VeriTest performed a detailed competitive analysis of Sophos’s desktop anti-virus solution version 3.75 against competitors and focused on three areas for each product: ease of product installation, scheduling accuracy and total time for scheduled scans, and procedures for updating virus definitions.

"These independent results validate Sophos’s ability to provide antivirus software that meets the stringent virus protection requirements of businesses," said Charles Cousins. "Network administrators demand antivirus software that is simple and quick to install, scans efficiently, and most importantly can be rapidly updated against new virus threats with minimal impact on network performance. Based on the testing, Sophos Anti-Virus meets these needs better than any other major virus vendor."

Meanwhile, to keep up the practice of providing customers with fast updates, Sophos unveiled its enhancements to its automated virus protection tool, Enterprise Manager (EM) Library. With EM Library, Sophos customers can now schedule automatic updates of the very latest virus protection across multiple platforms, including Windows, Mac, NetWare, Linux and Unix systems.

Additional features include a proactive alerting mechanism which keeps network administrators fully up-to-date with operational conditions.

EM Library enables network managers to specify the time and frequency of scheduled anti-virus updates across multiple platforms in their networks.

EM Library can be updated as often as hourly, ensuring that the latest virus protection is automatically downloaded and installed with minimal impact on system resources. EM Library’s proactive alerts – which can be delivered by email, desktop messaging or event log - ensure that administrators are kept informed about system performance, allowing them to check that the downloads and installations are running optimally. An audit trail of the time new updates are received and applied also aids network administration.