Sophos in Leader's Quadrant for UTM third year running

Sophos has announced that it has once again been positioned in the "Leaders" quadrant of Gartner's 7 August 2014 "Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management".

The quadrant is based on an assessment of a company's ability to execute and completeness of vision. Sophos is the only IT security company to be positioned as a Leader across three critical security areas: Unified Threat Management (UTM), Mobile Data Protection and Endpoint Protection Platforms.

"It is a privilege for Sophos to receive recognition from Gartner. The momentum in its UTM business has seen, most notably in the past year, the release of the SG Series appliances, the fastest UTM devices ever produced by the company, and expansion of UTM protection with the new cloud-based sandboxing, integrated mobile device management and simple to use email encryption. Smaller businesses need effective security that is easy to use and that's exactly what Sophos provides," says Brett Myroff, CEO of Sophos distributor, NetXactics.

"It is also why we are seeing more and more partners and customers switching to Sophos for their UTM and Next-Gen Firewall needs."

In the most recent quarter of trading, April to June 2014, Sophos recorded a 27% increase in UTM sales, and a 33% increase in new customer business for UTM. This demonstrates the significant share gains the company is making; Sophos' network security business now accounts for billings in excess of $150 million - with tremendous growth across North America, Asia Pacific and EMEA, among other regions. Additionally, the company's "channel first" focus continues to deliver success with the signing of several new strategic channels to market such as the recently agreed distribution deal with Ingram Micro in North America. Sophos now has over 25 000 UTM channel partners worldwide, with the number of partners growing at over 20% a year.

According to Gartner, "the Leaders quadrant contains vendors at the forefront of making and selling UTM products that are built for midsize-business requirements. The requirements necessary for leadership include a wide range of models to cover midsize-business use cases, support for multiple features, and a management and reporting capability that's designed for ease of use. Vendors in this quadrant lead the market in offering new safeguarding features, and in enabling customers to deploy them inexpensively without significantly affecting the end-user experience or increasing staffing burdens. These vendors also have a good track record of avoiding vulnerabilities in their security products. Common characteristics include reliability, consistent throughput, and products that are intuitive to manage and administer."