As security professionals, we are in one of the more privileged and challenged positions of facing a constantly evolving environment. We need to do more to protect our customers all the time. Almost daily, new vulnerabilities and avenues of attack force us to learn how to identify, prevent and respond to an insurmountable number of attacks against our network.

In response, the industry has created an ever-increasing number of defenses and urged everyone to deploy these new solutions as quickly as possible. In fact, a recent Cisco survey found that 65 percent of organizations use up to 50 different cybersecurity products to identify suspicious and malicious activity. Unfortunately, all of these defenses rarely work together or share information; which is the key to a sustainable defensive posture.

IBM and Cisco: A Dream Team

Cisco and IBM have teamed up to address this problem by integrating the best of what each of us does best. IBM’s QRadar SIEM is able to aggregate, correlate and intelligently understand what the breadth of these security solutions are unable to do on their own. Through new applications, the Cisco Firepower Next Generation Firewall (NGFW) is now tightly integrated with QRadar to quickly and efficiently identify malicious threats, actions, hosts and domains to automate security processes.

This combination of tools simplifies the administrators’ workload and automates the response process. This enhances the user experience, helping identify and remediate incidents more effectively when QRadar works with Cisco’s NGFW, Next-Generation Intrusion Protection System (NGIPS), Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) and malware analysis offering Threat Grid.

At the heart of the power of these technologies are the combination of IBM X-Force and Cisco Talos research teams, which are now collaborating on security research aimed at addressing the most challenging cybersecurity problems facing mutual customers. IBM will deliver an integration between X-Force Exchange and Cisco’s Threat Grid, which greatly expands the historical and real-time threat intelligence that analysts can correlate for deeper insights.

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As the threat landscape expands, our customers can gain a significant advantage in the defense of their networks through these product and research enhancements. Security leaders are working together to change the equation, and the Cisco and IBM collaboration will help administrators regain an advantage against malicious actors.

IBM Security and Cisco invite everyone (except cybercriminals!) to learn more about how they are working together by watching our on-demand webinar, which discusses the strategic alliance and demonstrate our Cisco Firepower + IBM QRadar integration.

Watch on-demand: Advanced Threat Detection with IBM QRadar + Cisco Firepower