New IBM open technology to secure firms without moving data

Bengaluru, Nov 20 (IANS) IBM on Wednesday announced Cloud Pak for Security - an open-source technology which can search and translate security data from a variety of sources, bringing together critical security insights from across a company's multi-cloud IT environment.

The platform is extensible, so that additional tools and applications can be added over time without moving data, the tech giant said in a statement.

"We're currently at tipping point in the security industry, driven by two major market forces that are converging - security fragmentation, and the march towards widespread cloud adoption in the enterprise," said Vaidyanathan Iyer, Security Software Leader, IBM India South/Asia.

IBM Cloud Pak for Security provides the much needed platform to help organizations more quickly integrate their existing security tools to generate deeper insights into threats across hybrid, multi-cloud environments, using an infrastructure-independent common operating environment that runs anywhere.

Companies can quickly search for threats, orchestrate actions and automate responses keeping their data where it is.

"In India, we will be targeting enterprise and small and medium business (SMB) customers across Telecom, BFSI, pharma, manufacturing and government sector," said Iyer.

In order to avoid becoming the next security headline, companies have raced to adopt the latest and greatest security tools, causing the market to expand rapidly - catapulting worldwide security spend to $124 billion in 2019 according to Gartner.

"We've reached a point where large companies are often using 50-100 different security tools from more than a dozen different vendors, with each point-product addressing a small piece of the ever-growing cybersecurity puzzle," Iyer added.

The Cloud Pak for Security includes connectors for pre-built integrations with popular security tools from IBM, Carbon Black, Tenable, Elastic, BigFix, Splunk as well as public cloud providers including IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services (available in Q4 2019) and Microsoft Azure.

"A key advantage for security professionals of the IBM Cloud Pak for Security is the ability to analyze data without moving it. This reduces risk and complexity while accelerating the speed with which the data can be analyzed, a tangible benefit for organizations," said Phil Hassey, CEO, CapioIT.

To further accelerate industry migration toward open security, IBM is also spearheading open-source projects to make security tools work together natively across the security ecosystem.

As a founding member of the Open Cybersecurity Alliance, IBM and more than 20 other organizations are working together on open standards and open source technologies to help enable product interoperability and reduce vendor lock-in across the security community.