We’re delighted to announce that Simon Reed, former Chief Security Officer at Sophos and cybersecurity industry veteran, has joined Overe as Strategic Advisor. Overe CEO Paul Barnes believes the appointment will supercharge the company’s engagement with managed service providers as SMBs face cyber threats at ever greater levels of sophistication and volume.
Simon brings more than 25 years of cybersecurity experience across security research, product, engineering and strategy.
As Chief Security Officer at Sophos, he established and led Sophos X-Ops, bringing together more than 1,100 experts across threat intelligence, incident response, managed detection, offensive security and enterprise security.
His career also includes senior executive roles at McAfee and several venture-backed technology companies. Simon is currently Distinguished Security Fellow at Sophos, advising its executive leadership on cybersecurity strategy, AI, emerging threats and long-term technology direction.
Simon has been an early investor and supporter of Overe, giving him a close understanding of our technology, strategy and the market opportunity.
As Strategic Advisor, he’ll work with the Overe leadership team across security strategy, product direction and global growth.
Simon joins Overe at a point when the cybersecurity landscape is becoming increasingly destructive for everyone. Small and medium-sized businesses are just as exposed as large enterprises.
AI is becoming both an upskilling and scaling tool for attackers, making attacks faster and more sophisticated, and increasing the pressure on businesses of any size. At the same time, organisations are becoming more dependent on cloud applications, identities and interconnected services.
Prevention remains essential, but on its own it is no longer sufficient. Organisations need to understand where they are exposed, recognise degradation in their resilience and resolve weaknesses before attackers take advantage and business operations are damaged.
For SMB and mid-market organisations, this creates an enormous challenge. They face the same threats as large enterprises, but without the same specialist teams, budgets or security infrastructure.
Effective protection now requires continuous expertise working in partnership with appropriate products. Most small and medium-sized businesses rely on an MSP or partner to provide that cybersecurity expertise, making it critical that those partners have access to the right products.
Microsoft 365 is the dominant digital platform for many small and medium-sized businesses, including much of the security capability they depend on. It provides extensive built-in security features, but the combination of licensing, identity, Conditional Access, applications and constantly changing configurations has created significant complexity.
That complexity is difficult for smaller businesses to manage, particularly when they lack internal cybersecurity expertise. They therefore rely on their MSP or partner, but Microsoft 365 is primarily designed around individual organisations rather than MSPs managing security consistently across many customer environments.
This creates a fundamental gap. SMBs need cybersecurity expertise, that expertise often comes from their MSP, and MSPs need products designed to help them deploy it efficiently and at scale.
Overe is solving that problem.
Our mission is to ensure MSPs have the right tools to deploy their cybersecurity expertise quickly, consistently and at scale, strengthening the cyber resilience of every customer they support.
Overe is a Microsoft 365 security operations platform. It allows MSPs and security teams to assess, harden, monitor and respond across Microsoft 365, continuously validating that security controls are enforced rather than simply configured.
The platform identifies configuration gaps, identity risks and authentication paths where controls are not being applied, then guides teams through the actions needed to reduce exposure.
Overe CEO and Co-Founder Paul Barnes said:
“Simon’s decision to join Overe is strong validation of our mission and the scale of the opportunity ahead. He has operated at the highest levels of cybersecurity, building and leading teams responsible for protecting organisations around the world.
Having an industry veteran of Simon’s calibre working alongside us will accelerate the company and our goal of making sophisticated Microsoft 365 security accessible to SMBs worldwide through the MSPs and partners they trust.
Simon already knows Overe extremely well as an investor and supporter. Formalising that relationship gives our team access to an incredible level of experience as we grow, and I couldn’t be happier to have him working alongside us.”
Simon Reed said:
“We’re entering a period where resilience matters just as much as prevention. AI is changing the speed and scale of attacks, while the systems businesses depend on are becoming more interconnected and complex.
Smaller organisations face many of the same threats as large enterprises, but they don’t have the same security resources. Overe has an opportunity to close that gap by making sophisticated Microsoft 365 security accessible and easier to deploy and operate, substantially improving their cyber resilience.