Porcupine Union, the international services company behind King Price Financial Services, is backing its international expansion with managed detection and response from Arctic Wolf Networks.
This is according to Francois Swanepoel, Partner: Commercial IT at Porcupine Union, who was speaking during a webinar hosted by Arctic Wolf Networks in partnership with ITWeb.
Swanepoel outlined Porcupine Union’s growth over the past decade, saying the company’s expansion into Europe meant it had new security and compliance requirements.
“We must comply with regulations such as POPIA and GDPR in three different countries, so we were looking for a security partner to take the journey with us as we grow into countries in Europe,” he said.
The company has a hybrid environment, and needed flexible, agile and scalable technology that could span its on-premises and cloud environments. It also needed a partner that aligned with its cyber resilience strategy, which focuses on compliance, servicing customers and mitigating risk across pillars such as operational resilience, compliance and conformance, growth, cost optimisation, standardisation, digital transformation, emerging technologies and agile resilience – building the ability to quickly adapt to changes and challenges.
Swanepoel said: “We started the journey with Arctic Wolf in 2023, when our business was looking at growing rapidly. At the time, we felt that our security posture lacked the ability to service us as we grew both in South Africa into Europe. The system we had in place wasn’t a good culture fit for our organisation, and 24/7 monitoring had become a full- time job. We started investigating launching our own NOC/SOC, but finding the necessary skills was a daunting task. Other challenges were that the technology we had in place was causing a lot of alert fatigue, we had blind spots in our public cloud and we also had limited reporting, which did not meet our stringent reporting requirements.”
“We needed a partner that was cloud-ready, with a local presence and a sound understanding of our business and risks,” he said. “Our ‘shopping list’ included a partner with a 24/7 SOC with an MDR (manage detect and response), who enabled us to customise alerts and reports, with exception management, across cloud and private cloud. The solution had to align with recognised standards to be compliant, and had to be able to scale across multiple countries. Importantly, the vendor had to be committed to our business.”
Arctic Wolf checked all the boxes.
It was important to Porcupine Union to get the technology in and working in the shortest possible time, and Arctic Wolf exceeded expectations.
Swanepoel said: “Arctic Wolf managed to onboard us in just 30 days. It was a full enterprise rip and replace without missing a beat or exposing us to any risk, which was phenomenal.”
Porcupine Union’s security landscape includes multiple tools, and Arctic Wolf now gives the organisation an overarching view of all the organisation’s security tools in a single interface.
Swanepoel said: “Once onboarded, we were handed over to Arctic Wolf’s named Concierge team, who have become the heart of our security team. They have an end-to-end understanding of our IT environment and have built an excellent synergy with my in-house security team. The Concierge security team has monthly review meetings with our team and constantly makes proactive security suggestions based on our environment. They have a proactive approach, running vulnerability scans and analysis, and issuing regular at-a-glance security review reports on observations, tickets and incidents to improve our governance, risk and compliance.”
He added: “A big focus for me was to have a partner who would be part of our incident response management. With Arctic Wolf, we bring the Concierge team into our incident response planning and testing. Arctic Wolf isn't just a security partner – it’s also like having an insurance partner that ensures we are protected.”
Jason Oehley, Regional Sales Manager at Arctic Wolf Networks, said the good partnership with Porcupine Union had enabled the rapid roll-out: “We spent a lot of time making sure we had good coverage and scoping the project correctly. But onboarding is also very reliant on the customer, so we had to work together to ensure we could roll out the project quickly. The partnership really helped the process.”
For more information, please the download the 2025 Arctic Wolf Security Operations Report .
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