Sophos Names Joe Levy As Permanent CEO, Hires New CFO

The cybersecurity vendor says it has made things official for Levy, who was appointed acting CEO in February, while the company has also poached Imperva’s CFO.

Sophos said Monday that Joe Levy has been named permanent CEO while the cybersecurity giant also announced the appointment of a new CFO.

Levy, who was named acting CEO in February, now officially becomes the first new chief executive for the company in more than a decade. He has succeeded Kris Hagerman, who’d served as CEO of Sophos from late 2012 until February, when he stepped down for unspecified reasons.

Sophos, which is owned by private equity firm Thoma Bravo, also said Monday that it has hired Jim Dildine from Imperva to be its new CFO.

The announcement comes after Sophos had said in mid-February that Levy was in the running for the permanent CEO role.

In a news release Monday, Sophos said that along with a track record of helping to drive the company’s expansion into managed detection and response (MDR), Levy also brings “in-depth experience working with the channel.” His work with MSPs and other IT solution and service providers has continued “throughout his career, which he started in the mid-1990s as a cybersecurity practitioner and product and service innovator at a value-added reseller,” Sophos said of Levy.

Looking ahead, Levy “plans to expand Sophos’ already strong customer base in the midmarket,” the company said.

A nine-year veteran of executive roles at Sophos, Levy has served as president as well as in the acting CEO role at the company since mid-February.

Levy has spent more than two decades in the cybersecurity industry overall, including previously as CTO at SonicWall and Blue Coat Systems before joining Sophos in 2015. In April 2023, Levy was promoted to serve as president of the Sophos Technology Group.

MDR Shift

The Sophos CEO transition comes as the company has grown its revenue to more than $1 billion, tripling from 2012.

Sophos executives including Levy have told CRN previously that the company’s MDR service has been responsible for driving much of the company’s recent growth.

The company said Monday that its customer count for MDR has surpassed 21,000, up from 13,000 in late 2022.

The goal now at Sophos is “to help more organizations in the midmarket” to become “better at detecting and disrupting inevitable cyberattacks,” Levy said in a quote included in the news release Monday. “Our envisioned approach to achieving this is to work with MSPs and channel partners that can scale alongside us with our innovative critical cross domain technologies – endpoint, network, email, and cloud security – and managed services that they can resell and co-deliver.”

New CFO

Meanwhile, Sophos announced Monday that it has named Dildine, a veteran of top finance executive roles at a number of cybersecurity vendors, as its new CFO.

Most recently, Dildine had been CFO at cybersecurity vendor Imperva since 2019. Defense and aerospace company Thales announced in December it had closed its $3.6 billion acquisition of Imperva from Thoma Bravo.

Prior to Imperva, Dildine was CFO at Symantec and, before that, was senior vice president of finance and chief accounting officer of Blue Coat.

The hiring of Dildine comes as a part of “Levy’s leadership strategy” to drive the next phase of growth at Sophos, the company said.

The CFO role at Sophos had most recently been held by Sue Savage, who was named to the position in January 2023. Savage had left Sophos “recently,” the company said in an email to CRN.