We asked Sophos about this and the company said it doesn’t have plans to expand parental controls outside of web filtering. Other tools, however, such as limiting or tracking screen time, or managing access to certain apps aren’t available. It’s easy enough to block sexually explicit sites using the web filtering options. Sophos Home is also lacking any kind of serious parental controls. That may be intentional to avoid having too much personal file system information contained on Sophos’ end. It’s possible to scan specific folders locally by choosing Scan with Sophos Home from the right-click context menu but there are no remote options.
#Review of sophos home full
It would be nice to see a wider variety of scans that are typical for home antivirus suites such as full system scans, quick scans, custom scans, and so on. That makes a lot of sense, and when a scan is ongoing hovering over the Sophos icon in the system tray or taskbar will show it. We asked Sophos why it didn’t display anything during a remote scan, and the company said it didn’t want to disturb people in the middle of their workflow with a sudden window pop-up. It all occurs in the background, with the activity history in the cloud indicating if anything happened.Ĭontrast that to clicking the scan on the desktop, which actively shows a scan is happening. Whenever a scan is initiated remotely, the desktop app doesn’t indicate that anything’s happening. Sophos Home Premium’s configuration options include scan scheduling. Overall, it’s a good set of features that are easy to understand and navigate. The latter removes malware, adware, browser cookies, and other unwanted items and their remnants. In addition to tweaking the Sophos Home configuration there are also buttons towards the top of the dashboard for adding new devices, or launching the clean feature. It’s also possible to block or warn about whole categories of sites, but nothing granular such as blocking a child’s device from accessing a specific site. There are also more expansive controls to schedule scans, set file or folder exceptions, and prevent Sophos Home from blocking a website you want to visit. Exploit Mitigation, for example, has options for protecting browsers, Java applications, preventing privilege escalation, and so on. When there are more advanced settings they are also binary choices between on and off. IDGĪn example of Sophos Home Premium’s configuration options.Ĭonfiguration mostly comes down to on/off sliders for each service such as real-time protection, exploit mitigation, and Sophos’ machine learning capabilities. It also offers configuration controls for antivirus, web, ransomware, privacy protection, and malicious traffic detection.
The dashboard for each device starts under Status, which shows the latest activity for the device such as when a scan started or finished. This is where the meat of the Sophos controls reside. The Sophos Home Premium device dashboard.
The other options-including My Activity, Settings, and Add Device-all launch the web interface. On the left rail, there are a number of menu options, but only the Scan button at the bottom carries out any kind of action on the desktop. There’s also a large green checkmark at the top and the message “You are protected!” if all is well.
The main dashboard (pictured at the top of the article) shows whether all the various protection modules are enabled. There isn’t much to Sophos Home Premium on PC. It takes a bit of getting used to, but Sophos Home Premium has a lot to offer the designated family IT support person. Generally, however, the bulk of the controls are on the desktop. Occasionally we might see the ability to start a scan in the browser. Most antivirus suites use a cloud-based approach for parental controls since this entails managing multiple devices. Sophos isn’t the only company doing this, but cloud-based antivirus controls aren’t common either.
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