Arctic Wolf Networks, the SOC-as-a-service company, on Tuesday announced a partnership with Ingram Micro. It’s the security company’s first distribution partner agreement, signed with the goal of taking the company to the next level.

Arctic Wolf boasts about 800 customers and 300 active partners. While the company was founded in 2012, its service went live in 2014. About two-and-a-half years ago, the company created its partner program. Its mission is to solve the problem of monitoring, detecting and responding to threats for midmarket and smaller enterprises that can’t afford to build their own security operations centers on premises.

Arctic Wolf’s Will Briggs

“We figured out that a lot of our great partners worked with Ingram, and Ingram provides a lot reach, not only in the U.S. but potentially worldwide,” Will Briggs, director of channel sales at Arctic Wolf, told Channel Futures’ MSSP Insider. “We need to provide our services and solutions through a distribution format where resellers, solution providers and MSPs can easily consume our service as well as incorporate it into other offerings.”

Arctic Wolf offers CyberSOC for cybersecurity managed detection and response.

The vendor’s portfolio includes its flagship CyberSOC offering and risk assessment, recently added as a result of its RootSecure acquisition, completed in December. CyberSOC capabilities include:

As part of its Ingram Micro partnership, Arctic Wolf will start with resellers and solution partners and will eventually grow its MSP practice so that it’s able to go through Ingram Micro, Briggs said.

“Most customers go on a security journey beginning with basic passwords and rudimentary security practices, then move onto the perimeter where they start looking at firewalls and Active Directory logs; then they look at antivirus protection, endpoint, [data loss prevention], web filtering, and email filtering and proxy,” explains Briggs.

The new Arctic Wolf-Ingram Micro distribution agreement allows Ingram to offer the detection piece — which up until today was a gap in the distributor’s growing security portfolio, he noted.

For many partners, SOC as a service is a net-new revenue stream — and a recurring one.

“We have generous margins in our program and its recurring. You get those margins in year one, two, three … five,” said Briggs.

What also makes Arctic Wolf attractive for partners is that in the process of improving a customer’s general security hygiene posture, they may identify the need for security training or a firewall or gap in the perimeter.

“That’s all potential up-sell for the partner; we don’t resell anything,” said Briggs.

Arctic Wolf isn’t 100-percent channel yet, but it aspires to be. Last quarter, 80 percent of the company’s net revenue was driven by the channel. That will change as the coverage for all regions grows and the company mindset shifts to a channel-first identity.