Integrating Secureworks is Job #1 at Sophos
Sophos CEO Joe Levy discusses the recently closed Secureworks deal and how it will benefit the vendor's partners.
At least we can be reasonably sure Secureworks won’t get caught napping by Q Day. They’ve been thinking about that for a while, it appears, as has Sophos, the even bigger vendor backed by the “pattern seeking” investors at private equity firm Thoma Bravo, which bought Secureworks in a deal that closed earlier this month.
Quantum computing is actually a good example of why global outlays on security software and hardware will climb 11% this year to $97.5 billion, according to Canalys. There’s no shortage of others.
“The threat landscape never rests. It’s continuously evolving,” says Sophos CEO Joe Levy (pictured), during the latest episode of the podcast I co-host. “This is why the industry needs to continuously evolve as well.”
It's also why spending on MDR services will outgrow the security market in aggregate this year, per Canalys, rising 16% to $10.3 billion. And why Sophos spent $859 million on Secureworks and now has more than 500 analysts in its SOC supporting over 28,000 customers. Novel, evolving threats like quantum computing are hard for most MSPs to address on their own.
“There are economic constraints that prevent organizations from doing everything that they need to in order to run a good cybersecurity operation,” Levy says. Like spending millions constructing an in-house SOC, for example.
“Many of them explored building that themselves, and they quickly realized that there’s just a lot of capital investment requirement in order to be able to do that sort of thing,” Levy notes. Staffing a SOC, he adds, requires even more investment. “There’s way more demand than there is supply for skilled cybersecurity operators today.”
Integrating Secureworks with the rest of Sophos, culturally and technologically, is Levy’s number one priority for the remainder of this year, and it’s an undertaking that will touch more than just MDR. Sophos plans to enhance a variety of existing solutions with other pieces of the Secureworks portfolio.
“Examples of that would be their vulnerability detection and response offering, which we’re planning on integrating into our managed risk offering,” Levy says, citing Secureworks’s iSensor intrusion prevention system and its recently introduced identity threat detection and response solution as additional examples.
Partners worried about the disruptive effects of all that change needn’t worry, Levy continues, and partners eager for it to arrive may have to wait.
“We practice the principle of ‘first do no harm’ in the way that we do our integrations, and it’s going to inform the way that we run the SecureWorks integration,” he explains. “Things are going to be the same tomorrow as they were yesterday for the foreseeable future as we begin to bring these portfolios together, but over time we are going to bring unified go-to-market motions and unified platform capabilities to the market.”
Speaking of my podcast…
Joe Levy is but one of many security industry luminaries who have joined us on the show. Others include WatchGuard’s CEO, N-able’s CISO, and Acronis’s president. Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan will be joining us on the show in a few weeks too. Shouldn’t you join us as well?
