Sophos has released a new edition to its line of network protection offerings, announcing today that its gateway appliances have been adopted for virtual use. They’ve simplified the pricing, with a fixed cost based per user / per year, making the virtual protection available to any company, of any size.
Sophos is taking virtual appliances a step further, by integrating their managed appliance experience to deliver an on-premise managed service.
For those unfamiliar, Sophos Managed Appliances include remote monitoring and automated maintenance, but at no additional charge. They’re designed to eliminate the need to manually schedule and apply updates or upgrades.
“Organizations are increasingly looking to squeeze more out of less by further leveraging their investment in virtualization, but simply implementing virtualized versions of the same maintenance-heavy applications only helps to a limited extent,” said Chris Kraft, vice president of product management at Sophos.
The new virtual appliances from Sophos were created with elastic scalability in mind, allowing organizations the ability to provision, duplicate, and move appliances within a virtualized infrastructure as needed. Deployment is faster, thanks to pre-configured profiles, and load balancing allows several virtual instances to work together for additional capacity and redundancy. In addition, Sophos has invested significantly in delivering a streamlined management experience; an intuitive management console with 3-clicks-to-anywhere task-oriented navigation and helpful policy wizards.
The company’s endpoint and Web appliance protections are merged, offering the same level of anti-malware, URL filtering, content control, and reporting as expected, but in a more modular design. In short, Kraft added, IT departments can “not only leverage all the benefits of virtualization, but also those of a managed service, all the while keeping their data on-premise and preserving complete control.”
Free trails are available, and the entire system is available from the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace.
