Sophos is set to acquire Secureworks for a deal worth $859 million. The acquisition comes five years after Sophos was itself bought by Thoma Bravo for $3.9 billion.
Sophos are used to protect employee devices, servers, and other systems from hackers. Sophos also offers a collection of hardware products, most notably firewall appliances that use artificial intelligence to block malware.
Secureworks inturn has a product portfolio with a collection of three cybersecurity applications called the Taegis suite. One application helps enterprises spot vulnerabilities in their infrastructure, while another detects hacker activity across systems such as servers and employee laptops. The third Taegis service, which debuted in August, spots malicious network traffic.
Secureworks recently disclosed that it has more than 50 petabytes’ worth of cybersecurity telemetry. This dataset, which the company expands regularly with new logs, could help enhance the AI models that underpin many of Sophos’ products. The more data is available to an AI model about the task it’s designed to perform, the more capable it becomes.
Sophos expects to complete the acquisition early next year. Most of the $859 million that the company is offering will go to Dell, which had a nearly 80% stake in Secureworks as of early August.
