Sophos Central Update - Role-Based Access Control and Numerous Enhancements for Wireless

At Sophos Central, many new and interesting features have been introduced over the past few months. Work on Sophos Central Wireless in particular has continued at pace. With this blog post, we want to brief all Central users on the most important changes.

1. Sophos Central Wireless

Everyone who already has a Sophos Central Wireless licence can look forward to a significant update. The feature set has been substantially expanded.

You can now define daily passwords for your hotspots, enforce time-limited hotspot usage for your customers, and create isolated guest networks without having to modify your existing installation. In addition, you can benefit from fast roaming, dynamic VLANs and MAC-based access control.

Another new feature is “band steering”, which ensures that each wireless client uses the most suitable band, delivering optimal performance for everyone. With the “airtime fairness” feature, you can also ensure that each wireless client is allocated an equal share of the available bandwidth.

2. Sophos Central Endpoint

Let’s start with something positive: Application Control is now available for Mac as well. You can now manage which applications are allowed to run on Macs, just as you do on Windows machines. From version 9.6 of Sophos Anti-Virus onwards, Macs will use the settings defined in their current Application Control policy.

For Windows users, there is unfortunately nothing new here, other than the note that Sophos is discontinuing and withdrawing support for Windows XP and Server 2003.

3. Sophos Central Intercept X

There are already two minor updates to report for the relatively new product “Intercept X”. First, everyone with a “Sophos Central Endpoint Standard” licence can be pleased: Intercept X can now be run in parallel with the Standard version as well (previously this was only possible with Endpoint Advanced).

Update: Sophos Central Endpoint Protection is no longer available in Standard or Advanced editions. Sophos has restructured its endpoint product line.

The second minor update affects all Mac users, who can now sign up as beta testers for CryptoGuard. To do this, simply log in to your Central account, click your account name at the top right, and then select “Early Access Programmes”.

4. New role-based access control for better collaboration with audit logs

Sophos Central now offers new predefined user roles. This enables precise, role-based access control (RBAC) to audit logs according to each permission level. The following roles are now available:

• Super Admin
• Admin
• Helpdesk
• Read-only

You can learn about the differences between these roles in this video.