In this episode of TCS+, TechCentral speaks to Jason Oehley and Andre den Hond, both with Arctic Wolf, to unpack the security posture of businesses in South Africa, and to learn more about what Arctic Wolf has to offer.
Over the course of his career, Oehley has worked at many tech companies, including Splunk, Dell and F5, and for over a year now has been overseeing the Arctic Wolf business in South Africa. Den Hond is Arctic Wolf’s sales engineer and joined around the same time.
Arctic Wolf is a global security business founded in the US more than 12 years ago. Over the last three years, it has expanded its presence across Europe, the Middle East and Africa – including South Africa.
Watch or listen to the Arctic Wolf interview below
South Africa’s security challenges are not unique, but local businesses do face challenges around skills and budget that expose them to a lot of risk.
Arctic Wolf has a unique set of security-focused offerings that essentially plug into an organisation’s existing security tools and investments, augmenting their capabilities by providing 24/7 SOC (security operations centre) services to manage, detect and respond to threats in the business environment.
For smaller organisations that don’t have the budget or staff to run a security team, Arctic Wolf can provide that as a service.
In the discussion, Oehley shares his thoughts on why South Africa is among the top five countries globally targeted by cybercriminals. The attacks the country’s faces are highly sophisticated; standard tools are inadequate when it comes to defending against evolving threats and attack vectors. In fact, he says some 80% of South African companies don’t even have a security team in place.
The conversation turns to cyber insurance, and here it’s interesting to note that South African insurance companies are more advanced when it comes to what they require for a customer to be covered, compared to insurers in other countries.
This means local businesses must deploy a more comprehensive stack of tools to get the insurance coverage they need, and Arctic Wolf can assist businesses with this. Having the capabilities to defend from attacks is still better than depending on insurance alone, and the more enhanced a company’s security capabilities, the lower the premiums they will enjoy.
Watch this episode of TCS+
Arctic Wolf is a channel-only business and relies on partner relationships to get its services to market. However, services are delivered directly to the end customer, with the partner involved to assist in improving the customer’s (and the partner’s) security posture.
The success of the platform has largely been because of its model, where bills are issued per device and not based on data received. By not limiting the data that is allowed to be monitored, Arctic Wolf is able to scrape far more data and assess many more threats.
This is all tied together by Arctic Wolf’s Concierge Security Team, or CST. This service gives every client access to two named resources whose role is to work strategically with clients to build out and manage their security road map and engage in activities that help to constantly improve their security posture.
Listen to this episode of TCS+
Perhaps the most powerful part of the offering is that Arctic Wolf plugs into every layer of an organisation’s security. This provides a total overview of the organisation’s security, 24/7, and the CST works with this data to ensure every security hole is plugged.
Oehley and Den Hood discuss how even with all these capabilities, it’s still possible for a customer to be breached, and part of the service includes incident response that is geared to helping the customer manage the aftermath, mitigate what they can, and assist the business with the implementation of recovery plans.
There’s plenty more in this important discussion – don’t miss it!
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