Cisco, IBM join hands to tackle growing cyber threats

As cyber security threats grow globally, Cisco and IBM Security have come together to work through technology integration across products, services and threat intelligence to safeguard the customers.

Cisco security solutions will integrate with IBM's 'QRadar' enterprise security solution to protect organisations across networks, endpoints and Cloud.

"The Cisco and IBM Security relationship is focused on helping organisations reduce the time to detect and mitigate threats orchestrating integrated tools to automate a threat response with greater speed and accuracy," Kartik Shahani, Integrated Security Leader, IBM India/South Asia, told IANS.

Cybercrime is expected to cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021.

"The collaboration and joint offering of solution is slated to begin immediately and will be rolled out in the next few months," Shahani added.

The collaboration also establishes a new relationship between the IBM X-Force and Cisco Talos security research teams, who will begin collaborating on threat intelligence research and coordinating on major cybersecurity incidents.

As part of the collaboration, Cisco will build new applications for IBM's 'QRadar' security analytics platform.

The first two new applications will be designed to help security teams understand and respond to advanced threats and will be available on the IBM Security App Exchange.

These will enhance user experience, and help clients identify and remediate incidents more effectively when working with Cisco's Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW), Next-Generation Intrusion Protection System (NGIPS) and Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) and Threat Grid.

In addition, IBM's Resilient Incident Response Platform (IRP) will integrate with Cisco's Threat Grid to provide security teams with insights needed to respond to incidents faster.

"The combination of Cisco's breadth and depth of network infrastructure and Cloud security offerings integrated with IBM's Cognitive Security Operations Platform, will help customers secure their organisations more effectively from the network to the Cloud," Shahani noted.