Sophos wins Best Security Offering at CPI's MSP Innovation Awards in New York

Sophos scooped the Best Security Offering award at Channel Partner Insight's MSP Innovation Awards on Thursday night.

We run through why the cybersecurity vendor pipped the competition to the award.

Best Cybersecurity Offering was a hotly-contested category with some 20 firms entering.

But Sophos' entry stood out for the judges. The firm has demonstrated strength in both network and endpoint security. Last year, the firm expanded its Intercept X portfolio with the launch of Sophos Intercept X Advanced with endpoint detection and response (EDR), powered by deep learning technology with the aim of delivering faster, more extensive malware discovery.

Furthermore, the introduction of EDR to Intercept X Advance comes hot on the heels of Sophos launching Intercept X with deep learning, which claims to learn the observable threat landscape, processes hundreds of millions of samples, and make more accurate predictions at a faster rate than traditional machine learning solutions. 

The cybersecurity vendor makes a convincing case for how it has given MSPs a synchronised security package. It also added deep learning to other product areas such as email, Sophos Intercept X for Server, and SophosLabs.

Its acquisition of cloud infrastructure security company Avid Secure adds further credence to Sophos' MSP offering. The expansion of Sophos' current capabilities in cloud security could help MSPs and customers evolve and adapt to the changing threat and infrastructure landscape.

Sophos' entry included a case study of how one US MSP Partner called Syndesi Solutions utilises the vendor's offering.

Syndesi largely works in the education sector. One of its customers, Fayette County Public Schools, consists of 25 schools and more than 25,000 students, but it has only two network administrators. Malware and ransomware attacks were spreading rapidly across the district and Sophos claims its existing AV solution wasn't doing enough.

Syndesi responded and deployed Sophos Central and Sophos Intercept X to 9,000 devices within four days. After the first day, Sophos claims it cleaned approximately 80,000 threats on the district's endpoint devices.

Syndesi continued to work with Fayette County and other education customers, focusing on cultivating long-term relationships and working closely with them to find the right solution and price point for their limited budgets or resources.

"We've had a tremendous amount of success with Sophos in the past for both endpoint and network security, and now it's time to move into the future. We appreciate how much effort Sophos has put into developing Sophos Synchronized Security and their overall product roadmap," said Paul Gibbs, Vice President of Syndesi in a testimonial.

"We see the writing on the wall-more and more customers are asking for security that can cover the exponential growth of advanced threats while still being uncomplicated. We know that Sophos will help our customers build a stronger security foundation no matter what they face in the future."

CPI's MSP Innovation Awards took place in New York on 6 June. The winners were chosen through a judging process by CPI's editorial and senior team.