Sophos merges three cybersecurity units to form Sophos X-Ops

The vendor says the move will help organisations better defend against constantly changing and increasingly complex cyberattacks

Sophos merges three cybersecurity units to form Sophos X-Ops

Sophos announced it has merged SophosLabs, Sophos SecOps and Sophos AI to form a new cross-operational unit to ramp up its cybersecurity services, the vendor says.

It claims the newly created Sophos X-Ops leverages the predictive, real-time, real-world, and deeply researched threat intelligence from each group.

Sophos says the new unit will provide a stronger cross-operational foundation for innovation, which it claims is an essential component of cybersecurity due to "the aggressive advancements in organised cybercrime".

"Modern cybersecurity is becoming a highly interactive team sport, and as the industry has matured, necessary analysis, engineering and investigative specialisations have emerged," said Sophos chief technology and product officer, Joe Levy.

"Scalable end-to-end operations now need to include software developers, automation engineers, malware analysts, reverse engineers, cloud infrastructure engineers, incident responders, data engineers and scientists, and numerous other experts, and they need an organisational structure that avoids silos.

"We've unified three globally recognized and mature teams within Sophos to provide this breadth of critical, subject matter and process expertise."

By intertwining the expertise of each group, Sophos claims it is "pioneering" the concept of an AI assisted SOC.

The cybersecurity specialist believes this approach will dramatically accelerate security workflows and the ability to more quickly detect and respond to novel and priority indicators of compromise.

Craig Robinson, IDC research VP of security services, added: "The Sophos X-Ops umbrella is a noted example of stealing a page from the cyber miscreants' tactics by allowing cross-collaboration amongst different internal threat intelligence groups.

"Combining the ability to cut across a wide breadth of threat intelligence expertise with AI assisted features in the SOC allows organisations to better predict and prepare for imminent and future attacks."