IBM Boosts Security Services via Trusteer Acquisition

Four Ways Security Analytics Can Improve Business Performance

IBM this week bolstered its security lineup yet again via an acquisition that adds fraud prevention software to its wares.

Trusteer’s software identifies malware that has compromised the credentials of an endpoint and prevents it from being installed. Trusteer’s product can be deployed as a software-as-a-service application or on an enterprise server for its own installed base of users.

According to Marc van Zadelhoff, vice president of strategy and product management for IBM Security Systems, IBM plans to integrate Trusteer with both its QRadar data analytic software and its BigFix endpoint management software.

Trusteer will become another element of IBM’s security division, which the company formed to develop a closed loop malware detection and remediation service delivered via the cloud. The end goal, says van Zadelhoff, is to be able to identify the variants of the vast majority of malware long before they can actually be installed on any particular device.

With billions of dollars being lost to fraud, IBM obviously sees Trusteer as an opportunity to not only expand it security product lineup, but its consulting business as well. The question most IT organizations will have to determine going forward is to what degree they want to manage security internally versus paying a more skilled outside party to do it for them.