Sophos looks to partners to take Fusion to market

Sophos is looking to its partner base to take its Fusion products out to market as it cuts the ribbon on its artificial intelligence (AI)-native security offering. The idea is to use AI to identify and prevent attacks that exploit the technology and provide customers with a single control point to track risks across their estates. Although it has excited many customers, AI has also struck fear into many concerned it had widened their risk profile, and is a consistent explanation for why some projects have been delayed. Sophos is hoping that it can work with its channel base to help customers quash those concerns and use AI security tools to foster wider adoption of the technology. “Partners are central to how we bring these capabilities to market,” said Rob Harrison, senior vice-president of product management at the firm. “Sophos has one of the world’s largest MSP and channel ecosystems, and Sophos Fusion is designed to strengthen that model. “Partners can deliver managed security services on top of Sophos Fusion themselves, use Sophos MDR as an extension of their own operations, or combine the two approaches depending on their customers’ needs,” he added. “The outcome is greater flexibility, stronger security outcomes, and new recurring-service opportunities for partners. We see this as a significant growth opportunity for the channel.” Agentic AI Fusion is the evolution of the Sophos Central product that was used by hundreds of thousands of customers and uses agentic AI to help remediate problems quickly, with humans always working in the background. “As AI increases the speed, scale and complexity of attacks, organisations need a modern connected, intelligent and adaptive defence,” said Joe Levy, the company’s CEO. “Sophos Fusion is built as a defence system optimised for human-AI workflows. We bring the most complete solution to a new category, a timely advancement demanded by the AI era.” At the same time, Sophos shared its State of Ransomware report , with the headline findings indicating the majority of attacks are originating from compromised identities. Along with accessing identities, criminals were also using malicious email and phishing to get through to data, with the more traditional methods of exploiting vulnerabilities dropping down the list. AI is also contributing to the acceleration in ransomware identity exploits, and is another area for the channel to increase customer defences. More than half of ransomware attacks were able to encrypt data (56%) and in those instances it improved the chances of the criminals gaining a ransom from their victims. “As we see ransomware criminals experiment with AI, it has the potential to accelerate their ability to steal valuable assets, hold them hostage and do it at a scale that exceeds their previous capability,” said Ross McKerchar, chief information security officer at Sophos. “This speed requires careful round-the-clock monitoring of the most exploited means of entry, which our data shows to be stolen and compromised valid accounts,” he said. “However, the improvement of unguarded open-weight AI models will give attackers a growing advantage in finding and exploiting software vulnerabilities. Defenders cannot rely on patching alone to keep pace, so reducing external exposure and maintaining strong endpoint protection is essential.”