Security solutions provider Sophos announced that Joe Levy is its new CEO. Levy has been acting CEO since February 15.
Levy is a nearly 30-year veteran in innovating and leading cybersecurity product development, services and companies. During his nine-year tenure at Sophos, he drove the transformation of Sophos from a product-only vendor into a cybersecurity company with incident response team and MDR services that defend over 21,000 organizations, worldwide.
Levy also created 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 Sophos solutions, making them smarter and faster at defending against persistent cyberattacks. Levy has in-depth experience working with the channel, including MSPs, since he started in the mid-1990s as a cybersecurity practitioner and product and service innovator at a VAR.
As CEO, he plans to expand Sophos’ customer base in the midmarket, which includes nearly 600,000 customers worldwide. As a cybersecurity solutions midmarket provider, Sophos can further scale its business and the business of its partners by helping those needing basic and expanded defenses against opportunistic and targeted cyberattacks.
“When midmarket organizations – the global critical substrate – are paralyzed due to ransomware or other cyberattacks, business activities linked in our supply chains also stagnate, slowing our economy down,” said Levy. “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 because of the increasing complexity of how the modern industrialized global economy works. Our goal is to help more organizations in the midmarket – the estimated 99 percent of organizations that are below the cybersecurity poverty line – be better at detecting and disrupting inevitable cyberattacks. Our envisioned approach to achieving this is to work 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 one percent, and Sophos is on a mission to change that.”
To drive a critical role in the execution of his strategy, Levy also named Jim Dildine as Sophos CFO and senior management team member. Dildine brings operational expertise to Sophos, as well as a strong background in channel partner-based cybersecurity business. He joins Sophos from cybersecurity software and services company Imperva, where he was CFO. Prior to this, Dildine was CFO for Symantec’s enterprise security business unit for three years. Dildine also served with Blue Coat Systems.
“Having worked in technology and finance for more than 30 years, it is exciting to join Sophos at this juncture, when the company is well on its way to breaking through to the next level,” said Dildine. “Everything the company has accomplished thus far is impressive, including how dedicated Sophos is to constantly be innovating 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. I am looking forward to helping Joe accelerate growth and further position Sophos as a leader in the industry.”
“Thoma Bravo has worked with Joe through successful investments in SonicWall and Blue Coat Systems, and our relationship and experience together, coupled with his authentic style of leadership and impeccable reputation across the cybersecurity industry, make him the ideal CEO to lead this next chapter at Sophos,” said Chip Virnig, a partner at Thoma Bravo and a Sophos board member. “We’re also excited that Jim is joining Sophos as CFO and is a member of Joe’s senior management team. We’ve worked with Joe and Jim at various companies for well over a decade, and we’re confident their combined expertise will reap big rewards for the future of Sophos.”
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