Sophos completes Astaro Acquisition

Global IT security and data protection company, Sophos, has announced the acquisition of network security vendor Astaro has been completed. This acquisition will allow Sophos to deliver coordinated threat and data protection offerings from any endpoint to any network boundary.

“Organisations face new challenges in protecting users and IT infrastructure from complex and targeted security threats, especially those that gain entry from across the Web or through new applications. As workforces become distributed across multiple offices, including the home, even basic security controls have become hard to update and enforce,” says Brett Myroff, CEO of regional Sophos distributor, Sophos South Africa.

The acquisition, which was announced on May 6 this year, will deliver a combination of endpoint protection with Unified Threat Management. Once integration is complete, the Sophos portfolio of security products will combine Astaro’s network security with Sophos’ threat expertise. The initial integration with the Astaro Security Gateway and Sophos Anti-Virus will bring real-time protection against malware using Sophos Live Protection, an architecture for real-time updates, and Sophos Web protection, real-time blocking of malicious websites via SophosLabs Web reputation systems, which classify over 50,000 infected Web pages every day.

In the longer term, the integration will allow central management of anti-malware, Web and data control policies across endpoint, mobile and network enforcement points – including consumer-owned mobile devices and branch, home or remote offices.  This will offer IT better visibility and control, whether the enforcement points are enterprise, consumer owned or located at a central, branch or home or remote office.

Upon completing Astaro partner certification, Sophos partners will have access to the full network security portfolio including unique capabilities for protecting branch offices, log management and a leading network security gateway available in any delivery model.  Likewise, Astaro partners will have the opportunity to become Sophos partners and deliver a complete set of endpoint, mobile and gateway solutions to their customers.

“We founded Astaro with the mission of bringing network security products to organisations of all sizes and accomplished this goal by creating easy-to-use, Unified Threat Management solutions that addressed several facets of network security. However, as the threat landscape continued to evolve it became clear that gateway security alone would no longer be sufficient to effectively secure a network,” says Jan Hichert, Astaro co-founder and CEO, and now Sophos’s Senior Vice President and General Manager of Network Security.