Arctic Wolf Cybersecurity | Simoda Technology Solutions
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Broadacres

Arctic Wolf Cybersecurity

Customer
Success Story

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Industry / Housing

Overview

The Broadacres Housing Association provides affordable accommodation to the local communities of Hambleton, Darlington, Richmondshire, Harrogate, Redcar and Cleveland, Ryedale, Scarborough, Selby, the East Riding of Yorkshire, York, and Leeds. Owning and managing just under 7,000 properties and providing a range of support services comes with the responsibility of managing sensitive client information and financial data. 

Issues / Challenges

 

  • Gaining a holistic perspective of threats from all angles, including the cloud

  • Managing and responding to alerts from numerous sources

  • Struggling to find ways to continuously improve security posture

Objectives

 

  • To have security monitoring that would help to effectively manage alerts and quickly take appropriate action.

Solution

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Cook and his team looked at platforms on the market offering security monitoring that would help them effectively manage alerts and quickly take appropriate action. Following numerous product demonstrations and testing of different security platforms from other vendors, Broadacres reached out to Simoda Technology Solutions, an Arctic Wolf partner, and with its support, chose Arctic Wolf as the solution of choice. “The Concierge Security Team was one of the main deciding factors,” Cook explained. “Advanced technology is useful in helping spot anomalies and alerting us to potential threats, but you need a team of people to interpret the data correctly and take appropriate action, quickly.”
 
Arctic Wolf’s Concierge Security® combines deep security operations expertise with an understanding of each business environment to deliver better outcomes. In practice, Arctic Wolf pairs a team of security operations experts directly with Broadacres’ internal IT or security staff to assess security needs and fine-tune solutions for maximum effectiveness. “A machine can do a lot of things, but it takes a real person to truly understand what’s going on with your security environment. The fact there are real people on the end of some of the incidents flagged up makes all the difference,” Cook added. What this difference looks like on a day-to-day basis is fewer, more accurate threat alerts and more time to focus on strategically bolstering the association’s security posture.  
Results / Outcomes
 
  • Security events are curated and triaged by Arctic Wolf’s AI and security analysts, so the Broadacres team only need to respond to true positives
  • Approximately one ticket per day which need reviewing or remediating
  • Threats uncovered from malicious actors that would have otherwise gone undetected
  • Increased vulnerability management frequency from once a year to daily
  • Saved costs related to deploying a 24x7 security operations centre
  • Rapid onboarding in under 30 days

Following “one of the smoothest IT onboarding processes” Cook had experienced in his career, Arctic Wolf was now working as an extension of the Broadacres’ security team, allowing the housing association to take an operational approach to cybersecurity. In the first two weeks of the onboarding process, the team put sensors in place to ingest data from endpoints, network devices, and infrastructure, as well as from cloud resources to make sure they could see threats from all angles. By the end of onboarding, Cook and his team had received immediate alerts on detected threats, alongside a number of weekly reports including an executive summary report which flagged incoming hazards on Broadacres’ external web servers from the likes of Russia, China, and the United Arab Emirates – something the association would not have caught otherwise. Through these alerts, Arctic Wolf has notified Broadacres of numerous previously unknown threats which have led to the organisation hardening its systems against attacks, for example, firewall rules being created to block countries it has no business dealings with.

Another differentiator Arctic Wolf offered was continuous vulnerability scanning, helping evaluate existing security controls through interrogating all aspects of the environment for potential risks to the organisation.

Cook’s team has been conducting a penetration test once a year to stress test Broadacres’ IT systems and security capabilities. Under the previous system, this was a manual and time intensive process, only giving a snapshot at that moment in time. With Arctic Wolf, the team are able to gain insights of areas of concern and risks to the organisation across on-premises networks and devices, public cloud instances, externally facing assets and dark web ‘account takeover’ risks, using the AI/machine learning features of the Arctic Wolf Security Operations Cloud. This gives Broadacres better visibility on a near real-time basis. 
“Arctic Wolf has prevented our non-profit organisation from becoming easy prey to malicious threat actors overseas which put us at risk of cyber attacks and data breaches. And, because of Concierge Security®, we’re protected 24x7 knowing our customers and employees are safe.”

“The housing sector is very collaborative. We share a lot of the same challenges and pressures, and so knowledge sharing is key. It’s absolutely testament to the work of both Arctic Wolf and Simoda, that we would recommend them both to any of the organisations within our sector.” 

Steve Cook, Infrastructure and Security Manager, Broadacres Housing Association
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