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Sophos CEO Joe Levy On Bridging The Cybersecurity Divide And Empowering MSP
Joe, you're no stranger to our audience. Last time we spoke you were CTO, and now you're CEO of Sophos. What is your vision for Sophos in your new role?
Joe: I've been with Sophos for quite some time. This coming February is going to be my 10-year anniversary with the company. I've been in the cybersecurity industry for longer than we've been calling it the cybersecurity industry for over 30 years. My focus in my new role at Sophos is to crystallize and clarify our mission. And that is just unambiguously stating and demonstrating our loyalty to the channel and doubling down on our focus on what I think is the most important segment of the market when it comes to cybersecurity service. That is the mid-market and the small to medium business space.
The reason why I think this is so important is because if you look at the composition of the very crowded and very competitive cybersecurity industry, the vast majority of vendors that are out there today are going after the enterprise and they're effectively leaving this segment of the market, which has a massive surface area relatively unaddressed.
What are the biggest challenges your partners face and how are you addressing them?
Joe: I think as an industry, one of the biggest set of challenges that we face today is the competition for talent. I often describe this as the cybersecurity skills gap and it manifests itself in a variety of ways. It’s competition for talent and market, which is always driving up prices for talent. And unfortunately, we're not addressing the scarcity as quickly as we need to. It's just not happening fast enough. We need to come up with better solutions to this scarcity problem that we have.
One of the ways that we can do this is through the hybridization of products and services. And this was one of the philosophical drivers behind our decision to get into the services business about five or six years ago. It was the recognition that the trend or the mode within the industry of just creating these good technologies and then hoping that our customers are going to be able to produce good outcomes with those technologies wasn't serving us sufficiently because of the skills gap.
We have one of the most robust channels in the cybersecurity space. I think it's kind of our killer app or one of our main differentiators as a cybersecurity vendor. Many of our partners are doing this on their own today and they continue to do it very successfully with our technology. What we've done is we've unlocked the ability for our MSPs in particular to build these kinds of service-oriented relationships with customers because now they have the ability to combine the offering of the service on their own, which they could scale only to a certain level because of the constraints of staffing. Then, they can augment that by also selling our service. I think it's a really good combination. And I think it unlocks a lot of opportunity for our MSPs and ultimately it allows us to better service our customers.
How can MSPs have a productive role in closing the gap between the under protected and the protected?
Joe: I think that the MSP population within the broader channel that serves IT and cybersecurity was probably the first to get this and the first to begin to embed this into their business models and their business practices. We need an ability to scale the reach that we have as an industry.
If you just think about the surface area in the United States, if you go to the small business administration side, they share some statistics. Over 99 percent of the businesses in the United States are categorically small business, meaning that they have fewer than 500 employees. There's over 33 million of them in the U.S. alone. And then, globally, if you look at it, it's a number that is probably approaching the hundreds of millions if you get the complete count of small organizations that are out there.
There is no way that a vendor by themselves, even a collection of all of the vendors in the cybersecurity space and their estimations of somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 cybersecurity vendors today, they're never going to have the capacity, they're never going to have the reach to be able to address the needs of 30, 50 million small businesses and organizations that are out there today. The only way that we can successfully scale is through relationships with a global MSP network. And what we need to do as a vendor is we need to ensure that we're equipping MSPs to be as successful, as efficient, and as profitable in their ability to reach all of these customers. This is exactly what we're focusing on doing.
For more information, go to Sophos.com.
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By The Channel CompanyJoe, you're no stranger to our audience. Last time we spoke you were CTO, and now you're CEO of Sophos. What is your vision for Sophos in your new role?
Joe: I've been with Sophos for quite some time. This coming February is going to be my 10-year anniversary with the company. I've been in the cybersecurity industry for longer than we've been calling it the cybersecurity industry for over 30 years. My focus in my new role at Sophos is to crystallize and clarify our mission. And that is just unambiguously stating and demonstrating our loyalty to the channel and doubling down on our focus on what I think is the most important segment of the market when it comes to cybersecurity service. That is the mid-market and the small to medium business space.
The reason why I think this is so important is because if you look at the composition of the very crowded and very competitive cybersecurity industry, the vast majority of vendors that are out there today are going after the enterprise and they're effectively leaving this segment of the market, which has a massive surface area relatively unaddressed.
What are the biggest challenges your partners face and how are you addressing them?
Joe: I think as an industry, one of the biggest set of challenges that we face today is the competition for talent. I often describe this as the cybersecurity skills gap and it manifests itself in a variety of ways. It’s competition for talent and market, which is always driving up prices for talent. And unfortunately, we're not addressing the scarcity as quickly as we need to. It's just not happening fast enough. We need to come up with better solutions to this scarcity problem that we have.
One of the ways that we can do this is through the hybridization of products and services. And this was one of the philosophical drivers behind our decision to get into the services business about five or six years ago. It was the recognition that the trend or the mode within the industry of just creating these good technologies and then hoping that our customers are going to be able to produce good outcomes with those technologies wasn't serving us sufficiently because of the skills gap.
We have one of the most robust channels in the cybersecurity space. I think it's kind of our killer app or one of our main differentiators as a cybersecurity vendor. Many of our partners are doing this on their own today and they continue to do it very successfully with our technology. What we've done is we've unlocked the ability for our MSPs in particular to build these kinds of service-oriented relationships with customers because now they have the ability to combine the offering of the service on their own, which they could scale only to a certain level because of the constraints of staffing. Then, they can augment that by also selling our service. I think it's a really good combination. And I think it unlocks a lot of opportunity for our MSPs and ultimately it allows us to better service our customers.
How can MSPs have a productive role in closing the gap between the under protected and the protected?
Joe: I think that the MSP population within the broader channel that serves IT and cybersecurity was probably the first to get this and the first to begin to embed this into their business models and their business practices. We need an ability to scale the reach that we have as an industry.
If you just think about the surface area in the United States, if you go to the small business administration side, they share some statistics. Over 99 percent of the businesses in the United States are categorically small business, meaning that they have fewer than 500 employees. There's over 33 million of them in the U.S. alone. And then, globally, if you look at it, it's a number that is probably approaching the hundreds of millions if you get the complete count of small organizations that are out there.
There is no way that a vendor by themselves, even a collection of all of the vendors in the cybersecurity space and their estimations of somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000 cybersecurity vendors today, they're never going to have the capacity, they're never going to have the reach to be able to address the needs of 30, 50 million small businesses and organizations that are out there today. The only way that we can successfully scale is through relationships with a global MSP network. And what we need to do as a vendor is we need to ensure that we're equipping MSPs to be as successful, as efficient, and as profitable in their ability to reach all of these customers. This is exactly what we're focusing on doing.
For more information, go to Sophos.com.