Tag: sophos

Sophos releases new services for cybersecurity partners

Posted on February 22, 2024 by - News

Security experts Sophos has unveiled a new service to help its partners deal with the nitty-gritty of their business.

Dubbed Partner Care, the service features a crack team of Sophos experts who are on call 24/7 to answer any questions and sort out any sales-related problems.

The service is designed to speed up response times for Sophos partners and Managed Service Providers (MSPs) who need a hand with admin and operations, freeing them up to focus on selling and securing their customers with Sophos’ cutting-edge security solutions.

Sophos global channels and small business sales boss Kendra Krause said after decades of experience supporting partners who sell to small and medium-sized businesses, the firm knows that admin and operations can be a real pain and take up precious time that could be spent on building customer relationships, chasing leads and closing deals.

Sophos boss quits as cyber firm booms.

Posted on February 16, 2024 by - News

Cyber security as a service outfit Sophos said that Kris Hagerman has packed it in as its CEO and will be an advisor to the firm until April 1, 2024. Joe Levy will be Sophos’s President and acting CEO.

Hagerman has been CEO of Sophos since 2012 and has seen the firm grow. The firm has tripled its revenue to over $1 billion. It has more customers, from about 150,000 to over 580,000 worldwide, making Sophos one of the top next-generation leaders in the cyber security business. Hagerman made Sophos go public on the London Stock Exchange in 2015 and sold it to Thoma Bravo in 2020.

Hagerman said he was happy with the company’s achievements over the last 12 years as it became a true next-generation cybersecurity leader and an industry pioneer in making cybersecurity a service.

“I am happy to hand over to Joe Levy as President and acting CEO to lead Sophos into the future. Joe and I have worked well together for over nine years, and he has been key in leading our product, services, and technology, which have made Sophos grow. He has my full and keen support.”

Firms find security a bit tricky

Posted on April 6, 2023 by - News

Security outfit Sophos has been asking around and found that nearly all organisations find essential security operation tasks, such as threat hunting a bit too challenging.

Sophos’s new survey The State of Cybersecurity 2023: The Business Impact of Adversaries on Defenders  which found that, globally, 93 per cent of organisations find the execution of some essential security operation tasks, such as threat hunting, challenging.

These challenges include understanding how an attack happened, with 75 per cent of respondents stating they have challenges identifying the root cause of an incident. This can make proper remediation difficult, leaving organizations vulnerable to repetitive or multiple attacks, by the same or different adversaries, especially since 71 per cent of those surveyed also reported challenges with timely remediation.

More than 71 per cent said they have challenges understanding which signals/alerts to investigate, and the same percent reported challenges prioritising investigations.

Sophos CTO John Shier said that only a fifth of respondents considered vulnerabilities and remote services a top cybersecurity risk for 2023, yet the ground truth is that these are routinely exploited by Active Adversaries.

Sophos expands security portfolio

Posted on March 10, 2023 by - News

Channel-focused security outfit Sophos has expanded its portfolio of endpoint security offerings with adaptive active adversary protection, Linux malware protection enhancements, account health check capabilities, integrated zero trust network access (ZTNA) agent for Windows and macOS devices and more improve frontline defences.

Sophos senior vice president of products Raja Patel said that ransomware was one of the most prevalent and damaging cyberthreats to organisations, with Sophos incident responders still consistently remediating ransomware activity worldwide.

Axeman cometh to Dell

Posted on February 7, 2023 by - News

Dell Technologies plans to slash its global workforce by 6,650 jobs which represents five per cent of its entire employee base.

For those who came in late, Big Tech has been making the short-term decision to improve their bottom lines by laying off staff as recession looms. This gives them the excellent opportunity to complain about not having skilled, loyal staff in two years or have their bottom lines handed to them by more agile companies staffed by the people they laid off.

In January SAP, IBM, Microsoft, Sophos, Amazon and Salesforce revealed that significant cuts were on the horizon, blaming the “economic downturn” with managers trotting out cliches like “economic headwinds.”

Arrow aims high with Sophos distribution.

Posted on October 11, 2022 by - News

Global technology provider Arrow has expanded its activity with Sophos, a global leader in next-generation cybersecurity, across Europe.

Channel partners and managed service providers in the U.K., France and Austria can now access Sophos’ products and services via Arrow‘s cloud delivery and management platform, ArrowSphere.

Arrow has added a suite of API-ready products from Sophos’ business portfolio to ArrowSphere, giving the channel access to a powerful choice of cybersecurity tools that can be easily rolled out across customers. Channel partners can also manage Sophos products in the cloud-native Sophos Central platform, to navigate quickly between products and across multiple customers, or via Sophos MDR – a dedicated 24/7 threat hunting, detection, investigation, and response service.

More than half of firms hit by ransomware

Posted on August 11, 2022 by - News

Ransomware attacks have grown by 62 percent with more than half of firms hit in the last year.

According to Sophos’ State of Ransomware in Financial Services report, 55 per ent of financial services organisations were hit with ransomware in 2021 – a steep 62 percent increase over the year prior according to the research that Sophos released today.

While the number and complexity of attacks grew, only 54 per cent of respondents reported that the attackers succeeded in encrypting their data, considerably below the global average of 65 percent.

Brexit biggest loss of sovereignty since 1066

Posted on July 26, 2022 by - News

Any chance that the UK would become technologically independent were dashed the moment it signed up to Brext, according to ARM co-founder Hermann Hauser.

ARM’s co-founder believes Britain has “no chance” of being technologically independent following Brexit.

Hauser said UK withdrawal from the EU was a tactical error.

Sophos merges SophosLabs, Sophos SecOps and Sophos AI

Posted on July 26, 2022 by - News

There’s an awful lot of Sophos going on. Sophos has merged SophosLabs, Sophos SecOps and Sophos AI into one security unit.

Dubbed Sophos X-Ops the unit is supposed to take the predictive, real-time, real-world, and  threat intelligence from each group.

Sophos says the new unit will provide better innovation, which it claims is an essential component of cybersecurity due to “the aggressive advancements in organised cybercrime”.

Companies pay off ransomware attacks even if they don’t need to

Posted on April 28, 2022 by - News

Just over a quarter of ransomware victims that paid off their attackers did so even though they did not need to, according to the latest annual State of Ransomware report from Sophos.

The study of more than 5,000 organisations found that the volume and impact of ransomware attacks continued on a relentless upward trajectory last year, with 66 percent of organisations hit by ransomware attacks in 2021, up from 37 percent in 2020.

Sophos found the average pay-out grew by nearly five times to $812,360 (£646,709), and the proportion of organisations paying over a million dollars to get their data back grew from four per cent in 2020 to 11 percent in 2021. Sophos said 46 percent of victims paid some kind of ransom and  but 26 percent paid even if they had the means to restore encrypted data.

Giacom increases in size

Posted on March 22, 2022 by - News

Small business Cloud business Giacom has grown by 20 percent to £58.6 Million and is increasing its hires.

The company said it wanted its team to grow by 22 percent in 2022 across all departments and most of the hires will come from the local Hull community.

To nurture young local talent, Giacom has started apprenticeships within its Marketing and IT departments. The company has also encouraged training opportunities internally and recently launched its Personal Development Plan Scheme, which is available to all staff to up-skill themselves. This has lead to nine staff applying for the highly regarded CMI management certificates.

Additionally, in October 2021, Giacom announced its new partnership with cyber security giant Sophos, being chosen as one of three UK MSP distributors for Sophos.

Integrity360 snaps up Caretower

Posted on February 25, 2022 by - News

More M&A action! Integrity360 has acquired cybersecurity MSP Caretower, as part of its cunning plan to create a £70 million-revenue business across the UK and Ireland.

For those not in the know,  Caretower offers managed security services, penetration testing, security consultancy and managed incident response services, working with an array of vendors including Microsoft, Sophos, Kaspersky, Check Point, Forcepoint, Barracuda Networks among others.

The business generated sales of around £28 million in 2021 and has offices in London and Sofia, Bulgaria.

Integrity360 is a Check Point, F5 and Forcepoint partner and claims that the acquisition will bring its group revenues to £70 million in 2022 and boost its headcount to more than 300 employees including 200 cybersecurity engineers, analysts, consultants and specialists.

All of Caretower’s employees will remain with the group.

Sophos signs two new disties

Posted on October 13, 2021 by - News

Sophos has partnered with Tech Data and Giacom as part of an expansion of its UK operati0n.

The security vendor’s new partnership with Tech Data will see the distributor deliver Sophos’ full range of products and services and will provide channel partners with the “staffing and tools, such as in-depth sales, technical and renewal support, that they need to accelerate business growth”.

Sophos now has three distributors in the UK with Tech Data and Giacom sitting alongside an existing partnership with Arrow ECS.

Meanwhile, the Giacom partnership will see its full suite of services offered, as well as providing partners with cloud software solutions available in their cloud market management portal and giving access to “highly-trained and certified sales, technical support and customer service teams and a wealth of sales, marketing, technical and training resources”.

Sophos speeds up MSP Connect worldwide

Posted on September 22, 2021 by - News

Security outfit Sophos is speeding up the worldwide growth of MSP Connect, Sophos’ programme to help managed service providers (MSPs) increase customer management efficiencies, unlock new business opportunities and boost revenue, it said.

The company said that MSP Connect has been doing rather well and achieved 67 percent  year-over-year billings growth in the first quarter fiscal year 2022, ending June 30, 2021, and 55 percent year-over-year billings growth in fiscal year 2021, ending March 31, 2021, through MSP Connect Flex, Sophos’ monthly billing programme.

The Americas, Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ), and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions delivered double-digit growth, with the most significant gains in the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland (UKI), Germany, and Australia and New Zealand (ANZ). MSP Connect now supports more than 16,500 global and regional MSPs worldwide, a 54 percent increase since April, 1, 2020, the start of Sophos’ fiscal year 2021.

Sophos shacks up with Amazon

Posted on August 26, 2021 by - News

Former British security outfit Sophos has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Level 1 Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) Competency status and is apparently the first to be named a Level 1 MSSP Competency programme partner. Parse that, if you can.

Scott Barlow, Sophos vice president of global MSP and cloud alliances said that it has never been more critical for organisations adopting cloud services to optimise their security “posture”, block advanced threats, and have expert resources available to monitor environments all the time,  to stay secure.