IBM and Cisco join forces for security collaboration

Partnership includes managed services play and product integrations

Cisco and IBM security have announced a collaboration that will see product integrations and a managed services push.

IBM Security said its managed security services team (which currently has more than 3,700 clients worldwide) will team up with Cisco to drive new services to reduce complexity. IBM Security and Cisco's first managed service offering will see IBM Security offering managed security services for Cisco security platforms in certain public cloud services.

The vendors will also integrate Cisco security products with IBM's QRadar SIEM offering in an attempt to secure organisations across networks, endpoints and cloud. Meanwhile, Cisco will be building new apps for QRadar, with the first two focusing on aiding security teams to understand and respond to advanced threats and being made available on the IBM Security App Exchange.

In addition, IBM Global Services will now support Cisco's MSSP offerings and unite IBM's X-Force and Cisco's Talos research teams to target threat intelligence research while also working together on "major" hacks.

"IBM has long been a proponent of open collaboration and threat sharing in cyber security," Marc van Zadelhoff, GM at IBM Security, said in a statement. "With Cisco joining our immune system of defense, joint customers will greatly expand their ability to enhance their use of cognitive technologies, like IBM Watson for Cybersecurity."

In addition, the vendors will combine Cisco's security and architecture approach with IBM's cognitive security operations platform, as well as integrate Cisco's Threat Grid with IBM's Resilient incident response platform.