Sophos Acquires Braintrace and their Network Detection and Response (NDR) Technology

Products•Acquisition•Braintrace•Managed Threat Response (MTR)•Sophos Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem (ACE)•Sophos News•Sophos XDR

Provides Visibility into Suspicious Network Traffic Patterns for Sophos Managed Threat Response (MTR), Rapid Response, and Extended Detection and Response (XDR)

Jul 22 2021 By

Today we celebrated another milestone at Sophos as we announced that Sophos has acquired Braintrace. The acquisition will empower our Extended Detection and Response (XDR) customers with deep visibility into their network traffic and expand Sophos’ global Managed Threat Response (MTR) and Rapid Response teams and capabilities.

Founded in 2016, Braintrace is privately held and located in Salt Lake City, Utah. Braintrace’s NDR provides deep visibility into network traffic patterns, including encrypted traffic, without the need for Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) decryption.

The addition of the Braintrace technologies to the Sophos portfolio will allow our partners bring Sophos MTR and XDR technology to a wider addressable audience, targeting new prospects and upselling existing customers. Braintrace’s technology will support Sophos’ MTR and Rapid Response analysts and XDR customers through integration into the Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem (ACE), which underpins all Sophos products and services.

The technology will also serve as the launchpad to collect and forward third-party event data from firewalls, proxies, virtual private networks (VPNs), and other sources. These additional layers of visibility and event ingestion will significantly improve threat detection, threat hunting and response to suspicious activity, especially for MTR and XDR customers that do not use Sophos Firewall. We plan on introducing Braintrace’s NDR technology for MTR and XDR in the first half of 2022.

As part of the acquisition, Braintrace’s developers, data scientists and security analysts have joined Sophos’ global Managed Threat Response (MTR) and Rapid Response teams. The incredible talent coming over to Sophos from the Braintrace team will provide an immediate boost to our MTR and Rapid Response teams as we experience unprecedented growth. Sophos MTR now protects more than 5,000 customers, and billings have grown at a monthly compound rate of 223% (at constant currency) since inception Oct. 1, 2019. Sophos Rapid Response billings have grown at a monthly compound rate of 99% since launching Oct. 28, 2020 (at constant currency).

We could not be more excited to welcome the Braintrace team to Sophos. Stay tuned for more updates.

About the Author

Kendra Krause, Sophos senior vice president of global channels and sales operations, has more than 20 years of channel sales, marketing and operations experience in the networking and security industry.