“With WannaCry, we dealt with a lot of customers and all customers that deployed InterceptX are safe today.”
Support from inside and out of the organization
A number of organizations have been facing challenges lately because of the legacy products they have. There is an unwillingness to replace them because of the money and the budget issue. “When we launched InterceptX, this particular point was kept in mind. It works with any kind of anti-virus and security solution. It works along with all of our competition products… It coexists. Today, in India we have many customers who are using this product with other solutions.”
“If a customer wants a reporting mechanism, we have Sophos Central which is a tool that gives integrated reports. It has proactive reporting and an automated response system. Today, no CIOs and CISOs can go to each and every particular product and find out where the vulnerability is,” Sharma explains, “As a CIO; I would be looking for an automated response system. That is what we offer with Sophos Central. It gives reports, all kinds of dashboards and they are customizable.”
The industry, according to assessments from Sophos, has been striving to make security more consolidated and collaborative. Yet, as of now, a number of premium enterprise solutions lack the capabilities to work efficiently in tandem with our security solutions. “When you talk about other products, they have to be compatible. As of today, such kinds of facilities are more or less not available. Been working with the industry, I believe such kinds of collaborations are must. Of course there are challenges in attaining this kind of compatibility but we would love to have that in our portfolio moving into the future.”
“Today, no CIOs and CISOs can go to each and every particular product to find out where the vulnerability is. As a CIO; I would be looking for an automated response system.”
Security for businesses with workforce in multiple cities
Sophos believes that the right customers are the ones that have unbridled growth, which expands to multiple offices in different locations. With big enterprises having large presence across country, security is always going to be a huge headache. This is where Sophos comes into the picture, “You can absolutely trust Sophos. We have SEs based out of 17 branches across India. One of our USPs is that we do not have third party contract people. We have our own employees who are further working with our channel network of 2000 partners out of which we have Gold, Platinum and Distributors. More than 250 plus of these partners have been enabled on our solutions. Even if you take 5 to 7 resources from each channel partner, it becomes a 1000 plus sales and SE force from the partner side. That is a formidable presence. You can be rest assured whichever location you go to grow; you will have solutions, deployment and support from Sophos.”
Sharma further elaborates on Sophos edge when it comes to providing secure solutions to infrastructure in multiple locations for enterprise customers. “Server protection from Sophos is one of the best in the industry. We cover all kinds of operating systems, not many vendors are able to offer it. In terms of business, we are doing a fantastic job in a lot of other countries. Unfortunately, since we have just started positioning ESG in India, only last year, the awareness is still lacking. My message is that we have fantastic server protection solutions available with us.”
“You can be rest assured whichever location you go to grow; you will have solutions, deployment and support from Sophos.”
Executing Proof of Concepts for CIOs & CISOs
Sharma reiterates that Sophos, being a channel driven company, has a policy to put the partner first in conversations with CIOs and CISOs. It is the partner ecosystem that performs demonstrations and PoCs for customer. Sophos comes directly into the picture only when needed. “Our one hundred percent business is through our channel partners. With a ‘Channel-first’ model, we help our partners wherever they get stuck while carrying out PoCs. It is our partners who lead the Demos and PoCs with the customers. Wherever a need arises, our SE steps in to troubleshoot.” Sharma continues, explaining his own ideology on which he has been able to build a lot of recent success for Sophos, “We believe partners should be more enabled and self- confident. We want our partners to grow with us and this can only happen when they have confidence in us.”
From the perpective of CIOs, addressing the issues in his organization and satisfying his queries is a joint responsibility of Sophos and its partners. “When our partners have the capabilities and the people, they deliver the training programs without assistance from Sophos. Whenever help is required from us, we go along with the partners and deliver those programs. Also, we have as part of our price list a skew which primarily takes care of such kinds of training programs for CIOs and CISOs.”
“With a ‘Channel-first’ model, we help our partners wherever they get stuck while carrying out PoCs. It is our partners who lead the Demos and PoCs with the customers.”
Building trust within the customer community
Sophos has a very niche position among a number of vendors plying their trade in cybersecurity. “Sophos is the only company which is focusing on the mid-market and pragmatic segment. What sets us apart is that we are very focused towards our market segment. In fact, we might be the only company who is talking about the end-to-end IT security. We are arguably the only company that in its message says that it will make security simple for CIOs and CISOs to manage, as per their requirement.” Sophos has one of the broadest portfolios of cutting-edge Cloud-first technologies that they deliver to their customers. “We are the only company enabling our customers to come on cloud first. All our new solutions being launched are being first launched on Cloud. This boasts about how customer friendly and cloud friendly company we are. Any customer from any place can easily move to the cloud and start using our solutions.”
