Sophos simplifies subscriptions and lifecycle for endpoint products

sophos-cloudIn order to make our endpoint products even easier to use, we have simplified the subscriptions in our on-premise management console (SEC) to make using Sophos engineering more efficient. Now, we will no longer be releasing all of our endpoint products together on a monthly basis.

Instead, we are separating the product and security updates and will deliver Windows, Mac and Linux individually, with more frequent security data updates, and less frequent software changes.

We’re sending more direct communications to our customers and partners over the coming weeks. In the meantime, you can take a look at a new set of knowledgebase articles that explain the changes and how things will work from now on.

A history lesson

Our old practice of releasing changes to all products along with engines and data at the same time each month goes back many years, and was outdated and inefficient.

If you go back far enough you’ll find that Sophos used to deliver updates to customers via a set of floppy disks. Then as PCs came with CD drives as standard we switched to CD delivery. Of course, we’ve had Internet updating available for years; but one thing that hasn’t changed for over 20 years is our monthly schedule.

It’s a complex operation to deliver product changes, security updates and new engines across a plethora of operating systems each and every month. It also ties up resources just to manage this process and do all of the associated testing.

Also, with the introduction of our Sophos Cloud solution for endpoint management, we realized that we needed to make things simpler all around and embarked on one of the most radical changes across our endpoint engineering and release management organizations that we had ever seen.

New customers will now see a set of simplified, user-friendly subscription options described in ways that indicate where they should be used, rather than by the raw version number. Existing customers will see both the old and the new for a time as we align the choices across our customers, both old and new.

We’ve also taken this opportunity to simplify the lifecycle, which means that for most of the time we’ll have just one major version of our endpoint products available at any given time. Again, we believe this will remove complexity and make it easier for customers to use the most up-to-date products, thus improving their protection.

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