At Manchester Digital, we like to interview our members to find out a bit more about what they do and their work in the Greater Manchester digital and technology sphere. This week we're speaking with Steve Winfield, Senior Sales Engineer at Arctic Wolf.
What does your organisation do?
Arctic Wolf offers security operations solutions. Unlike other vendors, who focus on delivering and managing a security tool for their customers, Arctic Wolf solutions deliver actionable security operations outcomes, whether that's 24×7 alerting, targeted remediation or strategic guidance.
What do you think is currently the biggest issue facing the tech industry?
From a Security perspective I would suggest the biggest challenges faced by security teams is keeping up with the sophistication of attacks, while managing complex environments. At the same time with limited budgets and finding it hard to find and retain staff. I’d also break down the biggest issues into 3 distinct categories
1. Ransomware
The threat of ransomware and targeted attacks are top of mind for nearly every business. In 2021 alone there were an estimated 700 million attacks using ransom or extortion. Arctic Wolf’s The State of Cybersecurity report 2022 Trends reported over 70% of IT professionals surveyed identified it as their top concern in 2022.
2. Phishing
Ransomware’s rise to infamy would have been all but impossible without the help of a vastly different kind of cyber threat: phishing.
Social engineering is any tactic that strives to manipulate individuals into divulging authentication credentials, sensitive information, funds, and other valuable items. Phishing is a form of social engineering that occurs online, typically via email, with the intent of stealing login credentials or getting a user to download malware or share sensitive information.
3. Data Breaches
Data breaches are somewhat unique in that the damage they cause to an organization isn’t as immediate. Organisations may not detect a data breach for weeks, months, or-in some cases-years. And by the time they do, it’s already too late. Data breaches typically result in the stolen data being posted on the dark web by cybercriminals either looking to turn a profit or cause some chaos.
What is your organisation’s biggest achievement?
Ending Cyber Risk for our customers !
Arctic Wolf also lists as one of the worlds top most 50 Innovative companies
50th most disruptive private companies and is named as Forbes top 100 private cloud companies in the world
What would you consider to be your organisation’s biggest challenge?
From a Security perspective I’d say unconscious non-malicious insider threats are the organisations biggest challenge. This was confirmed by Arctic Wolfs CISO Adam Marre raised when asked this specific question.
From a growth perspective I’d suggest recruiting and maintaining great people within the organisation is one of the top challenges when expanding and growing at the rate Arctic Wolf is in EMEA and the UK
What do you think the future looks like for Manchester’s tech sector?
Absolutely fantastic, The focus from all channels - government, education, Private and public sector specifically around Manchester and the Tech Sector is tremendous.
Tell us something that we might not know about your company?
There are around.
25-30 Billion Google searches performed per day
320 Billion Emails sent per day
The Arctic Wolf Security Operations Cloud platform performs 500 Billion (thats half a Trillion) Security observations per day !!
Thank you Steve!
To find out more about Artic Wolf click here.
