Former FBI Cyber Veteran Milan Patel Joins Sophos to Lead MDR Services; Lisa Moorhead Promoted to Chief Digital and Information Officer

Sophos, a global cybersecurity leader, today announced two senior leadership appointments across agentic security operations and enterprise technology: Milan Patel has joined as Global Head of MDR Services, and Lisa Moorhead has been promoted to Chief Digital and Information Officer (CDIO). Both report to CEO Joe Levy as part of the senior management team.

Patel brings more than two decades of leadership across cybersecurity, national security, and managed detection and response (MDR), and will advance Sophos’ agentic security operations center (SOC). Leading MDR Operations, Professional Services, and Advisory Services, his team defines and executes the global strategy for Sophos managed security services, including the continued advancement of Sophos’ agentic operating model and the commercialization of emerging AI capabilities across the services portfolio.

“Milan is a rare leader who has built and scaled an AI-powered MDR business from the ground up while operating at the highest levels of national cybersecurity,” said Joe Levy, CEO, Sophos. “His appointment reinforces our commitment to managed services and the critical role they play in our growth strategy, as we accelerate innovation across the world’s largest agentic SOC.

Sophos MDR defends more than 40,000 customers worldwide, delivering a fully automated response to threats in 89 seconds, with 52% of MDR cases closed end-to-end by AI. Patel’s remit includes scaling that model and reinforcing the human-on-the-loop governance behind Sophos’ use of agentic AI in production.

“The agentic SOC is the most significant shift in managed security since MDR itself, and Sophos has built the operating model that defines it,” said Milan Patel, global head of MDR services, Sophos. “I’ve spent my career at the intersection of advanced threats, national security, and managed services, and Sophos has the scale, architecture, and discipline to apply agentic AI to strengthen defense for customers against faster moving threats. I look forward to building on that foundation.”

Patel joins Sophos from BlueVoyant, where he was Global Head of MDR and Chief Revenue Officer. Earlier, he spent more than a decade as a Special Agent in the FBI, including as a Supervisor at FBI Headquarters and as a field Agent on landmark investigations such as Silk Road, Anonymous, and Operation Ghost Click, one of the largest cyber takedowns in history. Patel has also served as a member of the FBI's counter terrorism efforts overseas supporting Joint Special Operations Command, in addition to an operator on the FBI's elite Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT). Patel co-led the Joint Requirements Team under the White House National Security Council's Cyber Security Directorate, where he helped authored the first cyber incident severity framework endorsed across U.S. government and intelligence agencies.

Extending AI Across the Business

Sophos also promoted Lisa Moorhead to Chief Digital and Information Officer. Moorhead succeeds Tony Young, who is leaving Sophos after a transformational 10 years with the company.

As CDIO, Moorhead owns the company’s enterprise AI strategy, accelerating the speed and intelligence of go-to-market and business operations and raising the value Sophos delivers to customers and partners.

Sophos is applying the same agentic AI discipline inside its own operations. By adopting agentic data engineering across its enterprise data platform, Sophos now delivers data pipelines four times faster across the full lifecycle. Proof-of-concept pipelines that once took two to three days are now produced in under an hour. The company is modernizing more than 800 production pipelines behind revenue forecasting, HR operations, and business analytics, with full standards compliance and a first-time deployment success rate above 95%, with governance enforced during the build by design.

“In promoting Lisa Moorhead to CDIO, we are placing enterprise-wide AI adoption in the hands of a proven leader who has spent her career turning technology into measurable business outcomes,” Levy said. “The trust our customers place in us depends on adopting AI both aggressively and responsibly, and Lisa has consistently shown she can move fast while delivering the architectures that trust requires.”

Moorhead was formerly Senior Vice President of IT Applications at Sophos, leading a global organization spanning enterprise architecture, development, and QA across the company’s core business systems. She previously led Cloud Infrastructure Services and founded the company’s IT Business Operations function. Before Sophos, she established the Office of the CIO at GoPro and held several IT leadership positions at Informatica.

"This is one of the most exciting moments I've seen in enterprise technology, with AI driving rapid progress in areas that historically moved slowly," said Lisa Moorhead, chief digital and information officer, Sophos. "My focus is embedding AI across the business so our go-to-market, operations, and customer- and partner-facing teams move faster and make better-informed decisions. In IT, we hold a dual mandate to innovate and to protect the business from risk, and our discipline is making sure governance and guardrails keep pace with that adoption."

To learn more, visit Sophos.com.