Sophos Email Protection - Four Solutions Compared

Email communication is indispensable in the business world. Cybercriminals know this too, so it is no surprise that email remains the most popular channel for distributing malware. While modern spam filters do an excellent job, new threats have emerged that your inbox must also be protected against.

Sophos offers four different solutions for email security.

In this blog post, I briefly introduce the four most up-to-date solutions and hope to make your decision a little easier.

1. Sophos Central Email

Sophos Central Email is the cloud-based option among the four solutions. As the name suggests, it is set up and managed via the Sophos Central console. The product is relatively new and was released at the end of August 2016.

Of all four options, Sophos Central Email is certainly the quickest to deploy and offers completely straightforward integration with your existing email infrastructure. Central Email works seamlessly with Office 365, Google Apps for Work, Exchange (from version 2003), and many other solutions. You do not need any hardware for this, just a Sophos Central Email licence.

If you would like to learn more about Sophos Central Email, we have written a more detailed blog post about this product for you.

Data sheet: Sophos Email Buy product: Sophos Central Email

2. Sophos Email Protection on the SG/XG Appliance

For the second option, you need a “Sophos SG or XG Appliance” with an “Sophos Email Protection” licence. Email traffic is then routed through the firewall, which prevents viruses, malware, and malicious URLs from entering the network.

This solution essentially works in the same way as “Sophos Central Email”, except that it requires hardware or a VM. However, you must pay particular attention to maximising availability. For this option, you should use two internet connections from different providers and run an HA cluster; otherwise, in the worst case, important emails may be lost if the firewall or the internet connection fails.

3. Sophos PureMessage for Microsoft Exchange

This option is suitable only for organisations with their own Exchange Server. In this case, email traffic is not routed through a hardware appliance or a cloud gateway, but processed directly on the Exchange Server.

4. Sophos Email Appliance

Finally, there is the “Sophos Email Appliance”. This is specifically the enterprise solution and offers the most extensive feature set. You receive hardware that has been purpose-built to secure email traffic. As an alternative to the hardware version, you can also opt for the “Sophos Virtual Email Appliance”, which requires VMware ESX/ESXi 3.5 or 4.x, or ESXi 5.x, or VMware Workstation 6.5 or 7.x.

All solutions compared

In this article, I have deliberately not gone into too much detail for each option, but primarily wanted to outline the choices Sophos offers in the area of email security. The next step is, of course, to compare the features of the different solutions. It may well be that “Sophos Central Email” makes a good impression on you but unfortunately lacks a key feature.