IBM Watson now available for security operations centres

New Delhi, Feb 13: Tech giant IBM on Monday announced the availability of Watson for cyber security, the industry's first augmented intelligence technology designed to power cognitive security operations centres (SOCs).

With Watson, people can analyse and interpret all of their data, including unstructured text, images, audio and video. They can provide personalised recommendations by understanding a user's personality, tone and emotion.

"The idea behind Watson for cyber security is to take advantage of Watson's leading AI, machine learning and natural language processing capabilities to help security analysts make better, faster decisions from vast amounts of data," Vaidyanathan Iyer, Business Unit Executive, IBM Security, told IANS.

Watson can now help security analysts parse thousands of natural language research reports that have never before been accessible to modern security tools.

"India is part of the global 'X-Force Command Centre' networks that is now equipped with cognitive tools, including a Watson-powered chatbot currently being used to interact with IBM Managed Security Services customers," added Iyer.

Watson for cyber security will be integrated into IBM's new cognitive SOC platform, bringing together advanced cognitive technologies with security operations and providing the ability to respond to threats across endpoints, networks, users and Cloud.

The centrepiece of this platform is IBM "QRadar Advisor with Watson", the first tool that taps into Watson's corpus of cybersecurity insights. The IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson app brings cognitive capabilities to aid security analysts in their investigations and remediation through IBM's QRadar security intelligence platform.

IBM's global network of "X-Force Command Centres" are using IBM's cognitive capabilities like QRadar Advisor with Watson to enhance the investigation of security events.

"This new app is already being used by Avnet, University of New Brunswick, Sopra Steria and 40 other customers globally to augment security analysts' investigations into security incidents," the company said.

IBM will also help clients design, build and manage cognitive security operations centres globally through IBM "Managed Security Services".