When you work in the cybersecurity industry, the skills shortage isn’t just a news topic — it’s a serious business challenge. How can security teams defend against cybercriminals and their ever-evolving attack techniques when they’re significantly outnumbered? How can they successfully dig through millions of events across dozens of point solutions to identify the real threats and block them before it’s too late?

Winning the Cybersecurity War With Security Analytics

If we in the cybersecurity industry want to win the battles that are happening every day inside networks around the world, we need to help security teams become more efficient. With a growing number of attackers and a limited number of defenders, today’s security solutions need to be designed to automatically centralize security data, sort through the noise, detect the real attacks and enable responders to quickly contain threats — even when they’re understaffed and overworked.

Manage Security, Not Systems

To effectively protect your network from motivated attackers, you need comprehensive visibility into activity inside the network. When security data is split between multiple siloed systems, this critical visibility is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to achieve. Platform-based solutions for threat detection and investigation can provide centralized insights into security incidents while helping security teams reduce the amount of time they spend managing various disparate tools.

Replace Manual Tasks With Automation

Once all security information is in one centralized location, advanced analytics and cognitive intelligence can be applied to help analysts filter out the noise, begin the investigation process, provide insights into the incident and recommend a course of action to contain the attack. In effect, these tools can augment your security team and free up 59 minutes of every hour during the investigation phase. This enables analysts to focus their manual efforts on the most critical tasks to better protect your sensitive data and assets.

Take an Ecosystem Approach to Integration

No single solution can solve all your security challenges, so it’s critical that vendors work together to make your life easier. An ecosystem approach to internal and third-party integrations ensures that customers receive only certified, fully vetted integrations that work out of the box. Whether you’re looking to add on user behavior analytics, incident response orchestration or endpoint response capabilities, a security ecosystem makes the integration process easy, seamless and — best of all — free.

The Business Value of a Security Analytics Platform

Recent research from IBM and Aberdeen highlighted the business benefits of taking a platform-based approach to security analytics. A single-pane-of-glass view into the IT security ecosystem provides analysts with greater visibility into events occurring throughout the network. With a comprehensive view into all active threats, analysts can more quickly and accurately detect, investigate and respond to incidents. In fact, according to the report, security teams can respond to incidents twice as fast and reduce business impact by up to 70 percent by using an integrated, intelligent, platform-based approach to security analytics.

The IBM QRadar Security Intelligence Platform offers a centralized, intelligent, platform-based approach to security analytics to help security teams respond to incidents more efficiently despite a shrinking workforce and limited budgets. Using the platform, analysts can:

• Automatically correlate and group individual events into active incidents.
• Accelerate investigation processes using cognitive intelligence.
• Automatically receive tips on how to best respond to discovered incidents.
• Add or extend new capabilities in minutes without needing to manually piece together point solutions or schedule major deployment upgrades.

In today’s environment, security teams simply don’t have the time or resources to sift through millions of events across dozens of systems in hopes of finding the needle in the haystack. With the right security analytics platform in place, they don’t have to.

Download the research Report: The Business Value of a Security Analytics Platform