Sophos, we’re just better than the competition

Event: Sophos Discover 2019

Sophos provides an award-winning endpoint protection service with artificial intelligence and EDR. Giving its customers expert protection against malware, exploits and ransomware.

At their partner event in Manchester the message I got from them was all about evolving (digital transformation) and as expected, they framed the conversation around their next generation offerings, released back in 2014. They also reinforced their relevance in an increasingly Cloud native environment.

Kris Hagerman, Sophos CEO, provided an impassioned and articulate keynote, demonstrating a clear, well defined and relevant strategy. Which had resulted in terrific year-on-year growth in their next generation product line revenues, and net new client logo adds.

They’re committed to delivering everything as a service, supporting established and developing Managed Service Providers, like Acora, to deliver more innovative and secure Cloud-based services.

It’s clear that external validation is a core business strategy for Sophos, striving to have their platforms recognised by external analysts such as Gartner They’re extremely proud to be the only vendor included in their Magic Quadrant as leaders in both endpoint and networking.  They made a compelling argument, what with the innovation around their industry leading centralised management, deep product integration and applied artificial intelligence.

The scale of their client base affords them some obvious benefits around investment in product development too. Giving them visibility into vast numbers of different use cases, and providing their threat lab with lots of new suspicious content to review.  It was encouraging to see the continued efforts to ensure the efficacy of their solutions in detecting and responding to threats, ranking them top in independent lab’s security testing.

So, what’s so new?

• Intercept-X (Next Generation EDR) for servers – running from the same Sophos Central console as Endpoint.
• They have also set their sights firmly on securing the three largest public Cloud providers, Azure, AWS and Google following the recent acquisition of Avid Secure in January.
• Sophos Cloud Optix is a Cloud security posture checking platform for IaaS, PaaS and Microservices.  Agentless discovery and posture checking, configuration drift notification, compliance templates, which provides a particularly strong story for those customers already invested in DevOps automation and a rapidly changing public Cloud workloads.
• Sophos security synchronisation, which shares intelligence between their products to orchestrate or automate policy enforcement continues to develop, as does the coverage within the Sophos Central management console.  With deep integration and end-to-end visibility core to their next gen offering, they were quick to agree with Microsoft in promoting a best in suite approach for protecting against cyber security threats.

Sophos Central is genuinely powerful, already integrating into Acora’s ITIL ticketing system and SIEM platform to ensure a quick response and resolution once human interaction is needed.

Overall, I was impressed by the ambition of the event, not supported by any of their technology partners – happy to stand-alone.  The Sophos team have a strong innovation story, and I am excited their offerings align to Acora’s desire to build trust as an integral part of customers digital platforms.

To learn more about how Sophos can help protect your business, contact us.