Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

For many organizations, cybersecurity is an overwhelming challenge. New threats emerge seemingly in the blink of an eye, and IT and security teams are constantly reacting to the moves of bad actors who always remain one or two steps ahead and get to dictate where and when their attacks are carried out. As you might expect, a reactionary approach to cybersecurity is not ideal. It’s typically borne of necessity due to undermanned teams or inadequate resources. Ultimately, it is destined to fail.

Evidence continues to mount that it isn’t a matter of if, but when and how an organization will be attacked. So, we are seeing Security Operations Centers (SOCs) narrow the focus of their mission to become detection and response organizations. As they look to address additional use cases, including threat detection and monitoring, investigation, incident response and hunting, data becomes incredibly more important.

During AWS re:Invent 21, I had the honor of hosting Phil Weeks, Senior technical advisor at IHG for an informative session on IHG’s security modernization journey during the pandemic which started with replacing a legacy SIEM.

The pride of Arctic Wolf is our Pack. Now more than 1,200 Wolves strong, our team’s dedication, drive, and commitment to ending cyber risk has enabled unprecedented growth and innovation for Arctic Wolf. As we close out 2021 and look to the year ahead, we wanted to take a moment and reflect on a few of the highlights from the past year.

Arctic Wolf has been recognized as a November 2021 Gartner Peer Insights Strong Performer for Vulnerability Assessment. Gartner categorizes the Vulnerability Assessment market as “vendors that provide capabilities to identify, categorize and manage vulnerabilities. These include unsecure system configurations or missing patches, as well as other security-related updates in the systems connected to the enterprise network directly, remotely or in the cloud.”

2021 was a busy year for the cybersecurity industry. It began in January, as we were just beginning to understand the impact and massive scope of the SolarWinds attack. Then Kaseya happened. Then the Colonial Pipeline was breached. And now, as 2021 comes to a close, we’re in the early days of the Log4j crisis that will take all of next year—if not longer—to fully unpack, understand and mitigate.

As technology continues to change rapidly, and so do the tactics cybercriminals use. Responding to these changes requires adapting your security operations center (SOC), or eventually, you may encounter a security incident. Security is a journey, not a destination. You don’t just become secure and move on to another project. Instead, you continuously observe, adapt, and improve.

A security operations center (SOC), which includes the people, processes, and technology needed to monitor, detect, analyze, and respond to cyber threats, is the foundation of many businesses’ cybersecurity. A SOC, however, is difficult to manage and maintain, requires significant budget and resources, and comes with many other challenges.