Sophos Rewards MDR Partners with Network Security Incentives
The security vendor’s MSP Elevate program is designed to drive more MDR business and more consolidation on the Sophos Central platform.
Strictly speaking, the MSP Elevate program announced by Sophos last week isn’t a loyalty program. But from the cheap seats I occupy it sure looks like one.
Sophos “is committed to enabling our MSP partners to further grow their business and reward their success,” says Chris Bell (pictured), the SVP of global channels, alliances, and corporate development you met here recently, in emailed remarks. MSP Elevate supports that commitment through discounts, rebates, training, and exclusive access to the premium service tier of Sophos MDR Complete, a subscription offering 24/7 incident response, one-year data retention, network detection and response services, and more.
MDR revenue at Sophos is growing over 37% a year at present, according to Bell, and will climb 16% industry-wide in 2025 to $10.3 billion, according to Canalys. Big numbers poised to get even bigger given that Canalys also says 52% of MSPs don’t yet offer MDR.
Other MSP Elevate benefits include access to five discounted “network-in-a-box” bundles of Sophos firewalls, switches, and wireless access points. Participants in the vendor’s 2024 MSP Perspectives report estimated that consolidating on a single security platform would cut day-to-day management time by 48% on average, a fact “underscoring how managing multiple cybersecurity platforms snowballs into a major overhead for MSPs, and consumes valuable billable hours,” Bell says. Elevate’s network bundles are designed to address that challenge by enabling partners to manage the full network stack through the Sophos Central platform.
“Taking a platform approach with open access to all of a customer’s security investments, and tying those integrations back into a unified platform, creates security operations efficiency, and ultimately creates efficiency and profitability for an MSP’s business,” Bell says.
Sophos has more coming for its partners. “MSP Elevate is the first of many business-driving MSP programs,” says Bell in the press release announcing the program. That’s about as far as he’s willing to go for now, however, on how many additional programs and what kind.
“MSP Elevate is the latest of many programs and initiatives we’ve introduced to uplevel partners’ ability to focus on their business instead of being bogged down by management headwinds” is all Bell’s saying for the moment.