Arctic Wolf’s acquisition of BlackBerry’s Cylance endpoint security assets are expected to add more value for customers, says Jason Oehley, regional sales manager at Arctic Wolf.
The acquisition, announced last month, is expected to close in the first quarter of this year. In terms of the agreement, BlackBerry will sell its Cylance assets to Arctic Wolf for $160 million of cash, subject to certain adjustments, and approximately 5.5 million common shares of Arctic Wolf.
Oehley notes that Cylance is the pioneer of AI-based endpoint protection and is trusted by thousands of organisations around the world. With this acquisition, Arctic Wolf is able to enhance its security operations offering.
He says: “Arctic Wolf did a lot of research around a multitude of endpoint vendors to find a good fit. The Cylance endpoint security suite is directly aligned to our mission around security: ending cyber risk for customers. They have a very robust OS support around their solution. They also pioneered AI intelligence in endpoint protection a couple of years ago, and they have very good incident response capability.
“This is an exciting milestone for us, and adds to the solutions we can provide to customers, particularly those in the small and mid-market segments, and those who prefer to have their services and solutions under one umbrella,” Oehley says.
With the addition of a native endpoint security solution to its portfolio, Arctic Wolf is building one of the largest open XDR security platforms in the industry, enabling customers and partners to have the option to leverage more than 15 supported endpoint solutions.
Arctic Wolf states that by integrating Cylance’s endpoint security capabilities into the Arctic Wolf open-XDR Aurora platform, it will address the need for truly unified, effective security operations that unlocks more value and delivers better outcomes for customers.
Oehley says: “In South Africa, when we talk to organisations around security operations, we find many don't even have endpoint solutions. In other cases, endpoint solutions alone have failed to live up to what's actually required by businesses. But we do understand that the endpoints are a major risk factor and a vital piece of the security operations environment. This acquisition will give us the ability to talk about security operations and provide them with a full solution including an endpoint.”
“Arctic Wolf is an open extended detection and response architecture, committed to openness and interoperability with the third-party ecosystem, because we fully understand that most customers have started that security journey,” he says. “Therefore we still maintain that openness to support third party endpoint solutions that they already have in place.”
Oehley notes that Arctic Wolf has a ‘better together’ strategy: “Our approach is to have customers working to protect each other, and working with and integrating with best-of-breed technologies in the market to provide a very effective security operations environment to customers.”
He says: “Our goal is not to be a tools or product-based company at all. It's to be a security operations-based company that augments and integrates with existing security tools in the market and the existing security tools of the customer."
Arctic Wolf is about to embark on a series of partner sessions on strategy and roadmaps around the Cylance solution, and how it can add value for partners.
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