Sophos Recognized as a Leader in 2012 Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management

BOSTON, MA--(Marketwire - Mar 8, 2012) - IT security and data protection company Sophos today announced it has been positioned in the "Leaders" quadrant of Gartner, Inc's 2012 Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management.(1) The quadrant is based on an assessment of a company's ability to execute and completeness of vision.

According to the report, "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 a product that's intuitive to manage and administer."

Sophos UTM eliminates the complexity of deploying and managing a variety of point solutions to secure businesses against viruses, spam and hackers. It combines essential security solutions within a single flexible appliance, providing centralized control through an easy-to-use console. And in response to growing customer needs, Sophos recently introduced UTM cloud capabilities via the Amazon VPC (Virtual Private Cloud), enabling customers to easily host and run server infrastructure in a secure, scalable cloud.

Gartner states that: "especially under the current economic conditions, most SMBs have strong IT budgetary and staffing constraints. This causes them to highly value ease of deployment and use, strong local channel support, and flexible pricing."

"It is increasingly difficult for organizations of all sizes to create secure network infrastructures -- due to wireless networks, branch offices, cloud computing and increased mobile device usage. Our goal is to provide complete security solutions that allow organizations to protect their expanding networks while simplifying security management," said Jan Hichert, senior vice president, Network Security, Sophos. "We believe our position as a leader within the Gartner UTM Magic Quadrant demonstrates that we're delivering on this goal."

Sophos was also positioned as a "Leader" in the 2011 Magic Quadrant for Mobile Data Protection and the 2011 "Magic Quadrant for Endpoint Protection Platforms."

To download a complimentary copy of this report, click http://www.sophos.com/magicquadrant.

For additional information on Unified Protection, click here for a short video.

About the Magic Quadrant
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Sophos
More than 100 million users in 150 countries rely on Sophos as the best protection against complex threats and data loss. Sophos is committed to providing security and data protection solutions that are simple to manage, deploy and use and that deliver the industry's lowest total cost of ownership. Sophos offers award-winning encryption, endpoint security, web, email, mobile and network security solutions backed by SophosLabs -- a global network of threat intelligence centers. With more than two decades of experience, Sophos is regarded as a leader in security and data protection by top analyst firms and has received many industry awards.

Sophos is headquartered in Boston, US and Oxford, UK. More information is available at www.sophos.com.

(1) Gartner, Inc. "Magic Quadrant for Unified Threat Management" by Joe Pescatore and Greg Young, March 5, 2012