• Sophos has completed its acquisition of Secureworks in a transaction worth $859 million.
• With this acquisition Sophos is will expand and improve its product and service offering to customers.
• The company says that this acquisition puts in prime place to take advantage of the boom in demand for Managed Detection and Response services.

With the acquisition of Secureworks, Sophos is primed to become a power house in the Managed Detection and Response (MDR) services sector.

Following an all cash-transaction that concluded on Monday, Sophos will now be able to deliver a robust security operations platform with hundreds of built-in integrations, allowing for adaptive response and mitigation of cyberattacks. One part of this sees Sophos coming its X-Ops with Secureworks’ Counter Threat Unit. This adds security operations and advisory teams to the threat intelligence and security services capabilities of the entity.

“The market is embracing MDR as a clear means to deliver positive cybersecurity outcomes, and this has meant rapid growth in the category,” explains Joe Levy, chief executive officer at Sophos.

“Sophos is differentiated by our very mature competencies in ransomware detection, malware analysis and threat actor tradecraft. These defenses are further augmented by Sophos’ native artificial intelligence (AI), first innovated by our globally peer recognized AI team nearly a decade ago, and embedded in our MDR, endpoint, network, email, and cloud security to more effectively neutralize and stop threats,” adds Levy.

Sophos says that for the time being its business as usual for both it and Secureworks. Sales and support will continue working with the respective partners from each company. As time marches on though, we expect that the lines between Sophos and Secureworks will become more blurred as new products and business opportunities are developed and discovered.

It does expect that this acquisition will improve its product and service offering.

“With the integration of Secureworks, our expanded services and product portfolio will provide even stronger end-to-end security solutions that will include identity threat detection and response (ITDR), next-gen SIEM and managed risk, all in a single open platform,” Levy said in a statement.

“We will also be able to further advance our AI, threat intelligence and attack research through more diverse and deeper global telemetry that is analyst-tuned for the real-world. At every level, we are very excited about this next accelerated chapter for Sophos.”

Sophos really wanted Secureworks with the company stating it paid a 28 percent premium for Secureworks’ shares at a fee of $8.50. As a result of the acquisition, Secureworks stock is no longer tradable on the Nasdaq.

We’re curious to see how it evolves following this acquisition.