Sophos CEO Kris Hagerman reaffirmed the company’s commitment to the mid-market as he hailed ongoing growth at the company.
At a Sophos event held at the company’s HQ in Oxford, he stated that the company was the only vendor focusing on the "enormous opportunity" of the 60 million mid-market companies worldwide, or those with under 5000 employees.
Explaining this focus, Hagerman said that while these companies faced major security problems, they typically had "zero or one" IT security specialists employed at the company.
Sophos’s pitch is about simplifying security to the extent that this is not a problem.
Hagerman explained how the company plans to combine network and endpoint security.
"Anything the user is using to compute, we will protect. Everyone has lots of devices, which all provide an attack surface," he said, adding that the IoT would see this surface expanding.
"Some companies are just doing endpoint, some just do network; we’re giving those two sec guards radios to talk to each other."
Joe Levy, CTO, explained some of the tenets of this approach, called synchronised security. It includes quarantining a single machine within a network, as well as synchronised phishing protection which determines the normal patterns of communication and searches for anomalies.
Another area that will form a key part of synchronised security is ‘continuous authentication’, which will take advantage of the features of mobile devices such as the microphone and location to continually authenticate the user. Levy said that this would not necessarily lead to the death of the password, but it was a step towards replacing them.
In terms of overall strategy, Hagerman explained that the company would remain 100 percent channel-focused, removing the conflict faced by companies with multiple sales channels.
The company finished its Q1 2017 at the end of June, with like-for-like billings growth expected to be in the range of 20 to 23 percent year-over-year.
