Sophos has announced that it has been positioned as a Leader in Forrester Research’s new report, The Forrester Wave: Endpoint Encryption, Q1 2015.
Calling Sophos a “Breakout Star” in the evaluation, Forrester states that “security and operations admins will appreciate Sophos’ deep policy granularity and deployment flexibility in a variety of environments and use cases.” Forrester also found that “Sophos’ user support offerings and ease of deployment were consistently rated as exemplary by customers.”
Quoting from the report, “Sophos was the breakout star in this Forrester Wave evaluation, touting strong hardware-based encryption support, external media encryption policy flexibility, and file-level encryption functionality.”
Forrester evaluates vendors against 52 criteria grouped into three categories:
* Current offering – examines the strength of each vendor’s product offering.
* Strategy – critiques the viability and execution of a company’s strategy, including its market experience, future vision, integration strategy, global presence and engineering staff.
* Market presence – metrics include install base, revenue and partner ecosystem.
Sophos ranks top in the Current Offering category, achieving the highest scores in sub-categories “Endpoint full-disk/volume encryption,” “File/folder encryption” and “External media encryption.” Sophos earned the second highest overall score in the Market Presence category, with the top scores in subcategories “Technology partners” and “Financial viability.”
Sophos was cited for a broad portfolio of endpoint encryption offerings, combined with an easy-to-use user interface and strong product support capabilities. “This is a vote of confidence for Sophos as a company, including its engineering, product management, sales and customer support teams,” says Brett Myroff, MD of Sophos distributor, NetXactics.
In addition to evaluating vendors, Forrester examines the critical need for organisations to implement endpoint encryption, and that failing to do so increases the risk that a data leak or compliance breach event will occur. Forrester cites what it calls “an explosion of consumer devices and services that has fuelled on-the-go computing and a blurring of work and personal lives” as primary reasons organisations implement endpoint encryption solutions.
The report also states that, “While many Security & Risk (S&R) pros initially turn to endpoint encryption in order to meet regulatory requirements for data protection, endpoint encryption offers significant benefits beyond compliance. S&R professionals should view endpoint encryption not merely as a compliance ‘checkbox,’ but as an essential tool in their arsenal of data protection.”
