Optimizing your path to modern SIEM
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The four pillars of smarter security
Whether it’s through a managed or outsourced solution, one you’ve built with open source tools, a legacy approach – or even just plans to finally deploy one – there’s no discounting the importance of having a security information and event management (SIEM) strategy.
While there are a number of approaches to help keep pace with today’s rapidly-changing threat environment, they may also present significant operational and security challenges that prevent you from fully optimizing your SOC – and delivering full value to your business.
The question now is this: what if you could take a more proactive, automated and holistic SIEM approach that drives security everywhere in your enterprise today and tomorrow – and contributes to a smarter, safer digital world? One that quickly and efficiently addresses major operational and security issues in your SOC to provide:
Better management of alert volumes
Greater threat priority clarity
Better integration of tools and platforms
Reduced manual workflows
Solutions to address staffing shortages
Alignment with compliance mandates
This is the value of IBM Security QRadar® SIEM, built on a flexible architecture to help you deploy security everywhere it’s needed – on premise, in public clouds, hybrid clouds or as a hosted SaaS solution. It’s the modern, comprehensive security portfolio for accurately detecting and prioritizing threats across the enterprise, with intelligent insights and tools to quickly respond to incidents and reduce their potential impact.
73%
of surveyed organizations recognized the value of QRadar within one week1
Examine top use casesQRadar helps you proactively address the ever-changing landscape of threats – known and unknown — through four pillars of modernized security:
Centralized visibility
Prioritized
threats
Automated investigation
Integrated response
QRadar centralizes visibility with out-of-the-box support for thousands of security use cases and expands visibility with 500+ validated integrations for security and IT ecosystems. You can gain centralized insights across users, endpoints, clouds, applications and networks through a single, unified view.
That visibility powers the advanced analytics of the QRadar engine to prioritize threats. Tuned through years of protecting clients across industries and embedded with security best practices, these analytics and models identify abnormal behavior and anomalous activity for known and unknown threats – both inside your enterprise and externally.
51%
fewer false positives than other SIEM solutions on the market on average1
50%
increase in ability to detect attacks1
With security teams often overwhelmed and stretched thin, QRadar also facilitates automated investigations powered by AI. With curated internal and external context, as well as supervised machine learning to prioritize and automate triage, QRadar can deliver a 60x improvement over manual efforts.2
Once threats have been validated, QRadar accelerates integrated response and remediation on each incident by working seamlessly with IBM Cloud Pak for Security, offering up to an 8x increase in speed to respond.3
In addition, QRadar is designed to provide out-of-the-box content to help businesses manage the latest updates to a full range of compliance mandates, including GDPR, ISO 27001, HIPAA and others.
Maximize QRadar with proper insights, installation, deployment and support QRadar is essential technology for any organization. But it becomes even more effective when paired with the people and processes of IBM Security Intelligence Operations and Consulting Services.
Trusted by the majority of leading companies across industries and around the world, let's talk about how we can help customize and optimize intelligence-driven operations across your entire enterprise.
Read: How QRadar stacks up against the competition
View the demo 02
1 min read
Centralized visibility
Your current SIEM may feel like it provides enterprise-wide visibility. But as you look across your security landscape – from on premises to cloud-based to operational technology environments and elsewhere – questions may remain:
- Do we have full environmental awareness?
- Are we able to monitor our entire attack surface?
- Do we have too many tools and too much independent data?
- Do we have a protection gaps between these tools?
- Are manual processes costing too much time and prone to too many errors?
How IBM Security people and processes can help answer these questions
Where are breaches coming from?
52%
malicious attack4
23%
human error4
25%
systems glitches4
Not knowing what could be coming – or where it could be coming from – is one of the most important issues to be addressed in any SIEM. From here, you can better prioritize threats, investigate issues and mount more effective responses.
Better together: layering user context onto SIEM data for detecting insider threats.
QRadar provides centralized visibility into disparate security data across the enterprise. By collecting, parsing and normalizing log and flow data, you’ll gain a holistic, comprehensive view of previously siloed environments.
Easily ingest security-relevant data across users, endpoints, clouds, networks and containers, plus deep insights into vulnerability management and DNS analytics. With the IBM Security QRadar Cloud Visibility App, you can see cloud traffic and flows across AWS, Azure/O365, Google Cloud and IBM Cloud.
With 500+ out-of-the-box integrations, 200+ IBM-validated and third-party applications, QRadar provides immediate, meaningful insights into your security posture and the threat landscape – all through a unified interface.
QRadar provides support for more than a thousand leading security use cases including insider threats, advanced threats, cloud security and more.
Gain deeper understanding of application, system and network traffic to see between gaps in logging, auto-discover assets, log sources, and rogue or potentially misconfigured cloud environments.
Visualize gaps in monitoring on the MITRE ATT&CKExternal Link framework to assess how your security team can help the enterprise proactively improve its security posture.
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Prioritized threats
If everything is important, then nothing is. This old adage can apply to many instances, but is particularly apt in prioritizing the sheer volume of security alerts your team faces each day. The result can be a complex, unclear threat picture, clouded by:
- Too many alerts from too many tools
- Inability to detect critical attacks quickly
- No clear knowledge of compromised users, accounts or assets
- No connection of insights
Get expert guidance in assessing security capabilities and maturity against best practices
Alarmed about alerts?
34%
of security leaders say alert volumes have increased5
48%
of all alerts are actually invesitgated6
50%
of legitimate alerts are not investigated6
QRadar changes the way your security team prioritizes threats. With access to IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence, QRadar offers you newfound visibility across users, applications and endpoints, leveraging proven analytics and models to parse out the most relevant and pressing threats. Your security team can now have a smarter, more responsive threat response strategy to:
Employ advanced analytics to detect known and unknown threats, identifying attacks as they occur to stop them from progressing on the kill chain. Identify user, endpoint, cloud and network anomalies with prebuilt detection analytics created and tuned from real-world threats discovered by the IBM X-Force® Threat Intelligence team. Detection is accomplished by a combination of correlation, SIEM use cases and behavioral models.
Consolidate thousands of alerts from disparate tools into prioritized, high fidelity alerts for triage and investigation. QRadar chains activity from multiple log sources and various security tools to provide a single, consolidated point for investigation.
Through native support for network flows, QRadar can correlate Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) as they traverse the network enabling real-time visibility and detection of threats. QRadar is infused with premium threat intelligence from IBM X-Force and supports additional feeds from threat intelligence vendors or 3rd party feeds in STIX/TAXII.
Included behavioral analytics use machine learning models to detect abnormal user behavior that may indicate credential compromise or an insider threat. QRadar baselines user behavior from underlying logs and network flows, then applies anomaly detection models for 160+ insider threat use cases. This gives analysts the ability to easily see risky users, view anomalous activities and drill down into underlying user activity contributing to individual user risk scores.
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Automated investigation
There are only so many hours in the day – and you only have so many resources. So when it comes to investigating security threats that can damage the business, you and your teams face some significant challenges:
- Searching for Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) across internal and external data sources
- Conducting root cause analysis
- Complex and lengthy investigations
- Lack of staff bandwidth and experience
- Inability to determine if similar threats have occurred previously
How IBM Security Intelligence Operations and Consulting Services can help
QRadar helps you to force multiply your team through automated investigation of threats with greater speed, accuracy and consistency. These faster, more efficient investigations reduce mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) to help mitigate damage, while AI tools help your team overcome resource constraints and analyst fatigue.
The impact of QRadar:
60x
more effective investigations with AI compared to manual investigations7
QRadar automates manual tasks to speed up threat investigations, while IBM Security QRadar Advisor with Watson provides AI-driven insights to find commonalities from internal and external data sources. This enriches threat intelligence with deeper understandings into root causes and attack progressions against the MITRE ATT&CK framework.
With prioritized alerts and actionable insights driven by machine learning, analysts can focus on the most critical threats and remove false positives. IBM Security QRadar Advisor with Watson provides AI-supervised offense prioritization and disposition analysis.
Expand your global security threat intelligence by performing federated investigations across IBM and third-party data sources through a single, unified interface.
Read: 7 questions before adopting a cybersecurity cognitive solution
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Integrated response
When you’re under attack, the best response is your own plan of attack. Yet security teams at many SOCs face an array of challenges that often prevent an effective series of responses:
- Too many incidents to manage
- Difficulty prioritizing responses
- Too much time taken to contain and remediate incidents
- Varying skill sets leading to inconsistent execution
Expertise to help improve your SOC or create one from the ground up
Time is always of the essence
280 days
average time to identify and contain a data breach8
315 days
average lifecycle of a malicious attack from breach to containment8
USD 1.2M
breach lifecycles under 200 days cost USD 1.2M less than ones over 200 days8
Read: Our Cost of a Data Breach 2020 report
The combination of centralized visibility, prioritized threats and automated investigations — the first three pillars we’ve outlined for QRadar – powers your team’s ability to mount a robust integrated response, transforming a defensive posture into a proactive one.
QRadar helps enrich threat intelligence and accelerates incident triage by enabling IBM Watson bi-directional searches on IBM Cloud Pak for Security artifacts (IP address, hostname, file hash and more). This streamlines and automates manual, repetitive tasks to alleviate analyst fatigue.
Leverage the open-source Red Hat AnsibleExternal Link platform to scale thousands of automated containment actions – create new firewall rules to contain threats, remove suspicious files, upgrade deficient servers with latest patches, disposition and closing of basic incidents, and more.
Collaborate with privacy and legal teams on data breach investigations using a global knowledge base of more than 170 privacy reporting regulations from the IBM Resilient SOAR Privacy Add-On for IBM Cloud Pak for Security.
Capture and digitize enterprise and industry best practices in playbooks for guided responses to common incidents.
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Client success stories
The world’s enterprises vary widely across purpose, size, geography and industry. Yet they share many of the same valuable lessons in their efforts to modernize SIEM – including working with our security experts.
Learn more about QRadar client success stories
Banking
Cognitive capabilities for early detection of cyber threats
Banking
Staying ahead with technologies built for the future
Computer Services
Deploying and tuning a SOC in less than six months
Computer Services
Boosting speed and flexibility of investigations
Consumer Products
Out-of-the-box use cases for a dairy company
Entertainment
Cloud security designed to weather any storm
Insurance
Meeting compliance deadlines, achieving operational sophistication
Healthcare
Cybersecurity preparedness and resilience in national health
Utilities
Fighting back against targeted attacks
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Help in the ways you need most
Continual escalation in the number and sophistication of security threats. Severe staffing shortages. Fellow executive indifference about the importance of security. These and a litany of other issues leave little room for doubt as to why the average CISO tenure is now just 18 to 24 months.9 And why nearly 65 percent of IT and security professionals are so burned out that they’re on the verge of quitting.9
This isn’t a problem that impacts just your enterprise. It’s a serious threat to the cyber security profile of the entire world.
Addressing your security challenges with QRadar is only part of the comprehensive approach we recommend.
Technology
IBM Security products monitor more than one trillion security events each month
People
A culture of promoting security driven by more than 8,000 security experts
Processes
Trusted by virtually every leading financial services, healthcare and energy company
As the world’s largest enterprise security vendor, IBM is committed to making security less complex in your enterprise and more united across the globe.
Advanced technologies like QRadar that dramatically expand protection capabilities are just the beginning. We also live our values and commitment to a more secure world, fostered by our roster of leading security industry experts and battle-tested processes that provide deeper understandings of behavior, data, workflows and enterprises – and the threats we all face.
Whether you’re looking to deploy on-premises, in the cloud or in hybrid multicloud environments, taking full advantage of IBM QRadar SIEM starts with IBM Security Intelligence Operations and Consulting Services. Our experts can help your enterprise improve your Security Operations Center (SOC) or create one from the ground up placing SIEM at the center of your efforts. Our methodology is driven by:
- Assessment of security intelligence and operations against best practices
- Design of a robust SOC using security intelligence and analytics
- Building of a world-class SOC from initial plans through full deployment
- Optimization of your SOC with in-depth analysis and strategic recommendations
As you expand your security efforts beyond QRadar, our security consultants can help you maximize the value of your SIEM solution along with your entire security portfolio. With expertise that spans across industries, regions and IT environments, our team works side-by-side with you to deploy, optimize and expand your security tools – regardless of vendor.
Connect with IBM Security Expert Labs now
For an end-to-end program that aligns with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, explore IBM X Force® Threat Management (XFTM). It’s comprehensive management of the full threat lifecycle: insight, prevention, detection, response and recovery.
Our program of consulting and managed services can offer your organization advantages in experience, staffing, scope and access to data and technology. XFTM is an intelligent mix of cognitive tools, automation, orchestration and human guidance that accelerates and enhances each phase of the threat management lifecycle
XFTM has been built by our clients, for our clients, giving you access to the combined global expertise of IBM Security and an integrated ecosystem of leading security partners.
You’re not alone in your mission to protect your enterprise. We’re here to help.