Sophos Cuts 6 Percent Of Staff After Secureworks Acquisition

The layoffs follow the closure of Sophos’ $859 million acquisition of Secureworks and aim to ‘further align our business’ with ‘accelerating’ growth, the cybersecurity vendor says in an email statement to CRN.

Sophos confirmed implementing a round of layoffs affecting 6 percent of staff, following the completion of its $859 million acquisition of Secureworks.

The cutbacks aim to “further align our business” with the “accelerating” growth that is expected ahead, due in part to the combination of companies, the cybersecurity vendor said in an email statement provided to CRN Wednesday.

Specific figures were not provided for the total number of impacted employees. Secureworks had been expected to bring approximately 1,500 employees following the Sophos acquisition, Sophos said in a previous email to CRN.

Privately held Sophos, meanwhile, indicates on LinkedIn that it has between 1,001 and 5,000 employees. The company is owned by private equity firm Thoma Bravo.

“To further align our business with how we are accelerating [our] growth this fiscal year and beyond, and following the close of the Secureworks acquisition, we are making organizational changes that include some role eliminations and the start of consultation periods where required,” Sophos said in the email statement to CRN Wednesday. “This will impact roughly 6 percent of our combined companies, which is also due to reducing positions that are no longer needed when Secureworks delisted as a public company and streamlining duplicative roles as a result of the acquisition.”

Sophos is also “increasing investments in essential competencies with the addition of Secureworks’ and other new leaders and experts who have joined us in key departments over the last year,” the company said in the email statement.

“Staff changes and redundancies are difficult at any time, and we deeply appreciate the contributions of our collective employees globally who have worked hard to bring both companies to where we are today,” the Sophos email statement said, noting that it will provide “financial support, well-being resources and career transitional services to help when they depart.”

Some former Secureworks employees disclosed on LinkedIn that they were impacted in the layoffs this week, including workers in software engineering, threat research, program management and content marketing.

At Sophos, meanwhile, a threat researcher posted on BlueSky that while he was not impacted in the layoffs, his manager and a colleague were affected.

The cutbacks come just over a week after Sophos closed its acquisition of Secureworks, a specialist in extended detection and response (XDR), on Feb. 3.

In an interview with CRN following the completion of the deal, Sophos CEO Joe Levy said the Secureworks acquisition will bring new capabilities to the vendor in areas such as security information and event management (SIEM), as well as a “much better competency” on serving the enterprise segment. Sophos also serves enterprise customers but is best-known for providing security tools to SMB and midmarket customers.

For channel partners, Sophos expects to be able to provide “a far greater capability in the market” for serving customers, Levy said in the recent interview.

Sophos acquired Secureworks from its majority owner Dell Technologies. Secureworks previously implemented a series of layoffs in 2023, cutting 9 percent and then 15 percent of its staff in two rounds of cutbacks.

Recent years had seen Secureworks transition from its roots as an MSSP into a vendor focused on providing XDR, which correlates data from across an organization and then prioritizes the most serious threats for a response.