Antivirus update within Managed Workstation

The antivirus solution and process within Managed Workstation has changed.

What and When

During the month of August, we slowly replaced the prior Sophos product with an entirely new Sophos product with two components. The new product is called Sophos Intercept X.

This change was initially made to all Windows 7 computers to help support our efforts to upgrade them to Windows 10, because the older Sophos product was identified as blocking upgrades in some cases. As we gained trust that it demonstrated no problems with larger numbers of computers, we deployed it across all of the Managed Workstation service.

Note: With a service of this size, any broad change we make takes a long time to be complete. So at this time only 83% of all managed workstations have the new solution–primarily because those remaining have not been on the UW network to receive the update. So you may not have this change.

What this means for you

There are a couple improvements with this new solution:

• When you leave the UW network, your computer is now able to report infections and get new virus updates
• We have additional insight on the specific origin of an infection. We’re still analyzing how we might provide that information to you.
• Our process for addressing infections has shifted so that for most infections you are not required to take action–we take actions when it does not threaten your data. Where data might be destroyed, we will still contact customers before we take action–your data is important to us.

More Info

Some customer units which have IT support have noted that the new solution does not allow for local control or configuration changes. This is by design because this solution is part of what you pay Managed Workstation for each month.

Brian Arkills
Managed Workstation service owner and manager
UW-IT