By Edd K. Usman
London-based IT security company Sophos has unveiled in the Philippines its next-generation security management solution in a recent media launch at the Manila Peninsula Hotel in Makati City.
The 31-year-old British firm said Sophos Central is “an integrated management platform that simplifies the administration of multiple Sophos products and enables more efficient business management” for the company’s partners.
Noting that “security products have tended to be as complex as the networks they are trying to security,” the company is taking the other opposite tact.
“At Sophos, we know that the solution to complexity is not more complexity. We tackle challenges with clarity and confidence, knowing that simple security is better security,” the security firm asserted.
The company started creating anti-virus and encryption products about 30 years ago and at present, Sophos products are being used by 100 million people in 150 countries and 100,000 businesses.
Among its partners or customers include Pixar, Under Armour, Northtrop Grumman, Xerox, Ford, Avis, and Toshiba.
“As IT networks grow in complexity, we’re focused on keeping IT security simple and reliable,” Sophos emphasized. “We know that a proper security strategy must include networks, servers and devices — all devices — managed easily through cloud.”
Sophos Central, which was first launched in April 2016 in Oxford, United Kingdom, has three core components: Sophos Central Admin, Sophos Central Partner, and Sophos Central Self-Service.
Incidentally, Sophos also unveiled its new approach through a synchronized security against increasing attacks after the infamous Bangladesh Bank heist, wherein $81 million of the loot was transferred to a bank in the Philippines.
Justin Peters, director for technology solutions for Sophos Asia Pacific, explained that synchronized security ?marries network security and endpoint security, connected together by Heartbeat.?
“Synchronized security is a system that Sophos has made available where essentially we join together both our endpoint security solution and our network-based security solution to collaborate as a team to provide a better insight and automatic response to security events,” said Peters.
He emphasized the importance of having visibility of activity at the network level with a 360-degree view.
?With this, we can understand the threat activities and we cab automatically stop and clean them up without having the administrator inconvenienced or (make him) stop what he is doing to respond to this incident.”
To understand Sophos Central more, the Sophos executive said with endpoint security, one would think of it as something that gets stored in a device that a user interacts with, citing the examples of Windows desktop at work, or it might be a Macbook at home, or even a smartphone or a tablet.
“Basically, an endpoint security is a kind of software that runs on one of these devices to look for malicious or bad activity,” he said.
On the other hand, Peters compared network security to a traffic light. “Basically network security device looks at the traffic and determine whether it is good or bad and it’s going to stop the traffic that bad from going into the endpoint,” he added.
Meanwhile, Sophos Security Heartbeat is the connection between the endpoint security product and the network security product, which shares information on any bad activity and stops it, he said.
Through Heartbeat, endpoint and network protection can act as one integrated system and enables organizations to prevent, detect, investigate, a remediate threats in near real time, without adding any staff, the company said.
Some of its features include automatically prioritized alerts, summary dashboard for user’s environment, Security Heartbeat contextual sharing, automatic active directory synchronization, and simple migration tool for Sophos Enterprise Console administrations.
In short, Sophos Central provides a single place for managing endpoint, mobile, web, email, server, and wireless security.
