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IBM Security QRadar vs i-SIEM comparison

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i-SIEM
Read 1 i-SIEM review
625 views|473 comparisons
100% willing to recommend
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IBM Security QRadar
Read 198 IBM Security QRadar reviews
21,075 views|12,899 comparisons
91% willing to recommend
Comparison Buyer's Guide
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Buyer's Guide
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
April 2024
Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between i-SIEM and IBM Security QRadar based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Splunk, Microsoft, Wazuh and others in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM).
To learn more, read our detailed Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Report (Updated: April 2024).
Download the complete report
772,127 professionals have used our research since 2012.
Featured Review
Dannie Combs
The alert fatigue and false positive rates have just plummeted, which is really exciting.
We have a significantly higher confidence in our ability to automate mitigations. We've had technologies across SOAR and cyber threat intelligence... Read more →
James Riffenburg
The solution uses AI to analyze different logged events, and network activity and create a correlation
The solution has helped improve our organization by providing the comfort and visibility that we are, meeting compliance, and doing our due... Read more →
Quotes From Members
We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use.
Here are some excerpts of what they said:
Pros
"As a result of the automation, we are able to manage SIEM with a small security team. I'm in a unique position where we have been growing the security organization quite rapidly over the last three and a half years. But, as a direct result of the empow transition and legacy collection of tools towards the empow platform, we've been able to keep that head count flat. We've been able to redirect a lot of the security team's time away from the wash, rinse, repeat activities of responding to alarms where we have a high degree of confidence that they will be false positives, adjusting the rules accordingly. This can be a bit frustrating for the analyst when they have to spend hours a day dealing with these types of probable false positives. So, it has helped not only us keep our headcount flat relative to the resources necessary to provide the assurances that our executives expect of us for monitoring, but allows our analyst team to spend the majority of their time doing what they love. They are spending their time meaningfully with a higher degree of confidence and enjoying getting into the incident response type activity."

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"The interface is good.""Improved our organization's TCO.""The tool is already automated in many ways, but there are some additional functions which should be automated, like sending an email, mobile notification, and integration of XFS.""Log correlation is very useful for processing alerts. It serves to follow up alerts in real-time, building an entire workflow.""Due to the skills shortage, we are able to use it from the standpoint of bringing in a lower level employee or a person who may not have security knowledge.""It provides many options for searching. I can see devices from different vendors, like Cisco, in one interface, which is good for me.""IBM QRadar is easy to scale, it doesn't affect the environment. In our office, we have around 40 - 50 users, but our clients have more users on their networks. Our organization has staff in the software department that manages IBM QRadar for us.""The solution is relatively easy to use."

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Cons
"Relative to keeping up with the sheer pace of cloud-native technologies, it should provide more options for clients to deploy their technologies in unique ways. This is an area that I recommend that they maintain focus."

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"Technical support could be improved by a bit.""The product is good, but one feature they should have is an Elasticsearch. Currently, in QRadar, there are no Elasticsearch criteria.""The user interface is a bit clunky, a bit hard to find what you need.""IBM needs to invest more into the collaboration with other vendors.""IBM QRadar has a margin for development, for out-of-the-box use cases. It can be enhanced with better support and automate the use cases for that.""The interface is very old. IBM should remake it into a more modern interface.""Needs better visualization options beyond the time series charts and a few other options that they have.""We need more features in order to create rules to detect or to meet some requirements for other areas, for example, catching the event from other authentication tools."

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Pricing and Cost Advice
  • "With a higher degree of fidelity in the alarms, we were able to avoid adding additional resources to our teams. We take into account the cost of security resources in the market and the significantly higher fidelity from the alarms that are being generated. This drove down our costs with our MSSP. It drove down my cost for human capital internally. It drove down our need to have multiple resources supporting the underlying infrastructure and health and maintenance of empow as a platform from several resources down to one. Therefore, human capital costs were significantly reduced. Our operating expenses were significantly reduced. Our capital costs were significantly reduced while tripling our capacity and our run rate reduced. It was almost a "too good to be true" situation. Fortunately, for us, it worked out very nicely."
  • "I don't have to put up with any longer with these hypercomplex licensing agreements. Every time I want to add some additional reporting as a compliance centric or regulatory specific, e.g., GDPR, PCI, or Sarbanes-Oxley, many providers would have an additional license for this, which felt a bit ridiculous to me. With the simplified licensing architecture, there were no hidden "gotchas" down the road with empow. Something I have experienced with other providers that I've worked with in the past."

    • More i-SIEM Pricing and Cost Advice →

  • "found other solutions, with more features at the same cost or less. You don’t have to leave the Gartner Magic Quadrant to beat their price."
  • "Most of the time, it is easier and cheaper to buy a new product or the QRadar box."
  • "IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
  • "IBM's Qradar is not for small companie. Unfortunately, it would be 'overkill' to place it plainly. The pricing would be too much."
  • "Go through a vulnerability assessment review for price breaks. A virtualized solution will also cut down on cost."
  • "It is expensive. It is not a product that I can provide for SMBs. It is a program that I can only provide for really large enterprises."
  • "The maintenance costs are high."
  • "Pricing (based on EPS) will be more accurate."

    • More IBM Security QRadar Pricing and Cost Advice →

    report
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    Comparison Review
    Vinod Shankar
    Qradar vs. ArcSight
    Continuing with the SIEM posts we have done at Infosecnirvana, this post is a Head to head comparison of the two Industry leading SIEM products in the market – HP ArcSight and IBM QRadar Both the products have consistently been in the Gartner Leaders Quadrant. Both HP and IBM took over niche SIEM players and have made themselves relevant in the SIEM market. We have worked on both the products and feel that this comparison is a good way to start the discussion rolling on features of both the products and how they approach the problem of Security Information & Event Management. Okay, let’s get started!!! ArcSight vs QRadar Subject ArcSight QRadar Product Birth Year 2000, ArcSight SIEM came into the market and incidentally this was the only product they have worked on. In 2011 HP bought them Year 2004-2005, Q1 Labs entered into the SIEM market modifying their NBAD platform (QFLOW) and in 2012, IBM bought them. Logging Format CEF – Common Event Format LEEF – Log Event Extended Format Underlying DB Oracle till 2012, then combination of MySQL, PSQL etc. Proprietary based on Ariel Data store and probably Annotation Query Language (AQL) Vendor Support ArcSight supports more than 400 vendors with their CEF certification program QRadar supports more than 250 vendors with their LEEF certification program Portfolio Log Correlation – HP ArcSight ESM Log Management – HP ArcSight Logger Identity… Read more →
    Questions from the Community
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    What are the biggest differences between Securonix UEBA, Exabeam, and IBM...
    Top Answer:It mostly depends on your use-cases and environment. Exabeam and Securonix have a stronger UEBA feature set, friendlier GUI and are not licensed based on capacity (amount of logs and information… more »
    Read all 2 answers   →
    What SOC product do you recommend?
    Top Answer:For tools I’d recommend:  -SIEM- LogRhythm -SOAR- Palo Alto XSOAR Doing commercial w/o both (or at least an XDR) is asking to miss details that are critical, and ending up a statistic. Also,… more »
    Read all 12 answers   →
    What do you like most about IBM QRadar?
    Top Answer:The event collector, flow collector, PCAP and SOAR are valuable.
    Read all 88 answers   →
    Ranking
    44th
    out of 80 in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
    Views
    625
    Comparisons
    473
    Reviews
    0
    Average Words per Review
    0
    Rating
    N/A
    4th
    out of 80 in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
    Views
    21,075
    Comparisons
    12,899
    Reviews
    29
    Average Words per Review
    487
    Rating
    7.6
    Comparisons
    Also Known As
    IBM QRadar, QRadar SIEM, QRadar UBA, QRadar on Cloud, QRadar, IBM QRadar User Behavior Analytics, IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson
    Learn More
    empow
    IBM
    Overview

    If you had to invent the perfect SIEM from scratch it would combine a rules-free engine and a voluminous and continually updated database of threats. Well, the dream SIEM is here today. empow uses its proprietary AI and natural language processing to read the minds of attackers and determine the intent of each kernel of IP data.

    This power is now integrated with Elastic’s database and search capabilities. Think of it as an integrated “i-SIEM empowered by Elastic" - bringing enterprises a single place to manage all of their IT and data security functions. It’s a scalable data lake solution, with empow’s SIEM serving as an active infrastructure brain that detects, confirms and prevents attacks before they do harm.

    IBM Security QRadar is a security and analytics platform designed to defend against threats and scale security operations. This is done through integrated visibility, investigation, detection, and response. QRadar empowers security groups with actionable insights into high-priority threats by providing visibility into enterprise security data. Through centralized visibility, security teams and analysts can determine their security stance, which areas pose a potential threat, and which areas are critical. This will help streamline workflows by eliminating the need to pivot between tools.

    IBM Security QRadar is built to address a wide range of security issues and can be easily scaled with minimal customization effort required. As data is ingested, QRadar administers automated, real-time security intelligence to swiftly and precisely discover and prioritize threats. The platform will issue alerts with actionable, rich context into developing threats. Security teams and analysts can then rapidly respond to minimize the attackers' strike. The solution will provide a complete view of activity in both cloud-based and on-premise environments as a large amount of data is ingested throughout the enterprise. Additionally, QRadar’s anomaly detection intelligence enables security teams to identify any user behavior changes that could be indicators of potential threats. 

    IBM QRadar Log Manager

    To better help organizations protect themselves against potential security threats, attacks, and breaches, IBM QRadar Log Manager gathers, analyzes, preserves, and reports on security log events using QRadar Sense Analytics. All operating systems and applications, servers, devices, and applications are converted into searchable and actionable intelligent data. QRadar Log Manager then helps organizations meet compliance reporting and monitoring requirements, which can be further upgraded to QRadar SIEM for a more superior level of threat protection.

    Some of QRadar Log Manager’s key features include:

    • Data processing and capture on any security event
    • Disaster recovery options and high availability 
    • Scalability for large enterprises
    • SoftLayer cloud installation capability
    • Advanced threat protection

    Reviews from Real Users

    IBM Security QRadar is a solution of choice among users because it provides a complete solution for security teams by integrating network analysis, log management, user behavior analytics, threat intelligence, and AI-powered investigations into a single solution. Users particularly like having a single window into their network and its ability to be used for larger enterprises.

    Simon T., a cyber security services operations manager at an aerospace/defense firm, notes, "The most valuable thing about QRadar is that you have a single window into your network, SIEM, network flows, and risk management of your assets. If you use Splunk, for instance, then you still need a full packet capture solution, whereas the full packet capture solution is integrated within QRadar. Its application ecosystem makes it very powerful in terms of doing analysis."

    A management executive at a security firm says, "What we like about QRadar and the models that IBM has, is it can go from a small-to-medium enterprise to a larger organization, and it gives you the same value."

    Sample Customers
    University of Oklahoma, Donnelley
    Clients across multiple industries, such as energy, financial, retail, healthcare, government, communications, and education use QRadar.
    Top Industries
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Computer Software Company21%
    Financial Services Firm12%
    Healthcare Company12%
    Real Estate/Law Firm9%
    REVIEWERS
    Financial Services Firm23%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Comms Service Provider10%
    Security Firm6%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Educational Organization18%
    Computer Software Company15%
    Financial Services Firm10%
    Government6%
    Company Size
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business32%
    Midsize Enterprise16%
    Large Enterprise52%
    REVIEWERS
    Small Business39%
    Midsize Enterprise15%
    Large Enterprise45%
    VISITORS READING REVIEWS
    Small Business21%
    Midsize Enterprise30%
    Large Enterprise49%
    Buyer's Guide
    Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
    April 2024
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    i-SIEM is ranked 44th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) while IBM Security QRadar is ranked 4th in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) with 198 reviews. i-SIEM is rated 9.0, while IBM Security QRadar is rated 8.0. The top reviewer of i-SIEM writes "The alert fatigue and false positive rates have just plummeted, which is really exciting". On the other hand, the top reviewer of IBM Security QRadar writes "A highly stable and scalable solution that provides good technical support". i-SIEM is most compared with Splunk Enterprise Security, AlienVault OSSIM, AWS Security Hub and IBM Watson for Cyber Security, whereas IBM Security QRadar is most compared with Splunk Enterprise Security, Microsoft Sentinel, Wazuh, LogRhythm SIEM and Elastic Security.

    See our list of best Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) vendors.

    We monitor all Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.