Sophos, a global security solutions firm has appointed Joe Levy as it chief executive officer [CEO]. Levy has been acting CEO since Feb. 15.
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.
“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,” said Levy.
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’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.