Exhibitor News

Insights from Sophos

1.      What are your reasons for coming onboard the 43^rd edition of GITEX Global, what are your expectations, and who are you hoping to meet at the show?

Sophos has been at GITEX for 14 years. As a global leader and innovator of advanced cybersecurity solutions with a strong presence in the ME region, Sophos is participating at GITEX 2023 to promote its advanced cybersecurity solutions (ACE Platform), including a large portfolio of endpoint and network products. With Sophos Managed Detection and Response (MDR) and Sophos Incident Response services, organizations are better protected against cyberattacks and can be more efficient/prepared to defeat phishing, malware, active lateral attacks, ransomware, and more.

Sophos provides a single integrated cloud-based management console, Sophos Central – the centerpiece of an adaptive cybersecurity ecosystem that features a centralized data lake that leverages a rich set of open APIs available to customers, partners, developers, and other cybersecurity vendors.

The focus will be to highlight Sophos’ Cybersecurity as a Service capabilities, which is a combination of Sophos’ experts and tools provided as a service, that can help organizations of all sizes to deal with any cyberattack issues 24x7 365 days of the year. It helps organizations to have the right technology, people, and processes to effectively provide the active threat protection their business needs. It also helps organizations to proactively hunt for threats, scope their severity, initiate action, and provide actionable advice to address the root cause of incidents. 

2.      Are you planning to launch any products or services, demonstrate new technologies, or sign any partnerships during the show? Please provide details to help us amplify your presence.

Sophos is introducing Active Threat Response, a new cross-product integration that enables security analysts, either within the Sophos MDR team, or on the customer’s XDR team, to immediately and automatically block any active threat discovered on the network via Sophos Firewall in real-time.  This is a game changer for locking down active threats as it requires no firewall interventions, rule changes, or policy adjustments and it automatically identifies (and blocks) any new or additional compromised devices. This new Sophos Firewall capability is extensible, enabling third party threat feeds to also initiate an automated response to active threats in the future.

3.      How important is GITEX Global for your business, and what is the volume of business growth you anticipate from your participation in the show?

The Middle East is a very important market for Sophos and GITEX, being the largest technology exhibition in the region, is an ideal platform for us to showcase our best-in-class security solutions portfolio, meet with regional customers and partners at a single venue and strengthen our channel network.

4.      How important is the Middle East and Africa for your business, and what is your growth strategy in the region over the coming years?

Sophos’ strategy is to keep protecting our regional customers with our advanced cybersecurity solutions & services, we are also focusing on providing Cybersecurity-as-a-Service (CSaaS) to organizations needing fully managed, turnkey security solutions. Regional customers can manage their cybersecurity directly with Sophos’ security operations platform or use a hybrid approach by supplementing their in-house teams with Sophos CSaaS capabilities, such as threat hunting and remediation.

5.      To what extent can the region’s bold digital transformation missions elevate the global tech ecosystem?

 Ensuring the investments in digital transformation include security from the start could forge a path forward with more resilience and reliability than any existing infrastructure. This is a genuine opportunity to highlight the benefits of secure-by-default architecture set an example for the world of the benefits of trustworthy reliability. 

6.      Which countries and industry verticals are you targeting as part of your business plan over the next 5-10 years?

While we serve all verticals, we will continue to focus on the industry sectors where we have been the most successful:  Education, Government, Manufacturing, Healthcare and Retail.

Based on our 4th annual “State of Ransomware report, Ransomware attacks represented last year an average of 66,8% globally in these sectors.

We sell cybersecurity products and services to organizations in over 150 countries, and with accelerating growth in the middle east, we see the opportunity to expand in those countries.

7.      GITEX Global is accelerating the epic race for AI dominance in 2023:  how is your business embracing the AI innovation wave?

Sophos has been successfully utilizing AI and specifically next generation large language models (LLMs) in research in development for several years. We use LLMs to help us understand the content of URLs and HTML website, detect phishing attacks in email, and automatically interpret complex command lines. These approaches have been very powerful, providing state-of-the-art detection technology that is now embedded throughout our portfolio. We are excited about new LLM capabilities that recently came out, like OpenAI GPT3, and we are taking those innovation further by building custom GPT3-like LLM models to help simplify security operations center (SOC) workflows. We believe that custom task specific LLMs models can significantly improve over plain out of the box GPT3-like approaches and will become differentiators in the industry.

8.      Aside from AI, what is the world’s next big technology shift and how should government, business, and society prepare for it?

The complex interconnectedness of digital systems will require an even more intense emphasis on assessing supply chain security. Whether this is the software supply chain, service providers or bespoke IT product vendors our resilience and integrity are inextricably linked to those we do business with and impart trust upon. Regardless of the technology involved, understanding its component parts and the risks they may represent will become an increasingly important and challenging responsibility for most organizations and governments. 

9.      GITEX Global and GITEX Impact will build up the momentum for COP 28, taking place in Dubai from 30 November -12 December. How do you see the adoption of ESG strategies by tech companies, and what are the critical factors for those initiatives leading to a more sustainable future?

Business success is dependent on protecting the communities in which we all serve and because technology companies transcend traditional and digital borders, we naturally take a more global approach in adopting ESG strategies. We have a sense of duty to the communities in which we operate, and every year, more and more technology companies are committed to building an equitable future and a more sustainable world for generations to come. Sustainability has become a normal discussion in both customer engagements as well as interactions with industry analysts. There is an expectation to operate more responsibly amongst the tech community and provide greater disclosure regarding sustainability performance. We are committed to improving our sustainability now and in the future.