Levy had been acting CEO since 15 February.
Levy has also named Jim Dildine as chief financial officer and a member of his senior management team.
Levy has worked in cybersecurity product development, services and companies for almost 30 years. During his nine-year tenure at Sophos, he moved Sophos from a product-only vendor into the global cybersecurity provider, including an incident response team and managed detection and response (MDR) service that defends more than 21,000 organisations worldwide.
Levy also created SophosAI and Sophis X-Ops, an operational threat intelligence unit that joins together more than 500 cross-departmental cybersecurity operators and threat intelligence experts. Sophos X-Ops shares real-time and historical attack data with all of Sophos’ solutions, making them smarter and faster at defending customers from persistent cyberattacks.
Levy has in-depth experience working with the Channel, including MSPs, throughout his career, which he started in the mid-1990s as a cybersecurity practitioner and product and service innovator at a VAR.
As CEO, Levy plans to expand Sophos’ customer base in the midmarket, which includes almost 600,000 customers worldwide and generates more than $1.2 billion in annual revenue.
Levy said, "When midmarket organisations – the global critical substrate – are paralysed due to ransomware or other cyberattacks, business activities linked in our supply chains also stagnate, slowing our economy down. Operations of all sizes and shapes suffer collateral damage when dependencies in their supply chains are attacked. This can be devastating in often unpredictable ways because of the increasing complexity of how the modern industrialised global economy works.
"Our goal is to help more organisations in the midmarket – the estimated 99 per cent of organisations that are below the cybersecurity poverty line – be better at detecting and disrupting inevitable cyberattacks. Our envisioned approach to achieving this is to work with MSPs and channel partners that can scale alongside us with our innovative critical cross domain technologies – endpoint, network, email, and cloud security – and managed services that they can resell and co-deliver. Cyberattacks against the midmarket could severely impact the world’s ability to function; they are relatively under-protected compared to the 1 per cent, and Sophos is on a mission to change that."
Dildine joins Sophos from cybersecurity software and services company, Imperva, where he was CFO for more than four years. Before Imperva, he was CFO for Symantec’s $2.5 billion enterprise security business unit for three years. Dildine also previously held key financial leadership roles for almist nine years at Blue Coat Systems, where he also served as chief technology officer.
Dildine said, "Having worked in technology and finance for more than 30 years, it is exciting to join Sophos at this juncture, when the company is well on its way to breaking through to the next level. Everything the company has accomplished thus far is impressive, including how dedicated Sophos is to constantly be innovating its cybersecurity technology and managed security services for customers in the midmarket.
"Sophos is also equally committed to supporting its channel partners, MSPs, and staff around the world. I am looking forward to helping Joe accelerate growth and further position Sophos as a leader in the industry."