IBM to Collaborate with Cisco on IT Security

As part of an effort to simplify IT security operations, IBM and Cisco today announced an initiative under which they will pre-integrate their respective cybersecurity products portfolios.

Dov Yoran, senior director of strategy and business development for the Cisco Security Business Group, says the goal is to bi-directionally share security intelligence gathering by both companies in a way that reduces the amount of time it takes for IT professionals to identify and respond to cybersecurity attacks. To achieve that goal, Yoran says, the two companies will be making available free applets that provide a consolidated view of IT security events. The two companies also pledged to work together to advance IT security research.

“We have a lot of shared customers with IBM,” says Yoran. “We want to make it easier for them to pivot, rotate and drill into security events.”

Jason Corbin, vice president of security and offering management for IBM Security, says that for its part, IBM will first feed the data gathered from Cisco products into its QRadar security information and event management (SIEM) platform.

“One of the good things about working with Cisco is there’s very little overlap between our products,” says Corbin.

The results of those analytics will then be shared with an instance of the IBM Watson cognitive computing platform that IBM is training to more proactively address IT security issues.

In the interest of common defense, it’s clearly in the best interest of IT vendors to share as much cybersecurity intelligence as possible. What’s also becoming more obvious to customers is that they shouldn’t have to pay extra for the privilege of defending those IT products and services from cybercriminals exploiting known flaws in those products.