A new tender for the NRW state license agreement for virus protection software has resulted in a change of provider. The contract was awarded to the company Cisco with the product “Cisco Secure Endpoint”. The contract begins on October 1, 2024 and runs for 5 years. The licenses currently in use for the previous “Sophos Central” platform expire on December 13, 2024. By this date, all systems that are currently supplied with Sophos must be converted to the new security solution so that they continue to be protected. There are different migration options depending on the use case.

This page serves as an introductory page to provide useful information about the migration and contains information for the following usage scenarios:

• RWTH organizations
• Private use

RWTH organizations

As a part of the current country license agreement, organizations can migrate to the cloud-based successor platform Cisco Secure Endpoint free of charge.

• You will find nformation on obtaining a Cisco Secure Endpoint instance under Access to Cisco Secure Endpoint.

Changeover of existing systems

In general, the parallel operation of Sophos and Cisco Endpoint Protection should not be a problem, but possible interactions in certain constellations cannot be ruled out.

We therefore recommend the following sequence for changing from Sophos Endpoint Protection to Cisco Secure Endpoint:

1. Prepare the policies and any additional groups required in the Cisco Secure Endpoint Console:
   In particular, you should transfer any scan exceptions you have set up in the past to the new policies.
   You can find some general information on setting up the console under General information on operation.
2. Uninstalling Sophos Endpoint Protection:
   For instructions on uninstalling Sophos software, see Uninstalling Sophos.
3. Installing Cisco Secure Endpoint:
   According to initial observations, the Cisco scanner appears to behave more aggressively than Sophos. To avoid major disruption to the user community, you can initially include the computers in the “audit” group during installation and only then gradually move them to groups with strict policies. For instructions on how to install Cisco Secure Endpoint software, see Installing Cisco Secure Endpoint.

Private use

Unfortunately, private use is no longer included in the current NRW state license agreement. 

Further information

For further information concerning the changeover please see FAQ.