IBM-Red Hat Strategy Yields Latest Cloud Pak for Security

IBM Cloud Paks, the fruit of IBM’s RedHat acquisition, got a new addition this week — Cloud Pak for Security.

Cloud Pak for Security is open-source technology designed to uncover hidden threats and respond to those threats using automated capabilities. IBM has introduced six IBM Cloud Paks — application, data, integration, automation, multicloud management and security.

IBM Security’s Mary O’Brien

“As businesses move mission-critical workloads to hybrid multicloud environments, security data is spread across different tools, clouds and IT infrastructure. This can create gaps that allow threats to be missed, leading security teams to build and maintain costly, complex integrations and manual response plans,” said Mary O’Brien, general manager, IBM Security. “With Cloud Pak for Security, we’re helping to lay the foundation for a more connected security ecosystem designed for the hybrid, multicloud world.”

Back in August, the company announced that IBM Cloud Paks were part of its strategy to move more than 100 products from its software portfolio to be cloud-native and optimized to run on Red Hat OpenShift, which is vital to driving IBM’s hybrid multicloud strategy.

Cloud Pak for Security leverages open-source technology pioneered by IBM, which can search and translate security data from multiple sources, bringing together important security insights from an organization’s multicloud IT environment, the vendor said.

Here are the three initial capabilities of Cloud Pak for Security:

• IBM Cloud Pak for Security installs in any environment — on premises, private cloud or public cloud. It is comprised of containerized software pre-integrated with Red Hat OpenShift, an enterprise Kubernetes platform. Through the OASIS Open Cybersecurity Alliance, IBM has partnered with dozens of companies to promote interoperability through co-developed open source technologies. For example, Cloud Pak for Security includes connectors for pre-built integrations with security tools from IBM, Carbon Black, Tenable, Elastic, BigFix, Splunk, as well as public cloud providers including IBM Cloud, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
• Cloud Pak for Security connects to data sources to uncover hidden threats to help with more informed risk-based decision making, while leaving the data where it resides. Clients can access IBM and third-party tools to search for threat indicators across any cloud or on-premises location. Via the Cloud Pak for Security’s Data Explorer application, security analysts can streamline their hunt for threats across security tools and clouds.
• It also connects security workflows with a unified interface to help teams respond faster to security incidents. According to IBM Security estimates, security teams have to manage an average of 200,000 potential security events per day, and coordinate responses across dozens of tools. With this latest Cloud Pak clients can orchestrate and automate their security responses. The platform allows companies to orchestrate their response to hundreds of common security scenarios, guiding users through the process and providing quick access to security data and tools. IBM’s Security Orchestration, Automation and Response capability integrates with Red Hat Ansible for additional automation playbooks.