Sophos Anti-Virus

For those of you who don’t know I am an avid supporter of Sophos Anti-Virus. I came across this company about a year ago looking to replace Trend Micro Officescan. This company has turned back flips for me and my company. Our sales rep Brenton Newell has been incredible and always makes sure we have what we need. I did a pretty large survey of anti-virus software in order to make sure that my workplace was secured by the best product, I mean isn’t that what a Security Manager is supposed to do? This piece of software is one of the best I have ever used. Instead of traditional anti-virus heuristics they use what they call Genotype® Protection. I have got to tell you that what Trend wouldn’t clean, what Symantec wouldn’t detect and what no other AV can do Sophos can. The district I work for was hit with a major virut/scribble outbreak almost a year and a half to two years ago now and trend fumbled with it resulting in a lot of money going towards contractors to come in and help us reimage most of the PCs. This is not something that should happen in this day and age. In our enterprise environment of 15-20K PCs this virus should have been stopped dead in its tracks. Yeah yeah yeah I know what you are saying virut is a polymorphic virus…it’s basically a living entity. When I was surveying vendors the CA tech engineer told me that it’s not a virus its fake AV….I know fake AVs and this isn’t one. Let’s not even bring up the point that the Sophos command line rescue tool will clean Virut/I-Frame with no problem.

Point of this rant is that I called other users of the Sophos product and they had no idea what I was talking about when I asked if they got hit with the outbreak. The other districts I called who were using different products knew exactly what was going on. Sophos works and it works well. Calling other customers gave me even a better feeling about this program. Security managers and managers raved over how well it worked and how little administration there is.

Sophos only deals with small businesses and enterprise customers there is no home market for them. This says a lot about the company…too often do we see vendors going to the home and not paying as much attention to their enterprise customers. I realize that this article may be geared more towards the techies out there but I know a manager somewhere is reading this. Sophos supports our environment of Windows servers, Novell servers, Macs, Windows XP and 7 machines. They have great support and haven’t let me down yet.

Okay that’s all good but where’s the catch? Where is the bad part? I will have to say for all the good there are only a few downfalls to the program. When speaking with other companies their main gripe was having to go in and manually clear out
virus alerts. Personally I say that’s your job and it’s a great way to let people know where the problems are. The second downfall that I have experienced is their warnings, if a legitimate program changes the system files Sophos usually issues a warning. But there is ways to turn this warning off you just have to know how to do it. Basically the only problems with this program are that you have to do a little configuration. Are you kidding me? That’s not a problem it’s what we are paid to do, I don’t expect Sophos for a minute to be able to tailor their program to my environment without being in the place.

If your company is looking for a great piece of anti-virus software Sophos is the way to go, there is no question in my mind. If you would like to know more just shoot me an email and ill be glad to share.

Companies that trust Sophos to protect them include:

Toshiba, Marks & Spencer, Cisco, Lockheed Martin, Under Armour, Heinz and GE just to name a few of the big ones.

Thanks for reading another TechReally! technology post.