Arctic Wolf Boosts Cyber Incident Response With New Offering For Partners

The company’s Incident Response JumpStart Retainer guarantees that cyber incidents such as ransomware will get a response within one hour and provides partners with an opportunity to build managed services around the offering.

Arctic Wolf CEO Nick Schneider

Security operations platform provider Arctic Wolf Monday unveiled a new offering that will allow partners to more easily supply their customers with rapid cyber incident response services, which one solution provider executive told CRN will be a “game-changer” for the partner’s cybersecurity business.

Eden Prairie, Minn.-based Arctic Wolf unveiled the launch of a retainer option for its cyber incident response services, which partners can provide to their customers, including as part of a managed services package. The Arctic Wolf Incident Response JumpStart Retainer features benefits such as a guarantee that cyber incidents will receive a response within one hour, backed by a service-level agreement.

This response time guarantee is enabled in part by the fact that the rates for the service have already been prenegotiated with insurance companies, which expedites a part of the process that can often be drawn out, according to Jay Pasteris, CIO and CISO at GreenPages, No. 169 on the 2022 CRN Solution Provider 500. Kittery, Maine-based GreenPages has been among the early partners to utilize the JumpStart Retainer program.

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In the event of a breach such as a ransomware attack, if a customer lacks an incident response retainer then “there is a paper shuffle going back and forth” in order to get approval from insurance on the incident response services, Pasteris said. “Meanwhile, Rome is burning for them.”

Other benefits of the JumpStart Retainer include subscription-based pricing that offers lower costs to customers for the incident response service and also doesn’t require customers to pre-purchase service hours, according to Arctic Wolf.

The offering ultimately provides partners with a “conduit” to fast incident response services on behalf of their customers, “making sure that they have somebody that is at the ready in the event of an incident,” said Nick Schneider, president and CEO of Arctic Wolf.

Without this type of solution, an insurance carrier might refer an affected customer to a different service provider—“and that’s not something that necessarily the customer wants or the partner wants,” Schneider told CRN. “They want to continue to maintain those relationships over time. And [the JumpStart Retainer] just allows us to kind of glue the carrier, the end user and the partner together.”

For GreenPages, being able to guarantee customers a quick response to a major cyber incident from a known and trusted provider is “a game-changer for us,” Pasteris said.

Incident response services can include digital forensics work and advanced breach analysis, which are capabilities beyond the scope of those offered by many MSPs. GreenPages relies heavily on Arctic Wolf for these capabilities, Pasteris said, particularly in the case of severe attacks such as ransomware.

Crucially, GreenPages is able to build managed services around the incident response offering, which is “incredibly valuable” for the company, Pasteris said. Those services can include helping customers to prepare for acquiring cyber insurance, deploying the ideal cyber defense technology, running tabletop exercises with the customer and ensuring it has current documentation and immutable backups.

“We help them build the whole security program and we manage that, and they have assurance in knowing that GreenPages with Arctic Wolf’s incident response team is there [ready] to swoop in if a breach does happen,” Pasteris said. “We hit the ground running. And in those situations, time matters.”