Simply put, Sophos is a success story, says the company.

A ‘no frills’ approach to Anti-Virus (AV) and spam management means that Sophos’s products do what they set out to do. Key to the positioning and development of the company, with its advent in 1985, has been a core differentiator noted in its tagline of “Engineered for Business”, an approach that has ensured a stringent focus on the composite security requirements of the enterprise market.
And this is where the success story unfolds. With 35 million users in 150 countries around the globe, Sophos continues to deliver on market demand for its converged security products. Consistent performance and impressive growth year-on-year, proves that the market appreciates a strong focus on business sectors as well as the efforts to meet customer demand for simplified, consolidated protection against the latest security threats.
Over the past 18 months, and with the consolidation of anti-spam protection and email policy enforcement into its product portfolio, Sophos has successfully moved from being an established AV company to a respected security company with an expert focus on gateway and endpoint solutions.
Security is not written in code
A year ago, Sophos was a relatively unknown brand in Middle East. Unknown to the market and perhaps initially perceived with some trepidation was a previously unheard-of 100 per  cent licence renewal. But this impression did not last long, when the “trade-off” meant reliability, robustness, manageability and full cross-platform support for the multitude of users in Middle East who now continue to renew with Sophos year in and year out.
The vehicle to its success in the Middle East, Al Adeeb Information Technology, provided the necessary impetus, expertise as well as market and technical knowledge to take rock-solid technology, a trusted and mature brand and expert support, and expand the global reach of the Sophos solution set.
Mohammad Noraiee, CEO of Al Adeeb IT, says that through the strength of the product, a solutions focus, service and support, Sophos has become visible on the local security solution provider radar screen along with some of the other industry “leaders”.
 He describes the success of Sophos in the Middle East to a commitment to service, a solution selling approach, 24-hour support as well as technology and product features.
“A key factor in Sophos technology is the size of its virus table updates. This is significant for a number of reasons, not least of which is the cost of bandwidth in Middle East. While the size of an update will determine the speed with which it can be delivered, and the impact it will make on network performance, the ultimate point is to get the update to all network users as quickly as possible.”
Bandwidth and servers can easily be overloaded by large updates, but of equal significance is the software’s ability to use a single engine, and thus the same update, for a wide variety of operating systems found on most enterprise level networks.
Whether that’s a mix of Linux, Novell, Unix, Windows or DOS, it ensures a speedier delivery of the update regardless of the platform mix.
Multiple updates for multi-platform networks, on the other hand, introduce added complexity in terms of managing a virus threat as well as the speed with which it can be resolved.
“Sophos scores full marks in addressing these business realities through low system impact, a competitive and highly configurable feature set, security cost control and multiple platform support,” says Noraiee.
Local perspective
Making Sophos work in the Middle East might have been about proactive sales in the territory. This has been the primary focus of Al Adeeb IT, but it has also brought the world’s fourth largest security company, Sophos, within the reach of Middle East organisations.
“People don’t always realise that there may be better products than those offered by the current market ‘shareholders’. The AV space has been dominated by a set number of industry players, which meant that purchases were not always based on what is ultimately the best solution for the customer. While Sophos has inherent benefits, past experience has proven that resellers sometimes go for the easiest sell, and that was often the incumbent brand.”
 “People complain when there is a lack of competition, but they now have the option of exercising this sentiment as choice does exist,” Noraiee adds.
Says Noraiee: “Most of the time users don’t take much notice of their AV software. When there is a virus outbreak, however, you need an immediate response. If the AV vendor is servicing home as well as business users, millions of users will require a response. Sophos’s exclusive focus on businesses means a speedier response to potentially damaging threats.”
Threats to business continuity
The most recent release of Sophos Enterprise Solutions (ES) saw the company incorporate technology and features to address a changing market reality in so far as the nature of security threats is concerned.
Quantity
It’s no longer appropriate to relegate every conceivable threat to a “virus”, something that has become a very limiting definition.
The number and types of threats have increased to include a far broader spectrum, such as Trojans, Macro Viruses, Malicious Spyware, Port Sniffers, Hackers, Worms, Inappropriate e-mail, OS vulnerabilities, and the list continues.
Velocity
As the quantity of threats increase, so does the velocity of threat propagation. Internet worms spread in minutes, multiple strains of the same viruses are released in a short period of time and operating system vulnerabilities are exploited that much faster.
Complexity
The combination of “quantity” and “velocity” increases the complexity of security threats. With spam and virus writers working together, more complex propagation methods and new threats designed for commercial gain, curbing the threat becomes increasingly reliant on more sophisticated methods of detection and elimination.
The Sophos response
Providing protection against a virus or spam is one thing, ensuring that the sheer quantity of threats is effectively addressed, as well as the speed with which they aggregate, is the next challenge for security solution providers. Sophos has acknowledged this reality in the fundamental design components of its “next generation” solution set.
 Through its end point and gateway protection, Sophos ensures that the majority of threats are stopped  
before getting through to the corporate network. Sophos’ patented Genotype virus detection technology uses an analogy of living organisms to detect closely related relatives of a known threat. In computer virus terms, it enhances detection and disinfection of virus families before specific signature-based detection is available.
PureMessage, Sophos’ anti-spam solution, also incorporates Genotype technology for detection and classification of new spam campaigns related to existing or past campaigns to effectively control the rate of spam propagation.
Rapid response and protection against new threats released into the wild with immediate policy creation at the gateway further dispatches with all three areas of the threat evolution. And, for Sophos, this is a direct consequence of its exclusive focus on business users and the dedicated support and expertise at SophoLabs around the world.