Product descriptions:
Arctic Wolf operates one of the world’s largest cybersecurity platforms and security operations centers (SOC), managing massive event volumes to protect thousands of customers. As threats, tools, and data sources grew in complexity and scale, Arctic Wolf saw the opportunity to enhance workflows with new approaches to automation that reduce fragmentation, minimize alert fatigue, and speed investigations. By partnering with Databricks, Arctic Wolf unified siloed telemetry and automated threat detection and enabled its experts — and customers — to cut through the noise using GenAI and agentic workflows, accelerating time-to-outcome while maintaining trust and transparency at every step.
Navigating the Needle-in-the-Haystack Challenge in Cybersecurity’s Data Deluge
Modern managed security means chasing down real threats in a blizzard of signals, alerts, and telemetry from every endpoint, OS, app, and cloud. At Arctic Wolf, we help customers find the needle in the haystack. Not by searching alone, but by being their security expert trained to find hidden threats, 24/7. With petabytes of fragmented data streaming into the SOC, operational challenges multiplied — signal correlation grew more complex, detection logic needed to span diverse tools, and valuable context was dispersed across disconnected data stores.
As one Arctic Wolf expert describes, “Everyone wants their data instantly, with infinite retention and for minimal cost. But operational inefficiency, alert fatigue, and invisible blind spots threaten the effectiveness of even the most well-designed security operations solutions.” Pressure mounted as customer bases and telemetry soared, incidents grew in sophistication, and regulatory expectations required end-to-end lineage and transparency.
In this environment, even high investment didn’t guarantee better protection. “We knew we had to be proactive — addressing issues like incomplete data, duplication, and manual processes before they could slow our teams down or impact customers,” the expert reflects. A unified, intelligence-driven data foundation was needed to accelerate threat discovery, reduce complexity, and provide reliable, actionable detection.
Building a Unified, Trusted Platform With Databricks and GenAI
Arctic Wolf’s evolution with Databricks was not a quick fix but a multi-year journey. From early EDR pipelines to a holistic data lake — then onboarding managed EDR, control plane data, threat enrichment, and ever-advancing ML models — the team standardized on Databricks lakehouse architecture. “The Databricks Platform lets us combine all types of data, delivering compute on demand with serverless, taking the load off platform teams, and letting the business pay only for what’s used,” Arctic Wolf’s expert notes.
Runbooks became a breakthrough tool: what began as a research notebook could rapidly mature into a centrally-governed, intuitive web app or portal-powered workflow, made available to every analyst, data scientist, or SOC operator — no Spark or Databricks expertise required. Analysts could instantly run advanced ML detections, script analysis, correlation filters, or incident triage in a secure, permissions-managed UI. “Our data apps and portals bring critical features to analysts with a click — no more hunting through notebooks or losing context,” said one Arctic Wolf expert.
Arctic Wolf invested early in Unity Catalog for data governance and lineage, ensuring every tool, feature, and runbook deployed was secure, compliant, and traceable. “With Unity Catalog, we can set permissions once and apply them everywhere — helping keep our entire data estate safe and audit-ready for thousands of users,” said the expert.
Arctic Wolf’s GenAI is now deeply embedded in the workflow. Threat hunting runbooks, incident summarizers, and process tree visualizations leverage advances in AI and ML methods and models augmented by Arctic Wolf’s proprietary data telemetry and human expertise. When a suspicious script or incident is detected, our human-augmented AI agents not only find that “needle” but also provide actionable analysis and mitigations — all in seconds, not hours.
Delivering Operational Impact and AI With Confidence at Scale
For Arctic Wolf, the most significant value of this journey is measured in trust, agility, and reducing our customers’ cyber risk.
“There’s a myth that AI will completely replace security experts. Instead, a human augmented AI approach enables us to distill trillions of security events to actionable intelligence, all while preserving trust and auditability,” said another Arctic Wolf expert. Arctic Wolf has pioneered several empirical evaluation methods to monitor the quality and performance of AI workflows in vital sectors where hallucinations and drift are not acceptable.
With Databricks as a partner, Arctic Wolf now delivers real-time agentic workflows — analysis, triage, and enrichment for trillions of security events per week. This has enabled a marked reduction in operational overhead, faster incident response, and robust data governance at a global scale. Customers aren’t just protected from today’s threats; they’re ready for tomorrow’s — with a delivery model where every analyst, engineer, and customer gains insight at the pace of the mission.
“Databricks has made it easier than ever to build AI and machine-scale automations into critical workflows, enabling better and faster outcomes for our customers,” the expert concludes. “But our experts remain at the core, ensuring the right problems get solved with the right data, and letting automation do more with less — amplifying, not replacing, human skill.”