Activate Your License

When you buy a new license, you need to activate it.

You do this in Sophos Central (unless a Sophos Partner handles license activation for you).

When you buy an upgrade, it may be activated automatically or you may need to activate it.

We may update your devices automatically under certain circumstances even if you've set up scheduled updates for your devices. We may update your devices automatically as follows:

  • If you change your license or your license changes.

    For example, if you apply an Intercept X with XDR license to an account that had an Intercept X Advanced license, we install Sophos LiveQuery on any computers that had Intercept X Advanced installed.

  • If you change the software assigned to a device, it updates immediately to apply those changes.

    For example, if you assign a Device Encryption license to a computer running Intercept X Advanced, this installs the new software immediately.

Note If you are starting a trial of Sophos Central, you don't need to activate a license yet. You do this only when you upgrade to a paid license.

To activate a license, do as follows.

  1. Ensure you have the license key shown in the License Schedule that Sophos sent you.
  2. Look for your account name in the upper right of the user interface. Click the name and select Licensing.
  3. Now use your license key.
    • If you see Apply Activation Code, enter your key and click Apply.
    • If you see an Apply License Key link, click it. Enter your key and click Apply.
  4. If your account already has licenses for the features included on the key, you see another dialog. This lets you choose how to use your new licenses.
    • Renew starts the new licenses when your current licenses expire.
    • Change starts the new licenses now. We'll adjust the license term so that all your licenses expire on the same date.
    Click Apply again.

How the "Change" option works

A customer orders 50 licenses for one year. Six months later, they place another order for 50 licenses for one year.

If the customer selects Change, we do as follows:

  • Add the new licenses to the older ones. The customer now has 100 licenses.
  • Add the remaining time on the older licenses (50 licenses x 6 months = 300) to the time on the new licenses (50 licenses x 12 months = 600). The total is 900 months.
  • Distribute the time over all 100 licenses. Each user’s license now runs for 9 months from the date when the key was applied (and the expiry date is adjusted accordingly).

The customer now has 100 licenses that will all expire 9 months from now.

In most cases the existing license expiry date gets extended but do check the new expiry date shown.