Sophos license audit - Check your licenses
Have you recently received a letter from Sophos drawing your attention to the correct licensing of Sophos products? With this blog post, we’d like to shed some light on this matter.
Background to the license audit
We were informed by Sophos in a partner newsletter on 30 August 2018 that our Sophos customers would receive a letter in September on the topic “Are you still correctly licensed?”. As announced, these letters were sent just three working days later, on 4 September 2018. Some might maliciously claim that the timing of this letter was perfectly aligned with the start of the new quarter. 🤭 However, as mentioned, this is merely a claim – here we want to stick to the facts.
The newsletter did not specify which customers would receive mail from Sophos; it only referred to “software licenses”. When we inquired with Sophos, we learned that all Endpoint and Mobile users would receive a letter. No consideration was given to customers who had renewed their licenses only a month earlier.
When it comes to licensing for the UTM firewall, Sophos Central, and Classic products, Sophos adopts, in their own words, a “very conservative” approach. Sophos trusts that its users license the products they use correctly and, until now, has not considered it necessary to enforce this at the software level. It is therefore very easy to license fewer users than you actually have. The product continues to work without restrictions; you only see a warning message on the dashboard. For this reason, Sophos is simply sending a letter to all customers.
You might think that a technology company like Sophos, which uses deep learning to find unknown malware, would be able to prevent license violations in some other way. The fact that dead trees (paper) have to be sent for this rather disproves that assumption.
Checking Sophos Central licenses
Sophos also asked us in their newsletter to support our customers in correctly licensing products. In Sophos Central, you can easily perform a license check yourself. In your Central account, click on your account name in the top right and select “Licensing” from the drop-down menu.
In the following overview, you will see which licenses you are using. The value in the Limit column shows how many licenses you have purchased and are allowed to use. The value in the Usage column should therefore never exceed the value in the Limit column, as shown in the screenshot below. Otherwise, you will see a red gauge icon in such a case.
Since we know that Sophos also follows our blog, we’d like to point out that the screenshot has, of course, been edited. We keep a close eye on things to ensure that such extreme underlicensing does not occur with our customers. 😇
If, after this license check, you realize that you need to purchase additional licenses, please contact us at any time. It doesn’t matter at all whether you previously bought the licenses from another partner. We’ll be happy to make you an offer so that you are correctly licensed again in the future.
