Cisco Systems Inc. and IBM Security are teaming up to fight cybercrime together with a partnership that will see the two companies collaborating on products, services and threat intelligence for the benefit of both their sets of customers.

At the top of the list, IBM Corp.’s X-Force and Cisco’s Talos Security researchers will now work together to produce real-time threat intelligence and coordinate responses to major cybersecurity incidents. On the software and cloud services side, Cisco’s security solutions will integrate with IBM’s QRadar to protect organizations across networks, endpoints and cloud, with IBM Global Services now providing support for Cisco’s Managed Security Service Provider products. In return, IBM’s Resilient Incident Response Platform will be integrated with Cisco’s Threat Grid intelligence service.

The partnership will also result in the creation of two new apps being built by Cisco for IBM’s QRadar security analytics platform to enhance understanding and responses to threats that will be made available for organizations on the IBM Security App Exchange store. In addition, IBM’s global Managed Security Services team will be designing a new offering for enterprise hybrid cloud customers together with Cisco.

IBM and Cisco believe that by linking their products, they will able to help alleviate the stress faced by customers who can be overwhelmed by many different options currently on the market from a variety of small and large suppliers. “There’s a dog’s breakfast of different tools they’re trying to throw at the security problem,” David Ulevitch, vice president of Cisco Security, told Forbes.  IBM and Cisco “work well together, so you don’t have that friction between capabilities.”

Numbers cited by Cisco would back the contention up. A survey of 3,000 chief security officers found that 65 percent of their organizations use between six and 50 different security products, meaning that there is a complex challenge in security management that can lead to potential gaps in security. “The Cisco and IBM Security relationship is focused on helping organizations reduce the time required to detect and mitigate threats, offering organizations integrated tools to help them automate a threat response with greater speed and accuracy,” Cisco added.

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