Interview: Ralf Haubrich, Vice President Sophos CEEMEA

Where are business most likely to be vulnerable and how this can be fixed with Sophos products?

SMB Businesses have a limit of both personnel and financial resources. Security therefore must be simple to setup, configure and administer. Many SMB customers don’t have a security team. So we offer MSP and other methods of delivering simple security to customers at a reasonable cost.

What is the philosophy and the goals to which you aspire?

Sophos believes in keeping things and hence security simple. This starts with our UTM and Endpoint Security Products, making the administration and configuration simple. When security solutions are easy to use, our customers have a higher level of security. This is the vision that drives us as a company: Security made simple. We also don’t believe in scaring our customers, they are smart enough to understand the need for security.

Sophos delivers the vision through dedicated employees that have experience in the global security space and a dedicated channel that is continuously updated via technical and sales staff interested in its success. Our dedicated staff, channel, partners and customers are the key to our success. We are all ultimately on the same team!

How do you know that you have spent enough to make your business secure?

Good and tough question, there is no definitive answer here besides implementing as much as we can in a set budget. The more interesting question is, how do we create the security budget. This is where ISO27001/2 come in, creating a risk process that also looks at assessing what data and informational assets we have.

When a company knows what its assets are, then we can begin to assess the risk, vulnerability, exploits and also damages that could result. After this process, we then start to understand how and with which budget we can mitigate those risks.

What we can expect from Sophos cloud in the near future?

We are driven to adding, new and existing functionality into the Sophos cloud, adding features slowly to make sure we follow our vision of simple security. Every new step and verison brings more of the award winning in premise technology into a new delivery system (the cloud).

This doesn’t mean we will stop selling on premises based solutions. We are really excited about where the cloud is going, with great reports and an overall easy and simple administration console that has all the features a customer or partner could need based on our on-premise know-how.

How do you approach the partner landscape in Greece?

We’ve made it simple to partner with us—with a flexible and generous partner program, delivered by dedicated channel relationship managers. And of course in cooperation with motivated distribution partners like NSS in Greece. Even though we work with more than 12,000 partners you’ll feel supported every step of the way. Because we work hard to get to know you and your organization.

When you partner with us, we help you identify opportunities to retain and grow your customer base and increase profits. You’ll be rewarded with deal registration protection, attractive margins, and joint lead generation programs. We also support you with up-to-date training and certification, so your sales and technical teams are fully qualified in our latest solutions. Our approach is unique—we are 100% channel focused. We continuously invest in our partner relationships. And it’s our mission to help your organization flourish.