Sophos renewal and email protection

[Quatermass]

We're about to renew our Sophos AV provision and are moving to Central for our servers and endpoints. However that still leaves what to do about email. Currently we use Puremessage on a local Exchange server. We can either continue with PM, or switch to either Sophos Email (cloud based) or Sophos Secure Email Gateway (appliance/VM). I know that using PM on-server is a different approach to SE/SSEG, but what do people think feature/interface/management wise? And given both the considerable cost of SE and SSEG, and our plans to migrate to O365 email anyway, would another viable option be to ignore all of them and just use O365's own Exchange Online Protection or Advanced Threat Protection?

 

I've spent hours on Sophos's own site but its plethora of similarly-titled products/features are making me lose the will to live!

[Achandler]

Sophos Email gateway is terrible in my personal opinion.

 

We use PureMessage for our onside Exchange and are currently in the process (I am doing testing right now) of moving from Enterprise to Central

[Quatermass]

So will you go for Sophos Email (which AFAIK is the one you can manage inside Central alongisde AV etc)? Interesting what you say about Sophos Email Gateway, I did think the GUI looked pretty antiquated.

[Achandler]

I don't want to bash the Email Gateway to much because maybe it is adequate for your needs, however we have a 2nd free filter behind it which still catches thousands of spam emails a month. Across about 500 employees.

 

My main issue with it is the lack of ability to customise the way it works, add custom rules in etc. It is kind of we decide what is low, medium or high, if it is wrong then there isn't much you can do to fix it. We had some really obvious stuff getting through and all you can do is report it to Sophos to solve for you.

 

I work within the private sector now, so bare that in mind but we are probably going to Mimecast, but we have different levels of funding available to us and different requirements I suspect. It also offers us a decent secure messaging option etc, so it ticks other boxes that Sophos simply couldn't.

[Uber22]

We have Sophos central with intercept X for our server and the normal version for our desktops, we also have Sophos WiFi management for all our access points

[p3t3r]

If you have Google's G Suite for Education, a free alternative is to put Gmail in spam filtering only mode. This is how we replaced the email protection in the Sophos UTM. Working great so far.

[Wave9_Lee]

This is probably not do-able due to timing, but XG is a great firewall/filtering/security solution and it's quote cost-effective to have email protection added as part of the software bundle, so you're not buying an appliance just for mail. As far as I can tell, the O365 protection isn't too bad, but the dedicated products tend to offer a bit more. Sophos Mail protection comes with Encryption and DLP for instance.

 

 

Comprehensive list of features here:

 

You can also get a trial of central email to see how you get on.

 

cheers

[TwistedHelixis]

a free alternative is to put Gmail in spam filtering only mode

How do you do this????

[mukz]

Mimecast is brilliant if you can afford it