Jon's Network

Matt Hines of eWeek did a good write-up on Sophos  yesterday.  It’s good to see Sophos get this kind of attention.

"Sophos claims to have increased its business in North America by 50 percent during its fiscal 2006, which will end in March 2007, and company officials say that almost 100 percent of those deals involved the replacement of technologies made by Symantec and McAfee, the longtime IT security market leaders."

If you are in the market for endpoint or gateway security, Sophos is a great company to look at right now.

Here’s why.  Sophos has developed respected enterprise anti-virus software for over 20 years.  I have seen them develop and acquire new technology over the past 5 years to better serve their customers.  Here are some highlights:

1. Sophos Anti-Virus for 29 platforms, with integrated spyware and adware control, Application Control, and HIPS. All centrally managed of course.
2. Puremessage for Unix, Windows and as an appliance for comprehensive email security.
3. Zombie and Phishing alert services.
4. They have just released the web security appliance to scan and filter threats and content at the web gateway.
5. They just bought Endforce, a leading NAC solution.  This will be integrated into their suite of products.

Here are some predictions about their future direction, taking into account that they hope to become a the leading provider of security solutions.

1. Their application control solution could morph into a software inventory solution, which would increase security and it would also reduce help-desk costs.
2. I expect Sophos to add solutions for vulnerability assessment and patch management, since these are closely related to NAC, which they now have.
3. You can’t have complete endpoint security without device control to counter threats and leaks related to inappropriate use of USB flash drives and other media.  I expect them to add a device control capability too.

I guess we’ll see what happens.