Welcome back to Ward Solutions’ QRadar Masterclass, our series of blogs aimed at showing you how IBM’s QRadar security intelligence platform can help your business to tackle cyber-crime head on. Today we’re taking a look at some of the advanced features of QRadar and how they work.
Visibility is critical to defending against threats
Visibility over all areas of your business is critical to defending effectively against developing threats. However, while it is imperative to collect and store all original data that is relevant for your log, threat and compliance initiatives, it is simply not feasible for your IT team to sift through all of this information to spot and solve problems. This is where QRadar comes in. As a combined security intelligence platform, QRadar gathers information from a range of sources within the business network, sifting through the noise and prioritising millions of event records into a handful of actionable items. In this way QRadar can sense threats and anomalies that are extremely difficult for IT teams to spot.
Make sense of the noise
Following this, actionable items, known as ‘offenses,’ are presented to your IT team on predefined dashboards. Each offense contains all relevant information about attackers (including correlations about user identity) and their targets, and provides all relevant network and security information necessary for further forensics. This allows you to effectively plan your defense strategy.
All information collected by QRadar can also be produced as a report. There are a range of report templates available out of the box, and with the report wizard it’s possible to create new templates and edit existing ones.
To ensure that your system is up and running as quickly as possible Ward provides a number of profile settings out of the box, which are continuously updated by our shared knowledge of the millions of incoming logs and events monitored by QRadar. This enables:
- Detection of threats in the network that are not being or can’t be seen by security devices and other log sources
- Network self-discovery capabilities that build and maintain an accurate history of all assets on the network, their communication patterns, their server type, their vulnerability history and their corporate value
- Network enabled processing of incoming information to understand and prioritize an event’s severity (priority of the event contrasted to the vulnerability of the target) and relevance (priority of the event contrasted to the business value of the target)
- Identification of the correct resolution point within the monitored network: a firewall, router or switch, or event NAC gateway
- Forensic traffic that shows network and application communication at the time that events or logs were fired from any source
A scalable solution – from corporations to SMEs
The architecture and out-of-box features of QRadar mean that it is capable of scaling from the largest corporations to SMEs, whose logging, monitoring and analysis needs can be met with a single appliance.
The advanced level of business intelligence provided by the QRadar platform will ensure that your business has the edge in the fight against cybercrime.
Thanks for reading! Our next blog will take a closer look at our managed SIEM service offering, which is delivered from Ward Solutions’ Dublin-based Security Operations Centre.
Contact Ward Solutions today for a chance to win security services worth €3,000
For more information on how QRadar can help your business to effectively tackle cybercrime contact Ward Solutions today. Visit www.ward.ie or call +353 1 6420100. A number of lucky businesses will receive a free proof of concept trial worth €3,000. And if you’d like to receive these blogs first make sure to sign up to our newsletter today.