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

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

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