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Enterprise Master Licenses

You can opt to manage your licenses at enterprise level. Your licenses are shared between the sub-estates managed by your enterprise. You cannot turn off Enterprise Master Licenses once you have changed license management.

If your organization has a single Sophos Central Admin account that owns all the purchased (full) licenses you can transfer the licenses to your Sophos Central Enterprise account. These licenses are the master licenses for your entire organization. See Transfer licenses.

If you have several sub-estates with independent licensing you need to consolidate your licenses to use them as master licenses. See Consolidate licenses.

Enterprise Super Admins can allocate licenses from the pool of master licenses.

Terminology

Sophos Central Enterprise uses the following terms:

  • Enterprise usage: The number of licenses the enterprise currently uses.
  • Enterprise limit: The maximum number of licenses for the enterprise.
  • Enterprise allocation: The number of licenses allocated to the sub-estate.
  • Sub-estate usage: The number of licenses the sub-estate currently uses.
  • Set allocation limit: The maximum number of licenses allocated to the sub-estate.

License allocation

Newly-added licenses won't be available to master-licensed sub-estates until licenses are allocated.

To allocate licenses, do as follows:

  1. In Sophos Central Enterprise, go to the Sub-Estates page.
  2. Select a sub-estate, and then click Allocate Licenses.

  3. Next to each license type, enter the allocation limit.

    If you set the license allocation for a sub-estate to zero for a specific license type, the sub-estate can't use licenses of that type from your pool. The product isn't available to that sub-estate.

    If you allocate licenses of a specific type to a sub-estate, the sub-estate can use those licenses. If a sub-estate uses licenses over its allocation for a license type, this shows as over-usage for the enterprise, as well as the sub-estate.

  4. Click Allocate Licenses.

You can't select licenses for more than one product from the same product line within a sub-estate. For example, if you select any Intercept X Advanced licenses, you can't also select Intercept X Advanced with XDR licenses in the same sub-estate.

We recommend using only one license per sub-estate for identical products. For example, if you have two licenses for XDR, set one to blank (unlimited use up to the number available) or a specific number, and set the other license to 0 so that it can be allocated to different sub-estates.

If you attempt to add an allocation greater than your Enterprise Limit of licenses, you'll get an alert for "Invalid allocation limit set". The number you allocate must be the same or less than the Enterprise Limit number. Review the number under the Enterprise Allocation column and compare it with the total number under the Enterprise Limit column.

Add-on licenses

When you allocate licenses that also have add-on licenses, you must either allocate any base product’s license first, or allocate both at the same time.

You'll see an error "Requires a base product with sufficient seats and license time" if you try to allocate a license for Encryption add-on for Email advanced, without also allocating a license for Email Advanced.

Transfer licenses

Before you begin:

  • You must have only one sub-estate that owns all your full licenses.
  • You must have Enterprise Management turned on in the sub-estate that owns the licenses.

When you transfer:

  • You cannot go back to using individual licenses for each sub-estate.
  • All licenses are shared across the sub-estates in your enterprise.
  • You must manage licenses in Sophos Central Enterprise.
  • The Sophos Central administrators for your organization can't buy licenses or apply activation keys in Sophos Central Admin.

To transfer your licenses:

  1. Click your account name (upper right of the user interface) and select Licensing.
  2. Click Convert to Enterprise Master Licenses.
  3. Read the confirmation message about conversion and click Convert to Enterprise Master Licenses.

All your licenses are moved to your Sophos Central Enterprise account. Your licenses are shown on the Licensing page.

Any of your sub-estates that are using trial licenses are converted to full licenses.

All your sub-estates now use licenses from your master licensing pool.

Consolidate licenses

You must get a new activation key that consolidates your licenses. In most cases this key is applied automatically. You may receive a key from your partner. If you do, you must apply it on the Licensing page.

Before you begin:

  • You must have several sub-estates with independent licenses.
  • You must have Enterprise Management turned on for one of the sub-estates.

When you consolidate:

  • License consolidation may take a few days.
  • You cannot go back to using individual licenses for each-sub-estate.
  • All licenses are shared across the sub-estates in your enterprise.
  • You must manage all licenses in Sophos Central Enterprise.
  • The Sophos Central administrators for your organization can't buy licenses or apply activation keys in Sophos Central Admin.

To consolidate your licenses:

  1. Click your account name (upper right of the user interface) and select Licensing.
  2. Click Convert to Enterprise Master Licenses.

  3. Read the confirmation message about conversion and click Convert to Enterprise Master Licenses. The Licensing page now shows that you've requested conversion to master licenses.

    A consolidation request email is sent to you and your Sophos partner.

  4. Work with your Sophos partner to create a consolidation plan.

  5. Your new activation key may be applied automatically. If not, enter the key in Apply consolidation enterprise licenses activation key and click Apply.

All your licenses are moved to your Sophos Central Enterprise account. Your licenses are shown on the Licensing page.

Any of your sub-estates that are using trial licenses are converted to full licenses.

All your sub-estates now use licenses from your master licensing pool.

Change license allocation

You can change license allocation at any time.

Allocations don't update automatically when licenses are renewed. You must login to allocate licenses when the license becomes active.

If there is an allocation set already, entering 0 will remove the license completely from a sub-estate. That product will then be unavailable to that sub-estate.

Remove a license from a sub-estate

Some customers may find that when an allocation is set to No allocation, the license is still not removed from a sub-estate. If you want to remove the license, do as follows:

  1. In Sophos Central Enterprise, go to the Sub-Estates page.
  2. Select a sub-estate, and then click Allocate Licenses.
  3. Next to the license that you want to remove, enter 1.
  4. Click Save.
  5. Reselect the sub-estate, and then click Allocate Licenses.
  6. Next to the license that you want to remove, change the allocation to 0.
  7. Click Save.

The license will then be removed from the sub-estate.

Fix invalid allocation

You may see the error "Invalid allocation limit set". This means that you've allocated more licenses to sub-estates than you've bought.

This over-allocation can happen if you renew with fewer licenses than you bought and allocated originally.

You can fix this by reducing the allocation for sub-estates as follows:

  1. Go to the Sub-Estates page.
  2. Select a sub-estate and click Allocate Licenses.

  3. Next to the license type, in the "Set allocation limit?" column, enter -1.

    Entering this value removes the allocation and makes the licenses available for use elsewhere.

  4. Repeat this on more sub-estates until the license allocation no longer exceeds the Enterprise limit.