Specifications

SOPHOS ENDPOINT SECURITY AND DATA PROTECTION REVIEWER’S GUIDE

Application Control

While some applications can provide efﬁciency gains, others can distract users

from their business tasks, and waste valuable network bandwidth and processing

power. In addition, with P2P and IM-based malware attacks growing fast, and

regulations that make it a legal requirement to maintain and protect data, the

need to control the installation of unauthorized applications is increasingly

important.

Sophos integrates application control into the endpoint agent, letting you authorize

or block applications selectively, at the desktop level or centrally. You can also block

or authorize applications for different groups of computers using ActivePolicies in

Sophos Enterprise Console (see chapter 2). For example, you can block VoIP for

ofﬁce-based desktop computers, but authorize it for remote computers.

Device Control

Our device control technology helps you to reduce the risk of data loss and

malware infection, by giving you control over removable storage devices and

wireless networking prototcols.

Built into the single endpoint agent, it is port agnostic and supports any port

used to connect the device including USB, FireWire, SATA and PCMIA interfaces.

Initially the device control policy can be put into a notiﬁcation only mode

enabling you to get a view of device usage across your estate without blocking

any devices, before conﬁguring and deploying a control policy to relevant groups.

Each device type can either be authorized (the default setting) or blocked.

Storage devices can also be set to “read only” mode, which means that data can

be read from the device but not written to it. This can be particularly useful for

USB ﬂash disks and CD / DVD drives.

For network interfaces, a “Block bridging” mode prevents network bridging

and will disable a computer’s wireless interface when the computer has a

physical connection to the network, e.g. via an Ethernet cable. Once the cable is

disconnected, the wireless interface will be enabled.

Data Control

Sophos is the ﬁrst vendor to integrate DLP content scanning into the endpoint

agent, reducing the impact on system performance with a single agent that

scans for sensitive data as well as malware and making it easier for you to

conﬁgure, deploy and manage.

It enables you to monitor for when users transfer sensitive data, such as

Personally Identiﬁable Information (PII) or company conﬁdential documents

to removable storage devices or internet-enabled applications, helping you to

prevent the accidental loss of data.

Policy conﬁguration is easy with a number of preconﬁgured data control rules

that you can use out of the box or modify to tailor to your own needs.