Cyber attacks aren’t a question of if, but when. Yet for many midmarket and small enterprises, the tools and models to prepare for these threats have long been out of reach — often too complex, expensive, or ineffective. Traditional incident response (IR) retainers, designed for a different era, have only added to this challenge by creating financial and operational uncertainty when organizations need clarity the most.
IDC recently highlighted this issue in its Market Note, “Arctic Wolf’s Incident Response Retainer Plan: Why Didn’t Anyone Think of This Before?” (July 2025, #US53353925), where they state:
“Security leaders often end up juggling the need to improve their cybersecurity readiness and maturity levels by utilizing the proactive portions in their IR retainer while gambling that the drawdown on their retainer will not leave them having to go back to the CFO for additional funding should the inevitable cyberattack occur later in the year. The fear of not fully utilizing their IR retainer prior to their expiration at the end of the term is the other side of the seesaw balancing act that is not necessarily healthy.”
This broken model is exactly what the Arctic Wolf Incident360 Retainer was designed to solve. By moving beyond hours-based retainers and focusing on outcomes, Incident360 helps customers prepare for and respond to incidents with clarity, confidence, and speed — without the hidden costs and compromises of legacy approaches.
How Incident360 Reinvents Incident Response
Legacy retainers force organizations to guess in advance how many service hours they’ll need — a risky tradeoff between investing hours upfront in readiness or saving them for emergencies and risking under-preparedness. The Arctic Wolf Incident360 Retainer eliminates this compromise by combining full coverage for one major cyber event per year with expert-led readiness activities and industry-leading SLAs as fast as one hour. This outcome-driven model can deliver up to 70% cost savings compared to standard market pricing during a major incident, while also providing a comprehensive set of features designed to strengthen both readiness and response, including:
- IR Dashboard and Planner: A centralized interface to initiate emergency IR engagements, manage readiness activities, and build or update an IR plan.
- Cyber Resilience Assessment: Maps security posture against NIST CSF 1.1/2.0 and CIS Critical Controls v8, prioritizes improvements, and provides an insurability rating to share with cyber insurance brokers.
- Incident-Specific Runbooks: Expert-developed, step-by-step workflows for high-risk attack types, including ransomware and business email compromise (BEC).
- Expert Guidance: One-on-one sessions with Arctic Wolf experts to review plans, assess CRA results, and test readiness through tailored scenarios.
Arctic Wolf Incident Response is trusted by thousands of organizations to handle the most complex attacks. Our team’s expertise in forensic investigation, containment and eradication, threat actor negotiation, and full business restoration has delivered measurable results — reducing ransomware demands by 92% and accelerating recovery by 15% compared to industry averages. This track record has earned Arctic Wolf a place on 30+ global insurance panels and preferred status with leading cyber insurers.
IDC Validates Incident360’s Outcome-Driven Model
This approach is not just resonating with customers — it’s being validated by industry experts. IDC’s Market Note recognizes that Incident360 addresses long-standing shortcomings of traditional IR retainers. As the report states:
“Arctic Wolf’s Incident360 Retainer breaks the laws of traditional hours-based incident response retainer models. Cost certainty mixed with an outcome-based model will provide IT, cybersecurity, and C-suite leaders with some reduced anxiety when — not if — their incident response retainer gets utilized in a crisis situation.”
IDC highlights that the combination of predictable pricing, proactive readiness, and full incident coverage shifts risk away from the organization:
“Arctic Wolf’s Incident360 Retainer is a completely different and unique way of offering up an IR retainer. For one, it offers a strong outcome-based model and high return on investment (ROI), including a competitive price point, insurability, and fundamentals of incident readiness. Especially in the midmarket and among smaller organizations, the full IR coverage for an incident (with the previously noted recovery hour caps) shifts significant risk away from the firm and its cyber insurance provider, if they are even fortunate enough to be able to qualify for cyber insurance.”
IDC also recognizes the value of the proactive elements built into Incident360:
“The standard inclusion of select proactive measures (depending on the type of retainer) such as tabletop exercises, incident response planning, and cyber-risk assessments build some cyber incident response muscle memory that should speed up actual incident response should it be needed. Arctic Wolf gains by having a better prepared client base that will require less time and effort to help them respond to any use of the response portion of the IR retainer.”
IDC’s recognition of Arctic Wolf’s Incident360 Retainer underscores the fundamental shift we are driving in how organizations approach incident response. By replacing outdated, hours-based retainers with a model built on outcomes, proactive readiness, and cost certainty, Incident360 delivers the clarity and confidence that IDC notes are lacking in traditional retainers. Their validation reinforces what our customers already know — Arctic Wolf provides the expertise, coverage, and speed needed to prepare for their worst days and recover faster when cyberattacks strike.
Want to see IDC’s full analysis of how Arctic Wolf is redefining incident response? Download the complete IDC Market Note to learn why IDC calls Incident360 “a completely different and unique way of offering up an IR retainer.”
–Kerri Shafer-Page, VP of Incident Response, Arctic Wolf
