David Hayes (Arctic Wolf)
Arctic Wolf is going all-in on growth in Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) after it launched in the region last year with its 100 per cent partner-centric go-to-market model.
The cyber security vendor, which offers a cloud-native security operations platform, has experienced “rapid growth” in A/NZ according to David Hayes, Arctic Wolf A/NZ regional director. He joined the first cohort of local staff in October.
Arctic Wolf was founded in 2012 in the USA with “a mission to end cyber risk”.
Hayes explained that Arctic Wolf is largely focused on mid-market operations and strives to work with existing tool sets in a business to improve them, as opposed to other vendors who offer “rip and replace” solutions.
“Arctic Wolf is based around the premise that you don’t need to rip and replace – you can keep the existing tool sets you’ve already got as long as you’re happy with them. It [cyber risk] is definitely not a tools problem, it’s an effectiveness problem,” he said.
The local team is now 14 strong across Melbourne and Brisbane with ambitions to grow in Western Australia and New Zealand, building the ‘pillars for success’ in-region, he said.
This includes a security operations “concierge team” to build customer success capabilities, alongside the channel and marketing teams.
Hayes sees Arctic Wolf growing to become a “household name” in the A/NZ region, mirroring success in the mid-market cyber security operations space.
With a 100 per cent channel model, Arctic Wolf is looking to team up with partners “who want to build their capabilities around our offering,” Hayes said and are looking to bolster their existing managed security services with providing a 24/7 operations capability.
Hayes outlined three main ways in which Arctic Wolf can work with various types of partners. There is a straight resell function for partners who are involved with wall-to-wall management of customer environments, as well as the MSP model.
There is also a middle ground for partners who may manage a portion of the customer’s environment, where Arctic Wolf can step in to facilitate the “three-way communication” in its ‘MSP Plus’ programme.
“From an Arctic Wolf point of view, we can deal with people who are the experts in their area, if it’s firewalls or Active Directory, and we know we can talk to the right people to solve any issues”, Hayes said.
Nigel Heyn, founder of Australian technology success partner REDD, outlined why they chose Arctic Wolf following winning a government grant with the Australian Cyber Security Centre.
“There are two things that really stood out about Arctic Wolf – they are people that understood the channel and they understood our pain points. We are still a small MSP but growing rapidly, and we needed to partner with someone that could actually give us the ability to compete with the big boys,” he said.
“The second thing that we love about Arctic Wolf is that agnostic ability for the software and that it will work with existing tools. We've got a lot of in-place deployments, we're winning new business quite frequently, usually on a on a weekly to fortnightly basis.
“The key thing was that we needed a tool that would integrate with existing platforms rather than having to pull everything out and start again. It’s been a game changer,” he added.
In line with its local growth, a recent survey published by Arctic Wolf on the ‘state of cyber security’ in A/NZ, conducted with 300 cyber security and IT decision makers in A/NZ, found several key trends in the sector.
Most notably, the survey found that two thirds of organisations experienced a major cyber security incident in the last year, and 62 per cent of organisations indicated that their security budgets were poised to increase.
Further, 25 per cent of respondents claimed that their A/NZ-based organisations knowingly concealed a cyber attack to preserve the reputation of their business.
"The fact that over two-thirds of companies claim to have experienced a major cybersecurity incident last year highlights that many organisations are still ill-prepared to protect their businesses against both sophisticated and commodity attacks,” Hayes said.
“The best way for organisations to break out of this cycle of fear and uncertainty is for them to recognise that they don’t have a tools problem, but an operational one, and embrace security operations to address the ANZ-region’s evolving threat landscape and end cyber risk,” he continued.
