IBM To Buy Resilient Systems In Bid To Build Incident Response Capabilities

IBM Monday announced plans to acquire incident response provider Resilient Systems for an undisclosed sum and launch a new incident response service as part of a broader effort to boost its capabilities in the fast growing market for such capabilities.

IBM also announced a partnership with endpoint security provider Carbon Black under which IBM will use the latter’s incident protection and response technologies to deliver remote incident response services to enterprise customers.

The acquisition and partnership are part of an IBM effort to build services for responding to security incidents in a timely, organized and coordinated manner, Caleb Barlow, vice president of IBM Security, said in comments to Dark Reading. IBM customers are increasingly demanding such capabilities, he says.

Resilient Systems offers a response management platform that is designed to let security teams automate response processes and resolve security incidents more effectively. The company describes its technology as enabling organizations to develop dynamic action pans for nearly 20 different incident scenarios from malware and denial of service attacks to lost devices.

Resilient’s platform is designed to walk enterprise security teams through the incident response process and supports comprehensive analytics, dashboards and reporting features. With headquarters in Cambridge, MA, Resilient employs around 100 people and claims numerous customers among Fortune 500 companies as well as small and mid sized businesses in the financial services, healthcare, retail and government sectors.

Once the acquisition is finalized, Resilient’s Incident Response Platform will complement IBM’s existing QRadar security intelligence platform to create a comprehensive security operations and response capability, Barlow says. IBM’s new X-Force Incident Response Services will be based on iResilient Systems’ as well as IBM’s existing QRadar security incident and event management (SIEM) platform.

“It will also include remote incident response capabilities via our technology partnership with Carbon Black,” Barlow said. Carbon Black’s technology will enable IBM security analysts to conduct forensics on compromised endpoint devices, determine where a breach first occurred, map it across other devices, contain it quickly, and shut it down, Barlow says.

The Resilient purchase gives IBM a way to unite the technical and business aspects of incident response said David Monahan, an analyst with Enterprise Management Associates in an analyst note. With the acquisition, IBM will have a comprehensive set of capabilities ranging from incident detection and forensics to analysis, remediation, process management, resource coordination and communications, he said.

The dramatic rise in mega security breaches in recent times has heightened the need for organizations to have capabilities for quickly detecting and mitigating security incidents. Numerous recent studies and surveys have shown that one of the biggest challenges enterprises face these days is in knowing when they have had a security incident and then having a process for responding to and mitigating it.

“Organizations of all sizes can no longer afford to under-service or ignore incident response,” Monahan said. “IR must move beyond a loose semblance of scattered, incomplete, outdated, and untested documentation to an actual programmatic collection of documentation and tools.”

In a study of 600 organizations conducted last year by the Ponemon Institute, 75 percent said they were not prepared to deal with a security incident. Only 30 percent had a formal incident response plan in place while an even smaller 17 percent had an incident response plan that was applied consistently across the enterprise.

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