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01732 759725 26 security teams in Germany, and we are also hiring in the UK. So, there will be concierge teams in the UK and Frankfurt. TR: Your most recent product was the Managed Security Awareness module. What does that involve? CL: This, for me, is a really interesting market. They say that 85% of breaches come from bad guys targeting employees to get them to share their information through things like phishing scams and links. In 85% of cases, employees are enabling bad actors to get into networks and systems and once they get in, they are there for six months or longer, finding more and more ways through and getting more and more information. They also say that 80% of everything you learn you forget in under a month. Yet, only around 6% of organisations offer training more than monthly – they do training for an employee, but then move on. Managed Security Awareness is essentially micro-training. We continue to drip-feed learning points over time, which results in better retention of information. We send spurious links and do trainings on top of that. It may only take five minutes, but it will happen every few weeks. TR: What is your go-to-market model? CL: In 2019, Arctic Wolf announced that it was 100% channel. Having worked for start-ups before, it is very unusual to come into a company where their partner programmes are so well baked, so mature, and that is because the company has been 100% channel for a few years now. There are a couple of different ways a partner can sell our product; they can resell it or they can offer it as a service. When they resell it, all of the service at the back end is passed to us; the concierge security team will deal directly with the end user. That’s the reseller model. With the service provider model, the concierge security team will deal with the service provider, and it is up to the service provider to do the ongoing work with the end user. Resale is much the most common option. That said, the service provider programme is growing very quickly. TR: Are you attracting more resellers that perhaps aren’t security specialists? CL: We are. We have signed around 30 resellers in Europe in the last four months – and when I say Europe I am talking about the regions where we have people, which, so far, is the UK and the Nordics. We have had a sales team in the UK for to analyse all those alerts, understand what they mean and weed out the false positives is more than a full-time job, it is several full-time jobs. We did a bit of research in the UK and found that 39% of UK SMBs are overwhelmed by the amount of cyber security alerts they receive daily. Typically, they are receiving up to 75 alerts per day – that’s just for the UK SMB market. Following on from that, you have a skills, talent and time challenge. Organisations that have in-house IT teams might only have one individual looking after security and being able to look at the security posture of the business and plan for the future and at the same time make sure they are on top of all of the threats, understand what they are and action them is very, very difficult. Most organisations are not able to keep up. What we hear from many customers with generalist IT teams is that alerts are put on the back burner because there are more important priorities to take care of. TR: How does Arctic Wolf keep on top of it all? CL: Our cloud-native platform ingests all data, taking in around 32 billion observations per day, which turns into 765 investigations by the concierge security team. Alerts come in, they are passed or sent to our triage team of 250-plus security experts who investigate them, take out the false positives and work out which ones are important. An average of one or two incidents per week need to be reported back to each customer. The concierge security team will tell the customer exactly what the alert is, what the threat is, what they need to do about it, and how to stop it happening again. It really is a true extension of their security team. TR: Where are these experts based? CL: At the moment, we have security operations centres (SOCs) in North America and in Canada. We don’t currently have a SOC in EMEA, but we will be launching one towards the end of this year in Frankfurt. We have already hired some concierge four months now and in the Nordics for two and half. We have also recently hired in Germany and Benelux. We have signed around 30 partners so far, including 22 in the UK, and the vast majority are infrastructure partners. Some of that is because my background, where I have long-standing relationships, is in infrastructure, but it is also because Arctic Wolf enables channel partners to offer a comprehensive security solution without necessarily having to acquire knowledge of a whole host of tools or build a whole security team, because they can do that with us. TR: Do you have a distributor in the UK? CL: We are in conversation with distributors, and it is something we will look to do, but I am not quite sure when that will be at this stage. One of the unique things about Arctic Wolf and the way we are launching in EMEA is our investment in people. Very often, you will see sales teams come in, but until a pipeline is built, there is less support from non-quota carrying heads. Arctic Wolf is really investing in people and putting support into regions, so alongside the sales team and the security operations team in Frankfurt, we are hiring marketing teams and channel teams to support the in-country sales teams. TR: What criticisms have you encountered from potential customers? Do they worry that your service is too expensive? CL: We haven’t come across any objections about it being too expensive, because one of the key things customers are saying is that when you compare what we offer to having full-time employees to manage the security systems, it is not expensive. There is also quite a shortage of skills in the security industry, particularly trained security experts. Companies are struggling to find, hire and keep those employees because it is such a competitive market at the minute. TR: What are your plans for the rest of the year? CL: Our plans are to build out where we have teams, so the focus will be on the UK, Nordics, DACH and Benelux. That doesn’t exclude any of other regions, but that is where our key resources will be. Then we will look to expand into more countries next year. The big focus for the second half of this year is the launch of the SOC in Frankfurt. To find out more about Arctic Wolf, please visit www.arcticwolf.com Q&A ...continued Wolves celebrating Arctic Wolf’s EMEA launch