Sophos Email Protection: A comparison of four solutions

Communication via email is simply indispensable, especially in the business sector. Even cyber criminals know this, so it comes as no surprise that email is still the most popular tool for spreading malware. While spam filters are doing a very good job these days, there are new threats that need to be protected against.

Sophos offers four different email security solutions.

In this blog post I present the four most recent solutions and hope to make your decision a little easier.

1. Sophos Central Email

Sophos Central Email is the cloud-based version of all four solutions. It is set up and managed through the Sophos Central console, as the name suggests. The product is relatively new and was released at the end of August 2016.

Of the four options, Sophos Central Email is the fastest to set up and offers easy integration with your existing email infrastructure. Central Email works great with Office 365, Google Apps for Work, Exchange (from version 2003) and many other solutions. You don’t need any hardware, just a Sophos Central Email licence.

If you want to know more about Sophos Central Email, we have written a more detailed blog article about this product for you.

Data sheet: Sophos Email Buy product: Sophos Central Email

2. Sophos Email Protection auf der SG/XG Appliance

The second variant requires a “Sophos SG or XG Appliance” with a “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 actually works the same as Sophos Central Email, except that it requires hardware/VM. What you need to keep in mind, however, is to keep the system as fail-safe as possible. For this solution you should work with two internet lines from different providers and one HA cluster. Otherwise important emails will be lost if the firewall or the internet line fails.

Data sheet: UTM Email Protection

3. Sophos PureMessage für Microsoft Exchange

This variant is only suitable for companies with their own Exchange Server. Here, email traffic is not routed via a box or a cloud gateway, but traded directly on the Exchange Server.

Data sheet: Sophos PureMessage für Microsoft Exchange

4. Sophos Email Appliance

Last but not least, there is the “Sophos Email Appliance”. This is, of course, the enterprise solution and certainly offers the most features. Here you get hardware that has been specially developed to secure email traffic. As an alternative to the hardware version, you can also use the “Sophos Virtual Email Appliance”, for which VMware ESX/ESXi 3.5 or 4.x or ESXi 5.x or VMware Workstation 6.5 or 7.x is required.

Data sheet: Sophos Email Appliance

All solutions in comparison

In this article, I deliberately didn’t go into detail on every variant, but wanted to show what options Sophos offers us in the area of email security. The next step, of course, is to compare the features of the different solutions. For example, Sophos Central Email may make a good impression on you, but unfortunately there is one important feature missing.

You can find out how the four solutions differ in the following factsheet: Sophos Email GatewayComparison