Your 6 Cyber Security Pains

Should you choose Intelys & Arctic Wolf Security Operations to alleviate, remediate and remove your security pains?

Cybersecurity has an effectiveness problem. Organisations spend over $165 billion each year on cybersecurity, while attacks continue to increase in number and evolve in complexity. Last year was another record-breaking one for data breaches, with reports of massive hacks and huge ransomware demands dominating headlines.

If you ask us, the old ways of protecting your data just don’t work.

Arctic Wolf® security operations solutions and Intelys offer organizations a better way.

We strip out complexity in your environments and leverage your existing tools to deliver truly effective and fully managed cybersecurity, helping you advance along your security journey and end cyber risk for your organization.

How do we do it?

By alleviating, remediating and removing what Arctic Wolf call the six pillars of cybersecurity pain.

1. Alert Fatigue

While tools can enhance protection and visibility, they also generate a massive volume of events and alerts. And therein lies the problem. When faced with a deluge of potential attacks, security analysts can quickly become overwhelmed. In fact, many attacks succeed not because a tool failed to raise an alert, but because the alert was missed or ignored by an analyst. This operating environment of all noise and no signal is known as cybersecurity alert fatigue, and it has real costs for the professionals and businesses impacted by it.

Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response® works with your existing tech stack to immediately begin monitoring your environment, ensuring proactive and dynamic detection and response to threats, intrusions, and attacks. Organisations receive timely and actionable intelligence from an always-available team of expert security analysts—without the overwhelming noise of endless false positives.

2. Staff Shortages

Finding, training, and retaining cybersecurity talent has long been a challenge for most organisations, but the problem was exacerbated by the “Great Resignation” of 2021, with 80% of organisations unable to fulfill their target headcounts for security staff.

Arctic Wolf’s Concierge Security® delivery model fills in the staffing gaps, acting as a force multiplier to your existing security team. If you don’t have a security team, you gain instant access to security professionals that are otherwise difficult, if not impossible to find. Our Concierge Security experts continuously monitor security events enriched and analysed by the Arctic Wolf® Platform to provide your team with coverage, security operations expertise, and strategically tailored security recommendations that continuously improve your overall posture and ease the workload of already taxed IT professionals.

3. Vulnerabilities and Security Gaps

The task of effectively managing and remediating vulnerabilities is becoming increasingly difficult for already taxed security teams. Often, even fundamental information like what assets exist, which systems have vulnerabilities, and which systems are misconfigured is difficult to obtain. The growing attack surface compounds cyber risks for organisations. The implementation of new digital initiatives, the adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT), and the continued move to the cloud help drive innovation—but at the cost of increased exposure to threats.

Most organisations are unable to accurately account for assets or fully monitor their environment. This leads to gaps in posture that leave the door open to attackers. After all, if you can’t see it, you can’t protect it.

Arctic Wolf Managed Risk® enables you to discover, assess, and harden your environment against digital risks by contextualizing your attack surface coverage across your networks, endpoints, and cloud environments. Arctic Wolf provide around-the-clock monitoring for vulnerabilities, system misconfigurations, and account takeover exposure, helping ensure you are benchmarking against configuration best practices and continually hardening your security posture.

Our Concierge Security Team will work with you to deploy the Arctic Wolf® Platform, install the Arctic Wolf Agent®, integrate critical data points, configure Cloud Security Posture Management, and build an understanding of your network through internal, external, and host-based vulnerability assessments. Arctic Wolf catch risks other vulnerability scanners miss, like software defects, system misconfigurations, and corporate credential exposure, helping you close the gaps in your environment.

4. Compliance and Regulation Challenges

Compliance is an important part of a cybersecurity program. Heavily regulated industries are often a bigger target for cybercriminals because of their highly valuable data (e.g., patient data in healthcare, financial data in banking, identity data in government). The purpose of cybersecurity laws and regulations are to ensure that organizations take the right steps to protect this data. And regardless of what industry you’re in, you need to comply with privacy laws, GDPR, POPIA, and other regulations that apply to all sectors.

While meeting compliance requirements doesn’t guarantee that your organisation is secure, it provides you with a solid foundation for security practices. Not to mention that non-compliance may lead to fines and other penalties.

Arctic Wolf creates a custom security strategy for your organisation’s specific needs. Through our concierge approach, Arctic Wolf help you meet and maintain industry regulatory obligations, all while working around the clock to keep your organisation safe.

5. Human Error

While security technology is constantly improving and becoming more difficult to circumvent, human nature doesn’t change. Cybercriminals know that it’s much easier to trick people than machines — and they use social engineering schemes like phishing to accomplish this. According to Verizon’s 2022 Data Breach Investigation Report, 82% of all breaches involved the human element, meaning that improperly informed and prepared employees are a major threat to organisations.

Arctic Wolf® Managed Security Awareness prepares your employees to recognise and neutralise social engineering attacks and eliminate human error. Through fun, fresh and constantly updated microlearning sessions, Arctic Wolf address the most common cyberthreats by influencing behaviour and fostering a security culture.

6. Tool and Technology Complexity

Many organizations resort to adding more security tools in an attempt to keep pace with cybercriminals and secure ever-expanding attack surfaces. Rather than reducing risk and increasing efficiency, however, the addition of more tools increases complexity and reduces effectiveness. Plus, properly integrating tools is a time-consuming task that can only be accomplished if your tools are interoperable, and there’s often little incentive for vendors to create tools that integrate and communicate with one another.

Arctic Wolf Managed Detection and Response is vendor-agnostic and works with your existing tech stack to immediately begin monitoring your environment, ensuring proactive and dynamic detection and response to threats, intrusions, and attacks. Built on an open XDR architecture, the Arctic Wolf® Platform provides real-time, continuous monitoring, and threat hunting on your network. And Arctic Wolf do all that for a predictable monthly cost far below what you would spend to stand up your own in-house security operations centre.

If you’re ready to start knocking down your own pain pillars and embrace managed security operations solutions, we’re ready to help. 

Get in touch at sales@intelys.com to explore whether or not an Intelys / Arctic Wolf Security Operations solution is right for your business.

Partnership announcement: Intelys / Arctic Wolf

We have cemented our relationship with Arctic Wolf and added them as a vendor partner to augment and compliment our already robust cyber security solution offering.

Arctic Wolf has a novel approach to cyber security with their Security Operations Cloud and Concierge Security model.

The Arctic Wolf platform

Spanning thousands of installations, the Arctic Wolf® Platform processes over 2 trillion security events weekly. Built on an open XDR architecture, the platform collects and enriches endpoint, network, and cloud telemetry, and then analyzes it with multiple detection engines. Machine learning and custom detection rules then deliver personalized protection for your organization.


While other products have limited visibility, the vendor-neutral Arctic Wolf® Platform enables broad visibility and works seamlessly with existing technology stacks, making it easy to adopt while eliminating blind spots and vendor lock-in.

Concierge Delivery Model

Arctic Wolf invented the concept of Concierge Security®. With this delivery model, we pair a team of our security operations experts directly with your IT or security staff. Your Concierge Security® Team gives you 24×7 eyes-on-glass coverage. We work with your team on an ongoing basis to learn your security needs so that they can tune solutions for maximum effectiveness and ensure that your security posture gets stronger over time.
The Concierge Security® Team combines deep security operations expertise with an understanding of your environment to deliver better outcomes. We take on tactical actions like threat hunting and alert prioritization, and strategic tasks like security posture reviews and risk management.

Dax Andrews, our General Manager of Sales, had this to say:

As a specialist networking and network security business our evolution has been witness to the convergence of the network and security landscape. With that, so too has our business progressed into a niche network security partner.

Selecting a relevant vendor to align with our own strategy, vision and existing partner investments is an important part of our success along with the continued improvements in the customer environments we work in. Augmenting the layers of security services and solutions we offer helps us further entrench the skill we value so much.

When it came to Arctic Wolf, the cultural and strategic alignment was a great fit, and accelerated the conversations we were already having with our customers. With Arctic Wolf being a well-established and proven player in the global market it makes complete sense for us to announce the partnership in the local market.

Arctic Wolf’s Jason Oehley adds:

With Arctic Wolf driving accelerated expansion within South Africa we are in the process of building out an effective eco-system to support our customers. Intelys were an immediate fit for Arctic Wolf by focusing on the customer value and driving a consultancy approach with their customers.

Arctic Wolf and Intelys can ensure customers receive a full 24×7 security operations service offering while receiving a personalized experience. We welcome Intelys to the “pack” and are looking forward to growing together.

We look forward to making the unique solution offerings of Arctic Wolf available to our customers, and believe that they will add incredible value.

Web Application Firewall (WAF)

According to Fortinet, Web Application Firewalls (WAFs) are designed to inspect and protect HTTP connections and prevent web-based attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection. While WAF tools and devices have been around for over a decade, and are a required technology for organizations that process credit card transactions (PCI-DSS), they are just now starting to gain traction in many networks.

Snapt say that every business exposing online applications, services, and APIs needs a Web Application Firewall (WAF) to operate safely and protect against cybersecurity threats. A WAF identifies and blocks attacks that lead to downtime, leaked data, and compromised transactions and accounts.

Some questions you may have:

  1. What does your network architecture and application infrastructure look like?
  2. Which teams will use the WAF and how?
  3. Where will you deploy a WAF?
  4. Which detection and blocking techniques suit your traffic and risk profile?
  5. Which application attacks present the biggest risks to your business?
  6. Would your apps benefit from virtual patching and scanner integration?
  7. Do you need PCI-DSS compliance for secure transactions?
  8. Do you need to terminate SSL traffic?
  9. What kind of visibility and reporting does your SecOps team need to be effective?

Click on any of the above questions to learn more, from our partner Snapt on their blog.

The difference between SD-WAN and MPLS

This topic is often how the SD-WAN discussion starts.

A network migration to SD-WAN (software defined wide area network) may deliver cost savings, performance improvements and better security.

According to our partners Fortinet, the short answer is that SD-WAN offers better visibility, availability, enhanced performance, and more freedom of action. It’s why the industry has seen interest in SD-WAN rising over the past few years.

Fortinet list the following benefits of SD-WAN over MPLS:

  • SD-WAN delivers potential cost savings.

    By reducing the amount of traffic that needs to traverse the MPLS links, one may utilize commodity internet, reducing MPLS costs.
  • Secure SD-WAN from Fortinet provides better protection than MPLS, because the solution is delivered as an integrated function within a next-generation firewall appliance.

    A wide array of security tools, such as IPS, firewall, WAF, web filtering, anti-virus, and anti-malware are simultaneously deployed, as these are natively part of the NGFW firewall / SD-WAN device.
  • SD-WAN delivers better network performance, utilizing diverse links and paths based on application or traffic type, for example.

    SD-WAN is application-aware, and can thus prioritize traffic accordingly, based on bandwidth, latency and other requirements.

Click here for more information on Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution, or get in touch to discuss a SD-WAN solution that’s right for you and your business.

Our other partner, Aruba Networks, have made this short video which succinctly describes SD-WAN:

Announcement: We’re now Snapt partners

Did you know that we are Snapt partners?

Snapt provides future-proof load balancing and security solutions that are cloud-neutral and platform-agnostic.

Snapt eliminates downtime and automatically scales your sites and applications to ensure maximum responsiveness.

Using a single pane of glass, our solutions deliver centralized control and intelligence for all your clouds, platforms, architectures, and applications.

You can learn more about the available products and services by clicking through.

Protect your clients and your business

“Our bank details have not changed.” is surely one of the least pleasant things to have to put in your email signature.

Chances are, if you’ve seen this, the email sender’s email domain has been impersonated and used in a phishing attack.

Phishing is extremely commonplace these days and is used by attackers to steal information such as passwords and other credentials, and other sensitive information.

According to Sendmarc, below are several common phishing scams, which can include things such as:

  • Asking you to click on a link and download a malicious file onto your computer.
  • Sending you an email notifying you of an outstanding invoice – and then a link where you can click to pay it. Clicking on this link takes you to an illegitimate site where scammers can gather your personal information and access your bank accounts.
  • The email sender telling you that one of your accounts has been compromised, and then asking you to log in and reset your password, fill in your information and resubmit it.
  • Pretending to be one of your vendors and asking you to confirm your credit information before they can release or deliver an order.

There are 2 approaches, which work best in parallel, to prevent email phishing attacks.

  1. Implement a technical solution such as DMARC to assure email authenticity
  2. Train your employees to recognize phishing emails and handle them appropriately

We work with our partners Sendmarc to help our customers prevent their email domains from being impersonated, nd used in phishing attacks.

You should really know whether or not your domain is at risk of impersonation – fill in the form below and we’ll run the analysis for you and reply with the information.