After months of talk about a potential initial public offering, Arctic Wolf's CEO said there is no timeline for such a move – pointing instead to the company's focus on integration efforts following an acquisition of incident response company Tetra Defense.
As recent as two weeks ago, Arctic Wolf CEO Nick Schneider was quoted in the press saying that the company – which was reportedly valued at $4.3 billion – planned for an IPO this year. But he made no commitments in an interview with SC Media Thursday.
“We’re continuously evaluating what we would do from a financing perspective, but at this point we’re not commenting on financing plans,” Schneider said. "I just can’t comment on timing. We’ll continue to look at different avenues for financing. One option is an IPO, but there are other options we can consider and we’ll make that known when we get to that point in time.”
Schneider said the addition of Tetra Defense’s incident response and threat intelligence capabilities will strengthen Arctic Wolf’s ability to collect rich security telemetry, manage incidents, and initiate rapid response and recovery actions.
“We’re excited about the new acquisition,“ Schneider said. “Historically, we have focused a lot of our time on identify, protect, and detect in a NIST framework with some capabilities in response. This will help with additional detections, improving our ability to respond to an entity that had a breach by performing diagnostic forensics or threat eradication. And also the ability to recover. Tetra Defense also provides full data recovery and systems restoration and gets customers that need help back to their normal course of business in short order.”
Jon Oltsik, senior principal analyst at ESG, added that Arctic Wolf already has the sensors, data engines, and analytics for threat detection, while providing customer support and automated processes for remediation and incident response.
“This acquisition takes the next step with advanced services for incident response, including proactive readiness," Oltsik said. "In essence, Arctic Wolf is shifting left and right with this announcement.”
Making sense of security
Schneider was adamant that Arctic Wolf’s primary mission was to “unify the experience” for customers, especially when it comes to tool sprawl; over the past few years, he said, companies have deployed in excess of 50 or 60 tools and are on overload. Arctic Wolf aims to answer some fundamental security questions for customers: Is my business safe? Are we compliant? And have we met all of our regulatory needs?
“We can answer those questions in a sophisticated manner in a way that leverages the technology we bring to the table, but also the technologies they’ve made investments in,” Schneider said. “We are technology agnostic. We have our own agent and some customers leverage that agent for us to inform the platform of what’s happening on the endpoint. But we also ingest from the well-known endpoint companies, a Sophos, CrowdStrike, or SentinelOne. We’ll work with the customers regardless of the technology they have in place.”
In an interview with SC last November, Schneider said the security outcomes Arctic Wolf delivers differentiates it drastically from managed security service providers and legacy solutions, because the Arctic Wolf’s Security Operations Cloud ensures only verified security incidents are escalated to customers.
“With Arctic Wolf, a typical customer receives only one or two tickets a week, which effectively eliminates alert fatigue, and ensures internal security resources have the time needed to focus on hardening their overall security posture,” said Schneider. “When our customers receive an alert, they know it has been analyzed by our machine learning engine and verified by one of our analysts before the customer receives it. So our customers know that if they receive an alert from Arctic Wolf, it’s an issue they really should take a close look at.”
