Windows 8.1 will be released by Microsoft on the 18th October and will be available as a free download through Windows Update, we wanted to take this opportunity to let you know about the support we will have available for Windows 8.1 at launch and then what we will add later in the year.
As you will already know we currently support Windows 8 with our Endpoint products and also recently added support for our firewall to this platform, these will continue to work on Windows 8.1 but you need to be aware of a change that Microsoft are making within IE 11 that might affect the protection you receive from web borne threats.
In Windows 8 there is a setting for Internet Explorer called “Enhanced Protected Mode”, this is off by default in Windows 8 and, ironically, makes our own web protection capability inoperable on a Windows 8 machine if enabled. The protection offered by Sophos web filtering is superior to that offered by protected mode and so most customers leave it disabled, however, with IE 11 Microsoft have enabled this feature by default which means that you will need to turn it off in order to use the Sophos web filtering capability if you are installing onto a Windows 8.1 platform.
Further to this, if you upgrade from Windows 8 to Windows 8.1, Enhanced Protected Mode will become enabled as the version of IE changes to 11 and your previous settings are changed, if you want to retain the protection offered by the Sophos web filtering feature you should change the setting to back to disabled after you have upgraded.
Later this year we will release an update to our Windows endpoint product that will work regardless of the Protected Mode setting for both Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2.
Microsoft will also release Windows Server 2012 R2 on the 18th, and whilst it too will have Enhanced Protected Mode enabled by default we would expect fewer customers to have any web browsing on their servers, however, you need to be aware of this change and adjust settings accordingly in order to maintain best protection. Unfortunately, due to changes Microsoft have made you will not be able to deploy to either Windows 8.1 or Server 2012 R2 on the 18th, we’’’’ll have a patch available for SEC in November that will address this issue.
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