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Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition: differences from the edition for business/enterprise

grahamperrin1

http://www.sophos.com/products/free-tools/free-mac-anti-virus/features.html

http://www.sophos.com/products/enterprise/endpoint/security-and-control/mac/

Please: what are the differences between the editions?

:1000095


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    I think that for a home user - there's very little difference. In terms of protection from Malware I don't think there is any. Obviously you cannot use the home edition in a commerical environment. The home edition doesn't have the management facilities that the enterprise version has. There's probably other bits and pieces, but I think when it comes to virues/trojans/spyware etc they are the same

    :1000110
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    Thanks. 

    Also, I see that the option to update is limited — hourly is the greatest frequency (minutes is greyed out). 

    It'll be good to have Sophos advice on this one.

    :1000113
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    I guess one hour is more than enough for Macs. :)

    :1000122
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    Interesting as I often hear users worrying and complaining that a too short interval degrades performance. 

    Ideally a client should fetch an update as soon as a new detection identity is issued and any interval is a trade off. One hour is not too bad. Now you can argue that in case of a new threat every minute counts to limit exposure. But in practice the additional 50 or 55 minutes don't make that much difference. First the threat has to be detected "somehow" (by an AV vendor/community or one of its customers/members) - at this point it has usually been around for some time. Then it has to be analyzed, an IDE (or whatever it is called) has to be written, tested and issued several hours minimum, I'd say. So the additional risk is not as big as one might assume.

    Even an "empty" check for updates puts some load on the infrastructure. For the licensed versions a customer sets up one or more servers which fetch the updates and publish them for their clients (often several 1000). If there's only one free Mac HE user for every customer ... well, you can do the numbers yourself.

    I hope in the light of the above you'll find this limitation acceptable.

    Christian

    :1000124
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    nevrozel wrote:

    I guess one hour is more than enough for Macs. :)

    Depending on how you set your preferences for SAV, and depending on your application usage patterns:

    • one hour may be too often, may impact on performance. 

    If you find that applications are repeatedly slow to launch, please see 

    Second and subsequent launches of applications, a sense of hogging.

    :1000531
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    At http://openforum.sophos.com/t5/Sophos-Anti-Virus-for-Mac-Home/System-becomes-unresponsive/m-p/603#M399

    busterb wrote:
    grahamperrin wrote: AFAICT the technical differences are trivial. 

    Sorry, but that is pure here say and speculation at this point. Sophos has not spoken definitively on the subject, and I wish they would sooner rather than later. 

    What we know from the evidence at hand people are having problems, and my personal experience on my Macs is one of total system lock-up when scanning anything over 600 MB. Mind you one of those Macs was a freshly formatted drive, new install of Mac OS 10.6.3 and updated, only Apple software on the drive, nothing third-party save for Sophos Home.

    Contrast that with my Enterprise experience where I had nearly 1,000 computers in my bailiwick, all of which - Mac & PC - functioned flawlessly scanning drives of hundreds of gigabytes. And I emphasize - the Macs did NOT get managed from a central server. They were stand-alone just like with Home, and looked to Sophos directly for their updates. 

    I just cannot honestly state this is the same software at all. Others may be more comfortable saying so, but until Sophos comes forward and gives a definitive answer, I simply cannot believe them. 

    :1000611
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    busterb wrote:

    …

    total system lock-up when scanning anything over 600 MB. Mind you one of those Macs was a freshly formatted drive, new install of Mac OS 10.6.3 and updated, only Apple software on the drive, nothing third-party save for Sophos Home. … 

    I took the issue reported across two/three topics, quoted to a separate topic:  

    Sophos Anti-Virus Home Edition stops responding, total system lock-up and other misbehaviour when scanning a USB drive, or a folder, greater than 600 MB, on updated Mac OS X 10.6 or 10.6.3 with iWork, iLife and multiple partitions

    — http://openforum.sophos.com/t5/Sophos-Anti-Virus-for-Mac-Home/problems-scanning-USB-drive-large-folders-Mac-OS-X-10-6-x-with/td-p/615

    ----

    Side note, off-topic from the Sophos software: I'm very sorry for the repeated, deleted, re-posted and edited posts. In addition to the problems with rich text composition in this lithium forum (bugging the majority of my posts), I'm slowly realising that the title bar is not always a good indication of context. Personally, I'm a bit disoriented at the moment. So, it's hardly surprising that we're finding things spread across multiple topics ;)

    :1000625
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    At http://openforum.sophos.com/t5/Sophos-Anti-Virus-for-Mac-Home/System-becomes-unresponsive/m-p/603#M399

    busterb wrote:

    … Enterprise experience where I had nearly 1,000 computers in my bailiwick, all of which - Mac & PC - functioned flawlessly scanning drives of hundreds of gigabytes. And I emphasize - the Macs did NOT get managed from a central server. They were stand-alone … and looked to Sophos directly for their updates. 

    For me with enterprise edition 7.2.1 not centrally managed and updating not directly from Sophos: there are a couple of bugs in the pipeline (neither in these P2P forums nor reported via an enterprise channel). 

    For anyone whose experience is flawless I'm happy :-)

    my point here is that both editions are bugged, or affected by bugs. For me, the bugs are not alarming. YMMV. 

    Please, which version of SAV for Mac OS X did you use in the enterprise environment?

    :1000645