How you helped give Sophos its security heartbeat

In the coming months, we’ll be taking a deeper look into Sophos Synchronized Security – how it developed, what sets it apart from competing technologies and why we think it’s the best bet for defending your business. It makes sense to begin with a look at how we got here.

Like many technological advances, this began with feedback. Sophos had already established itself as a respected antivirus company, but as the threat landscape rapidly evolved, security practitioners found it increasingly difficult to keep up. They turned to us to help them reach the next levels of defense.

Antivirus itself was no longer enough, especially when data breaches, phishing attacks and smartphone malware became daily problems. In response, governments and industry standard organizations have created myriad security requirements companies must comply with (GDPR is the latest example), making smart technology investments all the more important.

The four categories of feedback

1. Attack complexity:

   Customers told us that the growth in complex and coordinated attacks quickly outpaced their organizations’ ability to mount a defense, leading to increased losses from cybercrime, most notably those data breaches mentioned above.

2. Uncoordinated defenses:

   Badly configured systems have always been the stuff of nightmares for IT administrators, and this was certainly a problem with security technology. Without the proper coordination, the network’s left hand doesn’t know what the right hand is doing. As attacks became more coordinated, point products continued to work in isolation.

3. Expanding Attack Surface:

   Mobile devices, cloud applications, and IoT devices are being used by employees more and more, and organizations of all sizes are deploying virtual and cloud infrastructure. This has increased the so-called “attack surface” dramatically, and IT security shops needed a more synchronized security system to protect it all.

4. Lack of resources:

   Overstretched IT departments told us they were struggling to respond fast enough to threats entering their ever-expanding IT infrastructure, and that they didn’t have the time or resources to manage the complex cross-product correlation needed to identify and stop advanced threats.

And so the goal became to develop a solution to address these four challenges at once.

Enter Sophos Synchronized Security

For IT security practitioners who need better protection and scale, Synchronized Security allows them to mount a more coordinated defense.

Unlike competitive point products and bundles which have no context or bi-directional communication, Synchronized Security shares threat, health, and security information across multiple Sophos products in real-time, which delivers unparalleled protection, automated incident response, and real-time insight and control.

In the next post, we’ll examine the different components of Sophos Synchronized Security and how the pieces come together into one potent package.

We’ll also look at examples of specific recent threats that have been blocked by the technology.