Hi all,
A bit of background information before you answer this survey...
A long time ago...
Personally, I have been using Sophos products since 1999. The time when Sophos cemented the deal for me was in 2000... like many companies at that time we were hit with the Lovebug malware, and pretty bad!
We were using an inferior product (in my mind) at that time, struggling with DAT and Super DAT files, and persuaded our board to purchase Sophos and eradicate the nasty. So we biked out a courier at that time to fly as quick as he/she could to Abingdon and grab us a copy of the magic that was Sophos...
Fast forward; we installed Sophos (SavAdmin) and saved the day!
We were in love...
Fast forward some more and we were really loving the Sophos products and ethos. We'd attend User Experience days and Sophos was genuinely interested in our feedback, we'd attend the EU Sophos Customer Council, we'd have Case Studies, we'd have regular catch-ups with our Sophos account managers. It was glorious, but alas it wasn't to last...
The threat landscape continually changes and Sophos changed their products accordingly, and did so quite well. However over the years the end-user compute landscape changed too; more and users were jumping ship from the flaking MS flag! Fed up with the poor UX and lack of stability with the patches, we saw users jump to the Mac OSX ship as quick as you could say "Blue Screen of Death".
We fell out...
NB: We tried counselling but it did't work....
It was at the point when we started to really become a Mac user base we noticed the issues:
* A massive lack of feature parity between the Windows end-points and Mac end-points
* The obvious lack of support and knowledge about Mac's in Sophos - having called the Support a number of times just a few years ago and having being told "we've only got one Mac in support".
* Bugs / Defects that kept re-appearing year in year out. - Especially the duplicate Mac's in Sophos Console. - This one in particular was great... We've been waiting over 18 months for that fix and have been told a number of things from Sophos. such as "we don't have the same user base on the Mac's, so we don't give the Mac defects as much priority as Windows" or "change your internal infrastructure around to support Sophos". Unfortunately that defect still exists, ending in a lack of protection on the Mac end-points.
Is it the end!?
So, after chasing our ever changing sea of Sophos account managers about these issues and getting absolutely nowhere quickly, UX days being canned, the Sophos Customer council being canned, we we're forced into some tough choices...
1. Stick with the defect for another 18 months and pay Sophos some more money and hope that Sophos fix the Mac defect??? 19 years of Sophos experience tells me that's not going to happen anytime soon, despite the on-going promises.
2. Look at Sophos Central (apparently the defect doesn't happen on that version)
3. Look at an alternative vendors product.
Deciding we don't like the game of risk we went with option 2 and 3...
Option 2:
1. Check the product feature party between the Windows and Mac=FAIL! For example no DLP for MAC OSX. A perfect view of this is here: https://ideas.sophos.com/forums/285723-endpoint-protection/suggestions/7423432-mac-os-x-dlp-app-control This is a request raised by an ex employee of Sophos (who in my mind was an absolute Superstar) which took Sophos nigh-on two years to implement, and for them to still not implement DLP for Mac OSX.
Personally I like and agree with the comment from Mike Yates "Data never leaks from a MAC".
2. Deploy the Sophos Central for Mac OSX end-point software=FAIL! The following options are not available on the Mac OSX Central installer
1) --quiet
2) --devicegroup=<Central group>
3) --products=<comma or semi-colon separated list of products>
Meaning...
A) having to click install on the GUI to install the Mac OSX client
B) manually needing to add each Mac OSX end-point into the Sophos Computer group in Central
C) Having to download separate installer components on the Mac. Not the end of the world, but not the same flexibility as the Windows installer.
3. Check monitor and maintain the Mac OSX end-points=FAIL! Two days in the our trial (after getting the Mac's MANUALLY installed!) and all of a sudden the Mac's report as not updating in Central, yet the Windows devices are fine. This of course is worrying given our experience of MAC OSX and Sophos.
Should we stick together?
Thus I would like to open this up to the Sophos Community of users who use BOTH Windows and MAC OSX...
I would think of some more to add here, but I've got to go to an Option 3 meeting...
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