Cisco and IBM join forces to fight cybercrime

There may not be a superhero team in sight, but IBM and Cisco are protecting those that need it

Two thirds of US organisations use between six and 50 different security products, and these solutions often fail to integrate well with one another.

That's one of the findings of a recent survey of 3,000 chief security officers, conducted by networking giant Cisco.

Cisco and IBM Security have agreed to work together across products, services and threat intelligence, to combat this confusing environment. They say that they will focus on stopping threats, rather than making disconnected systems work together.

Cisco security solutions will integrate with IBM's QRadar, providing protection across networks, endpoints and in the cloud. The collaboration also establishes a new relationship between two security research teams: IBM's X-Force (not the Marvel superhero team) and Cisco's Talos (not the giant statue that protected ancient Crete).

Ian McShane, a research director at Gartner, told Computing:

"The use of so many competing products comes from knee-jerk reactions. Organisations are starved of resources, in both financial and human terms; they elect to use specific answers to specific problems. This growth of products, solutions, platforms and systems isn't just limited to security: clients are drowning in vendors, agents and management consoles.

"When clients have alerts being generated from so many products, they don't know which are real and which are important. The industry needs a way to bring all of that data together and make it easier for IT teams. The Cisco and IBM announcement is a good example of two sources coming together to share intelligence and uncover threats for customers.

"What can end-users do to bring that data together? We're now seeing services that can proactively respond to threats; for example, automatic quarantining. These services automate repetitive, simple tasks, using data from multiple products."

Time is money

The cost of defending against threats continues to rise; the Ponemon Institute found that companies it surveyed spent around $4 million to fix data breaches - up 29 per cent over the preceding three years. That cost continued to increase as time went by, with breaches that took longer than 30 days to fix costing about $1 million more than those plugged in the first month.

Last year, Experian's research showed that SMEs understimate the cost of a data breach in their organisations by as much as 40 per cent.

"Cybercrime is expected to cost the world $6 trillion annually by 2021" - Marc van Zadelhoff, IBM Security

Cisco believes that customers can use its own security offerings and architectural approach, combined with IBM's Cognitive Security Operations platform, to secure their organisations more effectively. Cisco will build applications for QRadar as part of the partnership; the first two will be designed to help security teams understand and respond to threats. From IBM's side, the Resilient Incident Response Platform will be integrated with Cisco's Threat Grid; security teams can use this to more quickly gain insights into data breaches.

Working together

X-Force (still not a superhero team) and Talos will work together on research aimed at addressing the ‘most challenging' cybersecurity problems facing customers of both companies. These customers will be able to use a combination of IBM's X-Force Exchange and Cisco's Threat Grid.

WannaCry was one of the first examples of the companies sharing threat intelligence with each other. The teams exchanged insights into the malware's spread and co-ordinated their responses.

Readers will know that we at Computing are keen to get companies sharing information about breaches and security; working together is the best way to beat cybercrime. We applaud this move by Cisco and IBM, and hope that it can be extended to other organisations.

Computing's Enterprise security and risk management summit 2017 will be held 23rd November at the Tower Bridge Hilton.