AV outfit Sophos has announced that Joe Levy is now the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO).
Levy has been the acting CEO since 15 February, and one of his first actions was to appoint Jim Dildine as Sophos’ new Chief Financial Officer (CFO) and a member of his senior management team.
Levy, a nearly 30-year veteran in innovating and leading cybersecurity product development, services, and companies, has driven the transformation of Sophos from a product-only vendor into the global cybersecurity giant it is today during his nine-year tenure. This includes an incident response team and Managed Detection and Response (MDR) service.
Levy established SophosAI and Sophos X-Ops, an operational threat intelligence unit that unites more than 500 cross-departmental cybersecurity operators and threat intelligence experts. Sophos X-Ops shares real-time and historical attack data with all of Sophos’ solutions, enhancing their ability to defend customers from persistent cyberattacks.
With extensive experience working with the channel, including Managed Security Providers (MSPs), Levy began his career in the mid-1990s as a cybersecurity practitioner and product and service innovator at a value-added reseller.
As CEO, Levy aims to expand Sophos’ already robust customer base in the midmarket, which includes nearly 600,000 customers worldwide and generates more than $1.2 billion in annual revenue.
As a leading provider of cybersecurity solutions for the midmarket, Sophos possesses a unique capability to further scale its business and that of its partners by assisting organisations in dire need of basic and expanded defences against opportunistic and targeted cyberattacks.
These organisations include the critical substrate, SMEs that constitute the engines of the world’s economy and are just as vulnerable to cyberattacks as major corporations. Indeed, the critical substrate, including smaller organisations within the classic 16 critical infrastructure verticals, are prime targets for attackers, as evidenced by Sophos’ Active Adversary report and 2024 Threat Report.
Both intelligence reports disclose how attackers are repeatedly exploiting exposed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) access at midmarket organisations, as well as targeting them for data theft, espionage, ransomware payoffs, or supply chain attacks to gain access to larger victims.
Levy stated that when midmarket organisations – the global critical substrate – are paralysed due to ransomware or other cyberattacks, business activities linked in our supply chains also stagnate, slowing down our economy.
“Operations of all sizes and shapes suffer collateral damage when dependencies in their supply chains are attacked. This can be devastating in often unpredictable ways due to the increasing complexity of the modern industrialised global economy,” he said.
“Our aim is to assist more organisations in the midmarket – the estimated 99% of organisations that are below the cybersecurity poverty line – to become better at detecting and disrupting inevitable cyberattacks. Our envisioned approach to achieving this is to collaborate with MSPs and channel partners that can scale alongside us with our innovative critical cross-domain technologies – endpoint, network, email, and cloud security – and managed services that they can resell and co-deliver. Cyberattacks against the midmarket could severely impact the world’s ability to function; they are relatively under-protected compared to the 1%, and Sophos is on a mission to change that.”
Levy’s leadership strategy includes the addition of Dildine as CFO to assist Sophos in reaching its business goals and propelling the company on its future growth trajectory. He brings exceptional operational expertise to Sophos, as well as a strong background in channel partner-based cybersecurity business.
Dildine joins Sophos most recently from the cybersecurity software and services company, Imperva, where he served as CFO for more than four years. Before Imperva, Dildine was CFO for Symantec’s $2.5 billion enterprise security business unit for three years. He also previously held key financial leadership roles for nearly nine years at Blue Coat Systems, where Levy also served as Chief Technology Officer.
While at Blue Coat Systems, he oversaw significant growth in market value while guiding the company through a go-private transaction by Thoma Bravo, a sale from Thoma Bravo to Bain Capital, and a subsequent sale to Symantec for $4.6 billion in 2016.
Dildine spearheaded the acquisition and seamless integration of six security-focused companies, valued at more than $750 million during his tenure.
“Having worked in technology and finance for more than 30 years, it is thrilling to join Sophos at this point, when the company is well on its way to breaking through to the next level,” Dildine said.
“Everything the company has achieved so far is impressive, including how dedicated Sophos is to continually innovate its cybersecurity technology and managed security services for customers in the midmarket. Sophos is also equally committed to supporting its channel partners, MSPs, and staff around the world,” Dildine added.
