Cybersecurity strategies today often focus on what happens after an attacker gains entry or how to respond once malicious activity is detected on your network. But defending your network can be simpler and more cost-effective by preventing attacks or blocking unwanted access altogether.
“‘Shift left’ is a very trendy concept over the past few years [in application security]. The weird thing is, prevention is seen as something that’s kind of old school in endpoint security or security operations,” Ross McKerchar, Sophos’ Chief Information Security Officer, said in our recent webinar “Strengthening security, controlling costs — The power of prevention.”
In software development, “shift left” means catching vulnerabilities and security gaps early, when they’re easier and cheaper to fix. The same applies to cybersecurity. The sooner you stop an attack, the less damage it does, and the less effort it takes to recover.
Prevention reduces complexity, not just risk
There’s a misperception in the industry that prevention is a basic feature — something every vendor offers, and every organization already has.
But strong prevention doesn’t just block threats. It reduces the number of alerts, lowers the burden on security teams, and helps organizations avoid costly investigations.
“We were actually killing attacks too early, and we weren’t producing the signal for the major evaluation,” McKerchar said, referencing Sophos’ participation in MITRE ATT&CK evaluations.
Those MITRE ATT&CK evaluation results are a powerful demonstration of how Sophos proactively neutralizes adversaries before they gain traction. Every early block means fewer incidents to triage, less noise for your analysts, and stronger protection for your business-critical systems — keeping attackers out before damage is done.
Security teams can’t scale without it
Most organizations are growing, and so are the threats they face. As more systems, users, and data move to the cloud, the complexity multiplies exponentially. If your security team is expected to protect all of it without adding more people, prevention becomes essential.
“You’ve got kind of … double growth, if you will. You’re growing and the attacks are growing. So if you’re not focusing on preventing earlier, then how on earth can you scale your security team?” McKerchar added. “It’s just impossible.”
Stopping threats early means fewer credentials to reset, fewer systems to investigate, and fewer hours spent chasing alerts that could have been avoided.
The earlier you act, the less it costs.
“We’re talking about like orders and magnitude difference in terms of fixing a bug pre-production versus in-production, especially if it causes an incident,” McKerchar said. “But the weird thing is no one applies it to security operations. It’s the exact same thing.”
The role of AI in prevention
AI is everywhere in cybersecurity marketing — but not every AI-powered tool delivers meaningful value. For buyers and security leaders, the challenge isn’t just understanding what AI is but knowing what it does in the context of prevention.
Organizations have been bombarded with both alluring promises of AI-powered cybersecurity transformation — elevated protection, lower costs, reduced specialist headcount needs — and dire warnings that AI is ushering in a brand-new era of cyberattacks. The reality is that there are practical ways AI can be used in cybersecurity, but maybe not in the ways the headlines and hype cycle would have you believe. McKerchar says it’s essential for vendors and users to demystify AI in cybersecurity and prevention, and to explore its practical applications.
“There’s nothing worse than AI being kind of presented as ‘mystique,’ just magic, all these models,” said McKerchar. “What are the integrations like? How does it plug in? What data is it taking in? What decisions [are] made? The absolute basics.”
Sophos solutions include more than 50 deep learning and genAI models that deliver fast, effective protection against cyberthreats. Our AI-powered cybersecurity can detect web-based threats, impersonation attempts over email, and threats embedded in documents.
Our AI models generate nearly 500,000 detections a day, enabling defenders to share real-time security information. AI and expert defenders at Sophos work side-by-side to respond to threats efficiently.
And while large language models (LLMs) are generating excitement across the industry, their role in prevention is still evolving. They can summarize crucial data and context, but they’re not ready to make high-stakes decisions without human oversight,” McKerchar says.
“LLMs are great at making humans better, helping guide them,” he said during the webinar. “But the ultimate decision, I think, needs to be coming from a human … there’s so much organizational context required.”
Start with prevention. Scale to resilience.
Prevention isn’t perfect. But it gives defenders an advantage, buys defenders time, reduces noise, and helps security teams focus on what matters.
It’s what allows security teams to scale, reduce complexity, and stay ahead of threats without burning out. As attacks grow more frequent and more sophisticated, the organizations that invest in stopping them early will be the ones that stay resilient.
If you’re evaluating your cybersecurity strategy, start with prevention.
Visit https://sophos.com/prevention to explore how Sophos is helping organizations shift left, strengthen protection, and control costs — before incidents happen.
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