IBM Security is once again thrilled to be recognized as a Leader in the second publication of the “Forrester Wave on Security Analytics” report. Over the last decade, we’ve seen plenty of changes in the security information and event management (SIEM)/security analytics space, but throughout that time, IBM QRadar has continued to innovate and lead the market in addressing new threats caused by new attackers, against new technologies and amid new business challenges.

A Bit of History

This latest report builds on our long history of leadership in the market. In the “2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SIEM” report, QRadar was recognized as a Leader for the ninth consecutive year. You could ask, “So what?” but we’ve learned a lot in those nine years. Through all the uproars of “SIEM is dead!” declared by every upstart trying to ride the coattails of SIEM vendors, we’ve remained focused on the fundamental problem: helping customers get accurate, actionable and timely insights into their security data so they can respond to threats faster.

We’ve engaged with and listened to the largest installed base of SIEM customers in the world. The history of QRadar is one of continued investment unlike any other SIEM in this highly competitive market segment. Investments are made based on customer engagement, advanced research and development, and continuous innovations including cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and open collaboration, basically redefining the SIEM market, to help customers achieve simple-to-define yet difficult-to-achieve results such as:

• Faster time to detect;
• Increased accuracy; and
• Reduced alert fatigue.

What Does the Future Hold for SIEM?

As we look toward future development, changes in the SIEM market will continue at an even faster pace than today. Increasing data, digital transformations, adoption of cloud services and ever-increasing skills shortages will shape the next wave of SIEM. How will this look? SIEM will blur the edges of clouds, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and on-premises services and infrastructure, providing an end-to-end view with seamless connectivity to cloud platforms and SaaS services.

SIEM will become less about generating alerts and anomalies and become more use case-oriented. It will also focus more on root cause identification through cognitive reasoning innovations such as QRadar Advisor with Watson.

This will provide a foundation for automated and semi-automated response with full orchestration and automation capabilities, much like IBM Resilient. SIEM will move from being an appliance-based infrastructure to an elastic, on-demand service much like QRadar on Cloud. Most importantly, SIEM will become more intelligent, simpler and easier to deploy and consume with innovations such as cognitive assistants.

Within our QRadar team, this shapes our bold vision for the future. We are well down the path on executing against it and we look forward to bringing our customers on an exciting, safer and more secure journey with us.

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