IBM and AT&T have announced a series of major enhancements in their IT security capabilities that give mutual clients the ability to manage hybrid IT environments and to apply big data and analytics to secure them.  The developments come as companies that do business online have seen a number of security challenges in the face of a number of threats.  Security threats have escalated with better skilled cyber criminal groups of all types, better organization and from other points of vulnerability such as the proliferation of mobile devices.  Many companies have been in the practice of building public and private clouds and incorporating mobile technologies for emerging applications while still using traditional, on-premise resources for more business critical and sensitive data.  An unintended consequence can be the creation of ‘data silos’ that can be targets of opportunity for today’s cyber attackers.  This new offering aims to address that issue by delivering a single point of security management for both environments.

•  Reduced costs and minimized complexities
• Advanced visibility with intelligence and control across diverse IT environments
• Simplified infrastructure with less need for security hardware, licenses, and maintenance

This joint service called – “AT&T and IBM Threat Analysis service” – this solution is designed to optimize threat management, reduce cost and elevate network security in hybrid-type environments that have elements of cloud and on-premise.  IBM is delivering the benefit of real-time advanced security intelligence while AT&T is adding its network security benefits together in a rapid-cloud analysis offering that is expected to give its clients security insights available nowhere else.

 DALLAS, February 25, 2014 – AT&T* and IBM today announced a new strategic relationship to give businesses a simplified, single-source for network security and threat management. The two companies will offer business customers a new joint service, AT&T and IBM Threat Analysis service, combing security network infrastructure with advanced threat monitoring and analytics.
AT&T and IBM individually have world-class IT security data monitoring operations, each generating advanced security threat intelligence from the billions of security events they track each day.  Together, the companies will create a combined security intelligence source and analytics capability that will be unmatched in the industry.

Roll Call – here’s the goods

Specific elements of this new service include offerings from both companies

• Network Security Infrastructure and Managed Security Services from AT&T, for network-based firewall, IDS/IPS, web filtering, secure email gateway, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection services for security devices managed on premise or in the AT&T cloud
• IBM Network Security Optimization to assess and transform network security
• IBM Security Monitoring and Threat Intelligence for faster threat detection and response
• IBM Emergency Response Services for around-the-clock security expert support in responding to sophisticated attacks and helping remediate them.
• Network Security Infrastructure and Managed Security Services from AT&T – Network-based firewall, IDS/IPS, web filtering, secure email gateway, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) protection services for security devices managed on premise or in the AT&T cloud

Today’s enterprise has increasingly evolved almost de facto into a hybrid situation.  You have your legacy environment, you can also have your specialized performance and security environment – and you can have all your cloud-only elements.  Security operations in the midst of all that can get pretty fragmented.  For customers of this service, it is clear that the functionality and gain that comes from a unified security interface with these types of capabilities are tremendously empowering from a security perspective.  Quite often organizations are dependent on legacy enterprise security solutions for their on-premise solution and somewhat dependent on the host when it comes to the side of the cloud solution.  Put into a cost-effective package, there will be many organizations that will turn to this to address their on-premise, cloud and mobile environments for rapid security gains and what more needs to be said than it’s a great service with enormous built-in capabilities that makes sense.  The enterprise mid-market will probably eat this up, especially with such established partners as AT&T and IBM in the mix.

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