When it comes to emergencies such as fires, snowstorms or chemical spills, organizations have well-planned responses that are documented step by step and shared — even practiced — with employees. However, when it comes to cyberattacks, which can be equally destructive, few organizations have an automated, coordinated response.

According to a study from the Ponemon Institute, 70 percent of U.S. security executives do not have a cybersecurity incident response plan in place. With the average cost of a data breach now totaling $3.8 million (according to a separate Ponemon study), the risk of exposure is great.

IBM Invests in Incident Response

Today, IBM made a series of announcements, including the planned acquisition of Resilient Systems, Inc., that will aim to provide organizations with a proactive, comprehensive approach to respond to cyber breaches more quickly and effectively across consulting, services and products. With Resilient Systems, a leader in incident response, IBM will be in a position to provide the industry’s first integrated end-to-end Security Operations and Response Platform offering that spans the entire life cycle of an attack, from protection and detection to response.

The combination of IBM Resilient Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) Platform with QRadar Security Intelligence Incident Forensics has the potential to deliver something incredibly powerful. With the enhanced analytics capabilities that allow QRadar to continuously search through billions of events each day, looking for abnormal behaviors and feeding that data to Resilient Systems, we will be able to proactively orchestrate a process to tackle a security incident that spans organizational and product boundaries.

Resilient Systems’ platform provides a broad set of response playbooks for different incident types, tapping into its knowledge base of global regulatory requirements and compliance actions to provide information and tools for responding to a range of incidents. This enables users across the organization to collaborate in the response process and access data from more than a dozen cyberthreat intelligence feeds as well as other integrated cybersecurity and IT systems — including IBM X-Force Exchange, one of the largest threat intelligence databases in the world.

Upping the Security Ante

IBM’s investment in incident response also extends to our IBM Security consulting and managed services with the launch of our new X-Force Incident Response Services, which is designed to help clients manage the myriad aspects of responding to a cyber breach. IBM X-Force security experts will help clients develop response strategies, including Computer Incident Response Team playbooks, to more effectively discover, track, respond to and report on security incidents. Also included is a new remote incident response service that actively hunts for threats and allows for the remote management of active attacks via the cloud.

Working with Carbon Black, whose incident response products enable security analysts to monitor cyberattacks from the endpoint, will further enhance IBM’s response capabilities.

Breaches are not going away. Every day, another enterprise is compromised with new and more damaging attacks coming from cybercriminals. By uniting these two powerful capabilities, IBM and Resilient Systems aims to give organizations confidence that they can identify a threat and kick off a targeted response drill in 30 minutes rather than managing a crisis six to 12 months down the road.