US-based cybersecurity company Arctic Wolf has discussed ANZ partner opportunities and future plans.
CRN Australia spoke to the company’s global executives, the ANZ director and channel partner, Nueva Solutions.
Founded in 2012, Arctic Wolf provides managed detection and response, risk, and security awareness capabilities delivered as part of its Security Operations Cloud.
“In 2023, business continues to remain strong for Arctic Wolf," the company's chief sales officer Steve Craig said, acknowledging the large MSP community in Australia.
"We're a business that cut our teeth in the SMB in the mid-market space."
"We’ve always been 100 per cent channel; it’s been core to how we’ve grown,”
He said Arctic Wolf began growing internationally two to three years ago, and expanded to Australia in October 2022, and now has 1200 partners globally.
“We are looking forward to opening our first data centre within AWS here in Australia in the next two months."
"We're absolutely committed to the region in a big way holistically, to be able to service the Australian market,” Craig added.
The company's ANZ regional director David Hayes said the data centre was “a big move for Arctic Wolf, and a big investment to show the move to Australia was no trivial decision. Having all that raw data locally is insanely powerful as well.”
Arctic Wolf has staff in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, and is currently hiring in New Zealand, aiming to deliver its services locally.
The Arctic Wolf executives also shared that it will be hosting its annual partner week, dubbed “Partner Jam,” in Sydney at the Museum of Contemporary Art, on the week of June 5.
That will involve enablement sessions and a series of on-demand webinars each day that the Australian partners can view on topics including consolidation, managed awareness, and its partnership with AWS.
Arctic Wolf senior vice president global channels Will Briggs said, “Australia was recently activated, and some of the pitching and selling that we were doing to our partner community four or five years ago in the US is what we're starting to see today.”
“Security operations is still relatively new to this market compared to traditional MSSP offerings or do it yourself options,” he added.
Briggs said that partners are “excited about the opportunity” that Arctic Wolf provides, including a net new revenue stream, and “great margins and recurring revenue on a yearly basis.”
He also said that each Arctic Wolf partner is assigned a customer success manager, who oversees upsell, cross-sell and renewal and proactively works with partners to increase their growth.
Speaking from a channel perspective, Briggs highlighted that Arctic Wolf has multiple go-to-market models.
He said this includes a solution provider track for traditional partners, an MSP model where Arctic Wolf delivers services, and an “MSP Plus” model which allows both the MSP and end-user to be involved in the delivery of the service, while Arctic Wolf “co-pilots.”
Hayes said “a lot of partners have found it hard to find and hire security people, so expensive.”
“Us coming along as this kind of end-to-end SOC capability becomes a beautiful addition to you know, the likes of what Nueva’s doing, and our partners in general."
"It's non-competitive, and they can base other services around, and it becomes a nice joint solution,” he added.
Sydney-based cyber security solutions provider Nueva Solutions’ co-founder and director Cameron Cumming talked about his company’s experience in partnering with Arctic Wolf.
Nueva works across the healthcare, government, education and utility space, many of which require 24/7 security assistance.
“We went down the path of bringing in-house resources to build our own SOC, we do have our own SOC at the moment,” Cumming said.
“But as we're growing and scaling, there's things that we can't do ourselves, because of the lack of resources in the region, which is challenging when we're looking to scale and bring more customers on board.”
He said that Arctic Wolf has helped with this challenge, describing Nueva’s partnership with the company as “seamless from the beginning.”
He said “being able to democratise the security operation centre challenge for our customers through the partnership has been great.”
Cumming also acknowledged that Arctic Wolf stands out from competitors due to its vendor neutrality.
This means that “whatever the customer has already spent in time, effort and money can be utilised to their advantage with Arctic Wolf.”
“They don't need to go and spend money on additional software service or build new architecture.”
Nueva has a support team in Australia, the Philippines, the UK, and the Netherlands, with customers across several regions.
The company has customers across the Asia region in the fitness and lifestyle industry, including Anytime Fitness, with intentions to expand into the US for “global cybersecurity assistance.”
To address growing concerns around the need for cyber insurance, Cumming said Nueva has a referral program with cyber insurers, which can reduce premiums and provide reassurance for end-users.
Craig said, “I think resilience and BCDR (business continuity and disaster recovery) still has a massive place in this conversation,” where he believed that Arctic Wolf’s solutions and backups can help digital forensics and incident response teams to more efficiently restore business operations.
He added that Arctic Wolf recently launched an expanded service warranty, which he said is a “financial benefit for Arctic Wolf customers that have managed detection response.”
“One of our additional modules, either Managed Risk or Managed Awareness Training, they're eligible to receive up to US$500,000 to a million dollar warranty, that can be used for things like breach response if an event did happen.”
“I think this demonstrates our confidence in our customers leveraging our solutions, but it also acknowledges this need in any comprehensive cyber solution strategy to look at insurance,” Craig said.
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