Sophos expands cloud-based management platform with Sophos Email

Sophos has announced that Sophos Email is now available in its cloud-based Sophos Central management platform. Customers and partners can now manage their e-mail protection solution alongside Sophos endpoint, mobile, Web and wireless security products from a unified, simple-to-use console. Sophos Email boosts security for cloud-based business e-mail applications from leading providers, including Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Exchange 2013 and Google Apps for Work.

According to a recent survey conducted by Sophos, businesses are shifting to cloud-based e-mail for both infrastructure and security services, with 38% using it as their primary e-mail platform, and 43% using a cloud-based service for e-mail security. The most popular cloud-based service is Office 365, but security is a major concern for these users with 50% agreeing that third party security solutions are essential to extend Office 365 security. Ransomware, malicious attachments, malicious URLs, viruses and phishing were considered the top five threats with more than 50% of all respondents being very concerned about these. Yet, despite this recognition of e-mail-borne threats, more than a quarter of respondents admit that they rarely or never review their e-mail security policy to make sure it remains effective.

"E-mail is still the delivery mechanism of choice for cyber criminals targeting businesses with all types of threats. Phishing, ransomware and even spam are regularly getting past the protection built into the popular cloud e-mail services," says Brett Myroff, MD of Sophos distributor, Netxactics.

"Channel partners and IT departments need specialised security solutions as they fear e-mail system vendors are unable to keep up with the dynamic threat landscape. Security provided within cloud-based e-mail packages is just not enough for businesses who have a genuine challenge in preventing malicious and suspicious e-mail content from entering their network."

Sophos Email is a cloud-based secure e-mail gateway that has been purpose built to boost and simplify e-mail security for businesses. It incorporates the Sophos threat protection engine and additional advanced e-mail-specific protection technologies, such as aggressive context-specific heuristics (CXMail) built and maintained by SophosLabs. The CXMail family of detection strategies is purposefully designed to stop threats like ransomware that are predominately distributed using e-mail. The addition of the secure e-mail gateway to Sophos Central integrates technology from Reflexion Networks, which Sophos acquired in June 2015.

Sophos Email is managed from Sophos Central where the dashboard allows partners and managed service providers (MSPs) to control and configure settings, distribute licences, add new customers and track real-time view into all customer activity. The single pane-of-glass dashboard shows all Sophos Central services customers subscribe to, making cross and upsell opportunities more clear to help partners drive recurring revenue.