friends and have used old SG and XG hardware as I knew they would work. You can also see several posts here from people who have bought XGS hardware assuming that it will guarantee compatibility, only to find out that they can't run Home at all.

I appreciate that Sophos don't want people abusing the Home license in commercial settings but the memory and processor limitations go a fair way towards that and limiting people to non-Sophos hardware is not going to stop people doing it.

If Sophos are going to make free Home licensing available, I wish they would be a bit more committed to making it work easily. They may not make any money from it directly but they do gain product awareness and that is presumably why they do it. We are a Sophos Silver Partner and supply Sophos solutions to all our customers, where previously we sold Cisco solutions. This all arose from my awareness and personal use of their Home licensing, first UTM and then XG.

It is an investment choice. Generally speaking: SFOS Home is an unlocking of the Business product for home use. But there is "no business case" behind using it and it even costs Sophos real money (in terms of Data, telemetry, up2dates, Intelix etc.). 

So to investing into other factors for a home community is a choice to make by Sophos, while there is a big potion of business use cases and features, which are focused. 

It is a middle ground of what to do and where to use it. And most likely, the adaptation of bare metal is getting even smaller nowadays - Means: More people move to a hypervisor due other factors. There are light weight hypervisors, which gives you the option to utilize the entire hardware. As Sophos offers 4C6, there are plenty of request like "Why not doing 6C8, i have 8 GB RAM". But in the End, it is a business decision, and people start to use KVM and others, to use 16 GB RAM for other facilities as well. 

About the other part: Sophos is offering for Partners NFR appliances/licenses etc. The Home Segment is used for the home setup as well. 

To move the platform to support UEFI is not something, you can do quickly and the main segment (Sophos Hardware, Hypervisor installations) do not need it. This means, Sophos has to invest a big chunk of resources to develop, test and maintain this bare metal installation platform to be able to support this. 

You see the same struggle back in the day with UTM HCLs (Hardware compatibility lists). Where people started to write down, what worked and what didnt. But in the end, a hypervisor would solve that. 

I understand everything you say (and said much of it myself) but you have missed or ignored the point of what I said.

LuCar Toni said:

there is "no business case" behind using it

That just isn't true. You think Sophos do this out of charity? They do it because it helps promote awareness of 'Sophos', something companies spend a small fortune on. If people 'know' the Sophos name, they will consider their products. Did you not read the part where I explained that we have replaced Cisco and sell Sophos products to all our customers purely because I got to know the product personally from using your Home licence? That is the sort of reason that Sophos make Home (and other products) available 'free', because it makes commercial sense.

LuCar Toni said:

To move the platform to support UEFI is not something, you can do quickly and the main segment (Sophos Hardware, Hypervisor installations) do not need it.

XGS hardware uses UEFI boot. I wrote this in my previous post. So the development work has been done, just not brought to the Software image.

LuCar Toni you are clearly very clever technically but you have lost sight of what it is like for non-technical users. Having to setup a hypervisor environment first, even understanding what a hypervisor environment is, is an order of magnitude harder than booting some firewall software from a USB and configuring it through a GUI. Furthermore, the point of SFOS is to provide security but how many non-techical people understand the need to secure an underlying hypervisor environment and keep it updated?

The harder you make Home to install, the less people will try it and you lose that commercial exposure to the product.

I am not able to see people using SFOS / UTM as non technically person at home. That is not, what i learned from Community work in 8 years. Most people are technical person. 

Maybe i am wrong, but most people are people, which have a technical background. 

People like Prism  for example. Adding a layer of hypervisor could complicate the process but the questions about UEFI and other features are heard but there is right now not the resources to invest into this part. 

I am not able to see people using SFOS / UTM as non technically person at home. That is not, what i learned from Community work in 8 years. Most people are technical person. 

Maybe i am wrong, but most people are people, which have a technical background. 

People like Prism  for example. Adding a layer of hypervisor could complicate the process but the questions about UEFI and other features are heard but there is right now not the resources to invest into this part. 

I built 4 UTMs and XGs for friends and family, they all gave up because the extra security interfered with their gaming too much and required too much upkeep.

Adding a VM/KVM layer also increases the security risk, though for a home user maybe not that much.

Ian