Of the testing houses we track, only SE Labs has tested Sophos Home recently. Performance IDGĪn active scan on the desktop with Sophos Home Premium.

“Managing app access, however, is something we constantly monitor and potentially will roll out in the future based on customer demand,” a Sophos representative said. MacOS has Screen Time, for example, and Microsoft Family offers similar parental controls. The reason being that modern operating systems have similar features already built in. 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. 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. 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.

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