It’s April 6th 2021 – the start of a new financial year in the UK, and after a few weeks of downtime with the family i’m delighted to write that I – alongside some old friends & colleages – am part of the founding team whom are starting business operations for Arctic Wolf in Europe, Middle East and Africa! It’s one of the most exciting >$1bn valued startup unicorns around, and growing at an exception rate (more on that below).
I’m extremely proud to be joining the new venture as the first EMEA Sales Engineer, and will imminently be joined by a few excellent SE friends across the region as we scale rapidly into countries.
This is an incredibly exciting opportunity to lay the foundations and build the first international expansion for Arctic Wolf; known in North America as the leader for Security Operations delivered as a service. Arctic Wolf have experienced explosive growth and already gained thousands of fanatical customers, whom are scouring the market for a better way to enhance their security posture from ever growing security threats but cruicially at a reasonable pricepoint, without building their own in-house SOC and without more products.
It’s a departure from enterprise storage. It’s something really different. And it’s dead exciting.
“Alright!! Congrats – but why?“
I think we can unanimously agree that 2020 absolutely sucked as a year as a whole. It was the year that our lives were forced to come to an abrupt halt in order to save a large proportion of mankind from disappearing from existence. It was the year that we all had to survive working from home – whether that’s a small home-office, or more likely a sofa, bedside or kitchen table, or if you’re lucky – the garden. Kids had to be homeschooled, and relationships were tested as spouses are working & living on top of eachother.
2020 was also the year that work became far too intense for a lot of us – me included. Looking back, I have no problems admitting that my mental health drastically deteriorated throughout 2020, coming to a head as the autumn and winter drew in. Perhaps this is a blog post in it’s own, someday…
On top of the impact of the global pandemic, in psychological circles there’s a term called the “Seven Year Itch”; given to the timeframe in which we as humans tend to naturally evaluate things critical to them – ie relationships, personal lifestyle choices and jobs etc – and make future life decisions. You may have experienced this yourself. 2020 marked 7 wonderful years after joining Nimble early as SE #3 in EMEA, and I felt like the natural right time for something new.
During my dark days I stumbled across this excellent graphic on success from @lizandmollie which really summarised what I should look for in success. Far too often we’re told that a fancy job title and salary should be enough for one to be satisfied as a career; yet I increasingly felt that a sense of purpose, along with positive mental health was a far better place for fulfilment. It doesn’t matter about job titles if you love what you do.
I believe that we collectively should always be looking to ‘sharpen the saw‘; to consistently try to learn new things in our professional and personal lives. Technology and the cliche of ‘digital transformation’ means that IT is consistently evolving, and we as consumers should also evolve in lockstep to harness it as well as stay relevant. That said, learning new things introduces uncertainty, the fear of the unknown and also introduces the mental health conditon of ‘imposter syndrome‘ (something which I too suffer with). But if you never take the <small> risk to do something new (and suck at for a while), how will you ever know if it was something worth it?
And the final reason; customers. Over the last couple of years there’s been consistent themes across my discussions being had with customers of various sizes; that hybrid cloud operations, containerisation/app modernisation and cross-cloud data mobility meant that EVERY organisation now had multiple platforms to proactively protect and secure, across private and public clouds. The threat plane has exponentially increased beyond just one or two datacenters… And proactively protecting these multiple clouds effectively is _just too hard_ for many organisations, who just don’t have the manpower, the money or time to invest in securing these environments 24/7.
It’s a ticking timebomb for ransomware and data breaches for every organisation large and small, and that ultimately leads to lost business, declining share price or even lawsuits. A recent PwC survey found that 91% of UK CEOs highlighted cyber threats as a critical risk to their business. Businesses need help, and quickly.
Therefore the seven year itch coupled with the pandemic, personal fallout on me and the want to ‘suck at something new’ lead to this opportunity. And this was one I just couldn’t turn down.
“So, Why Arctic Wolf?“
I’ll write a follow-up blog post discussing what Arctic Wolf do and what makes them different very soon… however when evaulating at new career opportunities there are few things that are very important to me:
- Is the market ready to be disrupted by the product/solution they provide?
- ‘Cybersecurity’ has never been more in-demand, and at this point it’s safe to assume that EVERY organisation – large or small – has been compromised by now. However the fact of the matter is there is a HUGE skills shortage in the industry, and and most organisations just don’t have the resources or want to invest in the resources to build an in-house 24/7 security operations team to proactively respond to possible threat vectors. And with most organisations heading full-steam towards a hybrid cloud journey, a strong security posture across all clouds now becomes critically important.
Crucially – a strong security posture is not fixed with more point products thrown at the problem; it’s about people, processes, technology & business logic coming together as a living thing. Arctic Wolf are NOT a product, it’s an end-to-end service with kickass 24/7 security operations which integrate into your business, built on cloud native technology and with a global reach.
Think Infosight, AI/ML driven predictive analytics & Nimble Support delivered as a service but for Security Operations!
- ‘Cybersecurity’ has never been more in-demand, and at this point it’s safe to assume that EVERY organisation – large or small – has been compromised by now. However the fact of the matter is there is a HUGE skills shortage in the industry, and and most organisations just don’t have the resources or want to invest in the resources to build an in-house 24/7 security operations team to proactively respond to possible threat vectors. And with most organisations heading full-steam towards a hybrid cloud journey, a strong security posture across all clouds now becomes critically important.
- Is the culture of the company such that it would be an outstanding place to work and grow a career?
- The company has won numerous ‘great place to work’ awards (most recently ranked number 3 in the USA for businesses <500 employees), and check out the reviews on Glassdoor.com. As a smaller startup company, culture and a place where ‘no egos’ exist is crucially important. Many companies large and small struggle to get this part right, because a winning culture isn’t something tangible – it’s a belief that has to exist within every employee and every process throughout the organisation.
Us ‘international’ folk are lucky in that we are able to look Stateside to see who and how they recruit, as it gives a window into what to expect 1-2 years down the line for the quality of hires and how they’re treated. In Arctic Wolf’s case – there are stacks of high quality ex-Nimble colleagues and friends who have also landed at AW, and believe the culture and opportunity is even better than it appears. They are quite possibly some of the best sales and technical people I’ve had the pleasure to work with previously. That carries a LOT of weight.
- The company has won numerous ‘great place to work’ awards (most recently ranked number 3 in the USA for businesses <500 employees), and check out the reviews on Glassdoor.com. As a smaller startup company, culture and a place where ‘no egos’ exist is crucially important. Many companies large and small struggle to get this part right, because a winning culture isn’t something tangible – it’s a belief that has to exist within every employee and every process throughout the organisation.
- Who will you be working with? Are they likeable? What are their aspirations?
- Another crucial piece of information. Local colleagues are the people you spend most time with away from your spouse (even more so within a startup) so you HAVE to like working with them!
The great news here is Arctic Wolf have opened EMEA with quite possibily the best group of people i’ve ever worked with: the ones that successfully introduced and built Nimble Storage in EMEA with fanatical customers and partners, so starting with me on this journey in ‘wave 1’:
Clare Loveridge – VP & GM for EMEA
Charlie Whitfield – VP of EMEA Sales Engineers
Graham Holt – Sales
Emma Batey – Channel Manager
Petter Glenstrup – Sales Engineer, Nordics
Yes, opening a new region for a new company is challenging and somewhat scary, but this team have been working together for the best part of 10 years and a mantra of striving for success with passion, whilst having fun and a ‘no jerks’ attitude.
Wave 2 – coming in the next few weeks – will also bring another round of amazing people across sales, technical, marketing & channel.
And we’re not stopping here – we will be hiring across the region over the coming year, so if this is something you’d be interested to be part of, we’d love to hear from you.
- Another crucial piece of information. Local colleagues are the people you spend most time with away from your spouse (even more so within a startup) so you HAVE to like working with them!
- Do customers like the company & offering? Will it be successful?
- Obviously time will tell for the latter part, but Arctic Wolf have been incredibly successful in the US & Canada markets, onboarding thousands of happy customers across private and public sectors to their Security Ops service. The company has grown quarter on quarter / year on year, and wins many deals against the larger incumbents, most of which are legacy 20+ year old product-driven companies who are trying to pivot to offering an all-incompassing service – with sub-par results.
Just check out the reviews for Arctic Wolf on Gartner Peer Reviews. High praise indeed.
- Obviously time will tell for the latter part, but Arctic Wolf have been incredibly successful in the US & Canada markets, onboarding thousands of happy customers across private and public sectors to their Security Ops service. The company has grown quarter on quarter / year on year, and wins many deals against the larger incumbents, most of which are legacy 20+ year old product-driven companies who are trying to pivot to offering an all-incompassing service – with sub-par results.
So, as you can tell – i’m excited. It’s a new year, a new ‘building’ opportunity and getting back to grass roots, with a new post-pandemic world where everyone’s (rightly) concerned about security. It should be some ride!
Hope you like this post. Feel free to add a comment below… and if you’d like to hear how Arctic Wolf can help your Security Posture for the better, drop us a mail at ask@arcticwolf.com
Until next time!
Nick