IBM introduces latest QRadar security suite for faster detection and response to threats

The IBM QRadar brand has undergone significant evolution and expansion with this new release. It covers all essential technologies for detecting, investigating, and responding to threats, including major investments in innovative solutions. IBM revealed its latest security suite, which unifies and speeds up the security analyst experience throughout the incident lifecycle.

IBM Security QRadar Suite is a service-based platform that IBM designed specifically for the requirements of hybrid cloud environments. Its open foundation allows flexibility and boasts a modernized user interface across all products. The user interface contains advanced AI and automation capabilities, allowing analysts to work with greater speed, efficiency, and precision across their core toolsets.

Security Operation Center (SOC) teams today face the challenge of safeguarding an ever-growing digital footprint across hybrid cloud environments, leading to complexity and difficulties in keeping up with the accelerating speed of attacks. Investigating alerts and responding to incidents can slow SOC teams, as they must manually piece together information and switch between disparate data, tools, and interfaces. According to a recent survey, SOC professionals report spending approximately one-third of their day investigating and validating incidents that turn out to be false alarms.

Maximizing speed and efficiency

To address these challenges, IBM has leveraged its leadership in 12 security technology categories and re-engineered its market-leading threat detection and response portfolio. The new IBM Security QRadar Suite includes SIEM, EDR/XDR, SOAR, and a new cloud-native log management capability, all designed to meet the specific needs of today’s security analysts and maximize speed and efficiency. These solutions are built around a common user interface, shared insights, and connected workflows, with the following core design elements:

Unified Analyst Experience: Refined in collaboration with hundreds of real-world users, the suite features a common, modernized user interface across all products: designed to dramatically increase analyst speed and efficiency across the entire attack chain. It is embedded with enterprise-grade AI and automation capabilities that have been shown to speed alert investigation and triage by 55% in the first year, on average.

Cloud Delivery, Speed & Scale: Delivered as a service on Amazon Web Services (AWS), QRadar Suite products allow for simplified deployment, visibility, and integration across cloud environments and data sources. The suite also includes a new, cloud-native log management capability optimized for highly efficient data ingestion, quick search, and analytics at scale.

Open Foundation, Pre-Built Integrations: The suite brings together the core technologies needed across threat detection, investigation, and response – built around an open foundation, an extensive partner ecosystem, and more than 900 pre-built integrations that provide robust interoperability between IBM and third-party toolsets.

“In the face of a growing attack surface and shrinking attack timelines, speed and efficiency are fundamental to the success of resource-constrained security teams,” said Mary O’Brien, General Manager of IBM Security.

“IBM has engineered the new QRadar Suite around a singular, modernized user experience, embedded with sophisticated AI and automation to maximize security analysts’ productivity and accelerate their response across each step of the attack chain.”

IBM QRadar fulfills real-world security demands

The QRadar Suite results from IBM’s significant investment, acquisitions, and innovations in threat detection and response over several years. It comprises numerous AI and automation capabilities refined over time with the help of real-world users and data, including IBM Managed Security Service collaborations with over 400 clients. The suite also incorporates innovations developed in partnership with IBM Research and the open-source security community.

These AI-powered features have proven to enhance SOC operations’ speed and precision greatly. For instance, IBM Managed Security Services has automated more than 70% of alert closures and decreased alert triage timelines by an average of 55% within the first year of implementation.

By consolidating these capabilities under the unified analyst experience, the QRadar Suite automatically contextualizes and prioritizes alerts, presents data in a visual format for quick comprehension, and allows for shared insights and automated workflows across products. This approach can significantly reduce the steps and screens necessary to investigate and respond to threats. For instance:

AI-Powered Alert Triage: Automatically prioritizes or closes alerts based on AI-driven risk analysis, using AI models trained on prior analyst response patterns, external threat intelligence from IBM X-Force, and broader contextual insights from across detection toolsets.

Automated Threat Investigation: Identifies high-priority incidents that may warrant investigation and automatically initiates an inquiry by fetching associated artifacts and gathering evidence via data mining across environments. The system uses these results to generate a timeline and attack graph of the incident based on the MITRE ATT&CK framework and recommends actions to speed response.

Accelerated Threat Hunting: Uses open-source threat-hunting language and federated search capabilities to help threat hunters discover stealthy attacks and indicators of compromise across their environments without moving data from its source.

Open, connected, and modernized security suite

The QRadar Suite utilizes open technologies and standards across its range of products, along with numerous pre-built integrations with IBM Security ecosystem partners. This approach enables more significant shared insights and automated actions across third-party clouds, point products, and data lakes, reducing the time required for deployment and integration from several months to just days or weeks.

The IBM QRadar Suite comprises the following fundamental products, initially delivered as Software as a Service (SaaS) and updated with the new unified analyst experience:

QRadar Log Insights: IBM’s QRadar Suite includes several core products, all with the new unified analyst experience. The first product is QRadar Log Insights, cloud-native log management and security observability solution. This product is cost-effective for security log management and supports federated search and investigation. It simplifies data ingestion and offers sub-second search and rapid analytics while leveraging an elastic security data lake designed to collect, store, and perform analytics on terabytes of data more efficiently.

QRadar EDR and XDR: QRadar EDR and XDR help organizations protect their endpoints against zero-day threats using automation and machine learning, leveraging hundreds of behavioral models to detect anomalies and respond to attacks in near-real time. Additionally, IBM offers XDR with alert correlation, automated investigation, recommended responses across networks, clouds, and email, and managed detection and response (MDR). Its unique approach monitors operating systems from the outside, avoiding manipulation or interference by adversaries.

QRadar SOAR: QRadar SOAR recently won the Red Dot Design Award for interface and user experience. It automates and orchestrates incident response workflows to ensure that specific processes are followed consistently, optimized, and measurable. It offers 300 pre-built integrations and provides out-of-the-box playbooks to respond to over 180 global data breach and privacy regulations.

QRadar SIEM: QRadar SIEM is IBM’s market-leading SIEM solution, which has been improved with the new unified analyst interface. It offers real-time detection, utilizing AI, network, and user behavior analytics and real-world threat intelligence to provide analysts with more accurate, contextualized, and prioritized alerts. IBM plans to make QRadar SIEM a service on AWS by the end of Q2 2023.

WRITTEN BY

Team Eela

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