With business are opening up post Covid-19, cyber security is becoming major concern for the Industry. It is therefore offering opportunity for the partners to excel. SME Channels spoke to Sunil Sharma, MD – Sales, Sophos India & SAARC to know about their strategy.
How Sophos is seeing the India market situation and sentiment post Covid-19?
The pandemic has heavily impacted our working and learning culture. With businesses forced to adopt work from home, we observed a great acceleration in digital transformation and cloud adoption. However, with organizations balancing between ‘responding’ and ‘business continuity’, the global pandemic has worsened the cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
As businesses continue to transition in the new normal, we see them becoming more serious about cybersecurity and adopting a zero-trust security posture to accommodate expanding work force and IT assets. In future, more organizations will continue moving towards cloud native next generation cybersecurity solutions and layered security where security solutions are integrated and share threat intelligence to accommodate secured “work from anywhere” model.
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“With a growing number of organizations outsourcing their cybersecurity and going for cybersecurity as a service, we see a great growth for partners who are working as MSPs (Managed Service Providers).”
Sunil Sharma,
MD – Sales,
Sophos India & SAARC
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What should be the strategy behind bounce back for the partners?
Sophos’ security solutions are designed to protect endpoints, data and infrastructure regardless of location and we are proud to say that the channel partners of Sophos were not impacted by the pandemic that much in terms of the continuity of their cybersecurity business.
With a growing number of organizations outsourcing their cybersecurity and going for cybersecurity as a service, we see a great growth for partners who are working as MSPs (Managed Service Providers).
The new normal will be driven by digital transformation and cloud adoption. With India having a huge SMB base, it will be a tremendous opportunity for partners who adopt MSP model to tap this SMB market as these organizations don’t have in house team that can take care of their cybersecurity round the clock.
What is Sophos strategy to take partners in a growth direction?
Our vision at Sophos is to protect people and businesses from cybercrime by developing powerful and intuitive products and services. These products and services are aimed at providing the world’s most effective cybersecurity solutions for organizations of any size. We also aim to work closely with partners to make them believe in our vision and grow them by protecting our joint customers across every vertical and size.
Our MSP offering is also a great growth platform for our MSP partners who want to grow their cybersecurity as a service revenue.
Would there be change in the overall strategy from Sophos?
More than 70% of our global business will be from our cloud native products (by the end of this fiscal) and that speaks volumes about our future preparedness which is leaning towards digital transformation and cloud adoption. We are clear on our strategy that will accommodate the future of technology and the new normal way of working.
Skillset gap is a big challenge for the security domain, what Sophos would do towards this?
At Sophos, we have a two-pronged approach to address this challenge. Sophos’ Synchronized Security, an automated cybersecurity system enabled by machine learning has empowered businesses globally to work with reduced or smaller security teams.
For the businesses having no in-house team to conduct threat hunting, which is a must for security from today’s sophisticated threats, we empower them with threat hunting services through Sophos’ Managed Threat Response (MTR). And for the organizations that are under active attacks, we provide Sophos Rapid Response, helping them to tackle and neutralize active cyberattacks.
Any particular segment partners would focus on while approaching the market?
Sophos’ solutions cater to all segments and sizes of organizations and that is a wonderful opportunity our partners have with us.
What all activities Sophos is planning to create lead gen activities?
We are conducting multiple thought leadership virtual events to showcase our offerings, awareness campaigns and trainings to help us to generate leads.
What is Sophos expectation from percentage growth perspective for 2021 FY?
Sophos is well poised for an exponential growth. We are one of the fastest growing cybersecurity companies in the world. And our future strategy is also very clear – to advance our next-generation solutions that leverage synchronized security. We are very positive to leverage digital transformation and cloud adoption from cybersecurity point of view in FY 21.
