While IBM Corp.’s grandiose investments in cloud services and data processing may grab all the headlines, network protection is emerging as an equally important pillar of chief executive Virginia Rometty’s growth plan. The company is rolling out a new iteration of its QRadar Security Intelligence Platform today that promises to help defend corporate infrastructure against hackers more effectively with an extensible enforcement mechanism that makes it possible to block attacks as soon as they’re detected.

Administrators are able to set rules for how the software should respond to different threats based on considerations such as the severity of the incident and the potential fallout from a false positive. In a situation where a user belonging to an important group starts pulling large amounts of data from the system of another department, for instance, QRadar can be set to limit access requests and only take further measures if the anomalous behavior continues. Policies can be defined both manually in the native management console and by third party services through the new programming interfaces that are arriving as part the update.

The addition will enable partners and customers to augment the built-in capabilities of the platform with custom functionality tailored to their specific needs. Applications and extensions created using the APIs can be shared with the QRadar’s entire use case via the newly introduced IBM Security App Exchange, which features four offerings on launch. One integration developed by Big Blue itself makes it possible to pull information about new malware from third party threat intelligence vendors into the software, while another courtesy of partner Bit9 + Carbon Black Inc.  extends the native monitoring capabilities to employee device.

But the area where the APIs hold the most promise is supporting niche requirements that are too narrow for IBM to put on the internal development roadmap, particularly industry-specific security use cases in sectors as finance and healthcare. The company hopes that giving organizations the freedom of expanding the core feature set of QRadar will enable the platform to better target the segments that couldn’t be completely addressed before and thus broaden its appeal.

The update is part of a broader effort on IBM’s part to increase the reach of its security software that previously saw the data collected by its internal X-Force hacker tracking team made publicly accessible through a free cloud-based threat sharing platform earlier this year. More recently, the company open-sourced a homegrown authentication system that promises to help organizations reduce the impact of potential breaches by minimizing the amount of personal details that end-users have to share when creating an account on their websites.

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