Joe Levy Appointed CEO of Sophos
20 Mayo 2024 - 11:03AM
Sophos, a global leader of innovative security solutions for
defeating cyberattacks, today announced that Joe Levy is now chief
executive officer (CEO) of the company. Levy has been acting CEO
since Feb. 15. To drive a critical role in the execution of his
strategy to shape the future of Sophos, Levy has named Jim Dildine
Sophos’ new chief financial officer (CFO) and a member of his
senior management team.
Levy is a nearly 30-year veteran of innovating and leading
cybersecurity product development, services and companies. During
his nine-year tenure at Sophos, Levy drove the transformation of
Sophos from a product-only vendor into the global cybersecurity
giant it is today, including an incident response team and managed
detection and response (MDR) service that defends more than 21,000
organizations worldwide. Levy also created SophosAI and Sophos
X-Ops, an operational threat intelligence unit that joins together
more than 500 cross-departmental cybersecurity operators and threat
intelligence experts. Sophos X-Ops shares real-time and historical
attack data with all of Sophos’ solutions, making them smarter and
faster at defending customers from persistent cyberattacks. Levy
has in-depth experience working with the channel, including managed
security providers (MSPs), throughout his career, which he started
in the mid-1990s as a cybersecurity practitioner and product and
service innovator at a value-added reseller.
As CEO, Levy plans to expand Sophos’ already strong customer
base in the midmarket, which includes nearly 600,000 customers
worldwide and generates more than $1.2 billion in annual revenue.
As a leading provider of cybersecurity solutions for the midmarket,
Sophos has a unique ability to further scale its business and the
business of its partners by helping organizations in dire need of
basic and expanded defenses against opportunistic and targeted
cyberattacks. These organizations include the critical substrate,
small- to mid-sized organizations that comprise the machines of the
world’s economy and are just as susceptible to cyberattacks as
major corporations. In fact, the critical substrate, including
smaller organizations within the classic 16 critical infrastructure
verticals, are prime attacker targets, as evidenced by
Sophos’ Active Adversary report and 2024 Threat Report. Both
intelligence reports reveal how attackers are repeatedly abusing
exposed Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) access at midmarket
organizations, as well as going after them for data theft, spying,
ransomware payoffs, or supply chain attacks to gain entry to bigger
prey.
“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. 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,” said Levy. “Our goal is to help more organizations
in the midmarket – the estimated 99% 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 1%,
and Sophos is on a mission to change that.”
Levy’s leadership strategy includes adding Dildine as CFO to
help Sophos reach its business goals and propel the company on its
future growth trajectory. He brings exceptional operational
expertise to Sophos, as well as a strong background in channel
partner-based cybersecurity business.
Dildine joins Sophos most recently from cybersecurity software
and services company, Imperva, where he was CFO for more than four
years. Before Imperva, Dildine was CFO for Symantec’s $2.5 billion
enterprise security business unit for three years. Dildine also
previously held key financial leadership roles for nearly nine
years at Blue Coat Systems, where Levy also served as chief
technology officer. While at Blue Coat Systems, he oversaw a
dramatic growth in market value while guiding the company to a
go-private transaction by Thoma Bravo, sale from Thoma Bravo to
Bain Capital, and subsequent sale to Symantec for $4.6 billion in
2016. Dildine also spearheaded the acquisition and seamless
integration of six security-focused companies, which were valued at
more than $750 million during his tenure.
“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. 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,” said Dildine.
“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.”
About Sophos Sophos is a global leader and
innovator of advanced security solutions that defeat cyberattacks,
including Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and incident
response services and a broad portfolio of endpoint, network,
email, and cloud security technologies. As one of the largest
pure-play cybersecurity providers, Sophos defends more than 600,000
organizations and more than 100 million users worldwide from active
adversaries, ransomware, phishing, malware, and more. Sophos’
services and products connect through the Sophos Central
management console and are powered by Sophos X-Ops, the
company’s cross-domain threat intelligence unit. Sophos X-Ops
intelligence optimizes the entire Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity
Ecosystem, which includes a centralized data lake that leverages a
rich set of open APIs available to customers, partners, developers,
and other cybersecurity and information technology vendors. Sophos
provides cybersecurity-as-a-service to organizations needing fully
managed security solutions. Customers can also manage their
cybersecurity directly with Sophos’ security operations platform or
use a hybrid approach by supplementing their in-house teams with
Sophos’ services, including threat hunting and remediation. Sophos
sells through reseller partners and managed service providers
(MSPs) worldwide. Sophos is headquartered in Oxford, U.K. More
information is available at www.sophos.com.
Contact: Samantha Powers, sophos@walkersands.com