about Sophos

i'd like to know your opinions about Sophos Antivirus

 

IMHO it is too expensive for the average home user and is better suited for corporate environments. The experts here can give you more details, but I think it is geared for the corporate networks.

 

Very good ITW detection
Improved Polymorphic detection
Can detect more the 75,000 viruses/Trojans/worms/backdoors
No automatic update feature( it's coming soon)
No email protection(but catches viruses on-fly)
no heuristics
Best support
Fast release of updates
Fast scan
Too expensive for home user!!!! Around $250 or higher...a year...
Little or no impact on resources
Uses Intercheck technology

Sophos Anti-Virus is a powerful product that offers very good virus protection and features. But it may not be for everyone(home users). Its more corporate oriented as pointed above...




Technodrome

 

There are better solutions for home users available in terms of prices and detection rates. For companies Sophos might be a good choice but for home user I see now reason to use it.

wizard

 

Unless you got a load of money!


Technodrome

 

Hi,

I have used Sophos for the last couple of years paid for by my company. It did a great job overall, but updates were manual and unnecessarily complicated. I don't want to be fiddling with zip files every time there are new virus identities issued, and while I have no problems with the quality of the product, I just feel that they provide a very minimal service for a very pricey piece of software. For that much you'd expect all the bells and whistles not something so basic (no e-mail protection or atou-updating feature unless you pay substantially more for each extra).


The phone support was top-notch though.

 

Sorry my late reply, have been very busy.

I've been using Sophos for a while. It wasn't my first choice, but I was forced to choose between Norton and Sophos and Norton has a bad reputation on supporting Novell NetWare.

Expensive? I got a 3 year license for the price of 2, supporting all of our servers, 200 desktops and free use at home. It also supports Linux and offers a SMTP mail gateway. Although, compared to 'ordinary' AV it still is expensive.

Sophos just announced a features for automatic updating on notebooks, which should make easier to support.

Sophos has released an Enterprise Manager, but it only works on Windows and I have to enable server services on all my Windows 2000 desktops.

Updating is very easy, but you have create you own scripts. I've written a script that automatically updates the virus signatures on our servers and clients.

Client configuration is much too complicated. On Windows 2000 Professional you need to create a user, give it privileges to start a service and fill in the user credentials to allow it to log in on the server hosting Sophos. I've had a discussion with the Dutch distributor about implementing Sopohs as a service and pulling updates from a network resource with read access. He didn't undestand what I meant, but this is the same model as used by Kaspersky and NOD32. Install it as adminstrator so it can run as a service and point to a central network resource to install updates.

Sophos phone has been excellent. I had a problem with my network client and they immediately pointed out I had to install an update.

For our Novell GroupWise server I'm going to implement RAV Antivirus. With Sophos I have to implement the SMTP gateway on a seperate server or implement GWAVA which can use Sophos. RAV is $ 600 with 20% yearly maintenance fee, GWAVA € 2000 and up.