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IBM Watson for Cyber Security vs Netsurion comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 18, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

IBM Watson for Cyber Security
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
57th
Average Rating
8.0
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Netsurion
Ranking in Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
17th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (5th), SOC as a Service (3rd), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (14th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (18th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of IBM Watson for Cyber Security is 0.3%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netsurion is 0.5%, up from 0.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Elena Stefanovska - PeerSpot reviewer
Knowledgeable support, reliable, and useful compliance policies
IBM Watson for Cyber Security can be deployed on-premise or in the cloud and it is used as a SIEM solution The most valuable features of IBM Watson for Cyber Security are ease of use and out-of-the-box reports and compliance policies. Additionally, if there are aspects that are missing IBM add…
John-Berry - PeerSpot reviewer
The SOC center monitors, hunts, and notifies us of threats around the clock
I know they are working to resolve this issue, but Netsurion is currently unable to retrieve logs from S3 buckets. We use WP Engine for a lot of web hosting as well as AWS, and both of these platforms use S3 buckets. I would like Netsurion to be able to pull logs from Linux devices. We have some of that capability, and I believe they can do it. However, the way it works with Amazon is strange and glitchy. Therefore, working something out with Amazon would be great. Netsurion's SOC can be a bit too aggressive at times. We have asked them to adjust their playbook because I am tired of being notified about the same issue multiple times a day. I am aware of the issue, and it is not a cause for concern. Let's only take action on this issue if we see an actual problem.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very stable."
"The most valuable feature of this product is innovation, where the research and upgrading of technology never ends."
"The customer support is very good."
"The most valuable features of IBM Watson for Cyber Security are ease of use and out-of-the-box reports and compliance policies. Additionally, if there are aspects that are missing IBM add them in the next release."
"I really appreciate the fact that the dashboard breaks everything down into a pretty easy view for me... It shows what changes are happening to privileged user accounts, access and identity, what's cropping up. It shows application activity and whether we've got system resources that aren't online and being found anymore. It's a pretty simple, easy, quick hit and there are the supporting logs behind it. If I need to drill down further, I can do that quickly. It's very effective."
"The product satisfies our compliance, and thus, all of our auditors. All of the data that we use and store for all security events is required by our auditors to be kept in a central storage location."
"Their SOC team manages vulnerability management and IOC reviews. They stop bad processes when they happen. The best thing is their weekly reviews of what has been going on in the infrastructure as well as the things that they see and what we should look out for."
"If I were to look at logs manually, there's no way I could do that. As an example, they are 48 million logs processed a day. There is no way I could look at all 48 million of those. So, it gives me a good structure to be able to look at the different incidents which are created and do different searches."
"They have a number of integrations with different products. Google Workspace is one of them, and Microsoft Azure is another one. They integrate with a number of other things, such as Duo for multi-factor authentication. They can pull the logs from Duo to see if users are coming from bad repeatable IPs or if there are malicious known IPs that may be popping up in the logs. They are able to see that, and they can identify that. Some of the other integrations they do are from inside your network. For firewalls, they can integrate with SonicWall, Cisco, Fortinet, etc. They have a pretty wide variety of things to integrate with and be able to pull the logins from those devices."
"There are a host of things that are most valuable. Obviously monitoring our environment and reporting out different events is important. They perform a suite of services. They monitor all of our servers, all of our key infrastructure, like our DNS, our switches, all that stuff. They aggregate and correlate that quarterly. They'll tell us if we're getting a lot of login failures and something is going on or if something's weird."
"I like EventTracker's dashboard. I see it every time I log in because it's the first thing you get to. We have our own widgets that we use. For the sake of transparency, there are a few widgets that we look at there and then we move out from there... Among the particularly helpful widgets, the not-reporting widget is a big one. The number-of-logs-processed is also a good one."
"We don't have the eyeballs available to stare and watch for things, or even have the capability of building internal alert systems. So, the managed SOC has been huge for freeing up staff to work on other responsibilities. We are saving on at least one full-time employee."
 

Cons

"In the future, I would like to see threat intelligence included."
"The dashboard could improve in IBM Watson for Cyber Security."
"This is an expensive product, so making it more cost-effective would be an improvement."
"They need to continue to build the AI capabilities."
"The deployment of the agents could be a bit easier. We always seem to have a bit of a challenge with that. A lot of times the agents either don't deploy or they quit responding, then we have to go and redeploy them."
"The solution's dashboard is okay. The one thing that we ran into are issues when we upgraded to the newer version. It uses Elasticsearch for the different dashboard entries. So, we were running on spinning disks, and Elasticsearch didn't work that well. A number of the different dashboards, like my dashboard or different things like that, pull from Elasticsearch. Since Elasticsearch really wasn't working, we were having some issues with that, but we just migrated."
"I would also like to have a dashboard that I can access anytime to review the real-time data from their website."
"I would like to see a faster response when we see things like 15,000 lockouts. I really wished that I had known that on Friday afternoon rather than waiting until I got the weekly report today. By the same token, they are looking at it from the point of view that this is a system or software malfunction. This is not a bad actor repeating the exact same password three times a second. Therefore, they can tell that this is not a bad thing. However, it's not a security event but it is an operational event for me. Knowing this sort of thing would help my team and me out more because then we would be able to clear out a lot of network traffic that we didn't know was going on. So, we would like quicker updates on non-high security events."
"Where there is an opportunity for improvement is in the interface used for performing the searches. You have to understand Elasticsearch search too well for the security team to be able to take really full advantage of that part of the product. It's not as intuitive as I would like it to be for new staff coming in. The general query capability is a little bit challenging."
"I'd like to see improvement in the ease of generating reports. It seems fairly cumbersome whenever you decide to start tracking new categories of events. It seems a little kludgy when trying to generate those reports."
"I would like to see the dashboard come up more quickly."
"There's always room to improve because there would be no competition if they had a perfect solution. The GUI to perform searches within the product may not be intuitive to a new user."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The price of this solution should be lower, although I understand why IBM charges a premium price."
"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very simple to license and is priced well."
"We have seen time and cost savings. It prevents us from having to hire specialized people for this type of work. We would need to hire six staff members to accommodate the same service."
"I don't know if the pricing is by the seat but we're paying about $20,000 to 25,000 a year. On top of that, we pay for the managed support services. That runs us about another $35,000 or $40,000 a year."
"You are paying for different levels, especially as far as the monitoring goes and how often you review it with the team. The other factor that figures in is how many nodes are on your network, such as clients, network equipment, servers, etc. There are some additional pieces on top of that, but it's laid out pretty simply, as far as how much you're going to pay for a node."
"The solution is fairly expensive, but in my experience, all of the SIEM applications that I've evaluated or looked at cost about the same."
"The upfront costs have increased, and we have been locked into this contract. The cost of changing over from it is way too high."
"Netsurion's pricing is competitive. At the same time, they're the only ones who do what we want to do the way we want it. I can't say we would've paid more, but we would've had to have come up with our own solution if they weren't providing that."
"Our budget follows the calendar year. We just started a new budget year at the beginning of the month. We did budget for an increase in our threat management system selection. Therefore, we have the budget to implement and accommodate a threat management system change, including an increase for the quoted actions that we received to improve EventTracker. We are just waiting on our council to approve that budget, which might not be for a little while. Hopefully, when they do, we will be able to jump on doing something."
"Netsurion's pricing is extremely fair and flexible. The price of their SIEM product is reasonable, and you can pay for those services you want on top of that. It wasn't cheap, but it's competitive, and we intend to renew our contract."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
18%
Computer Software Company
16%
Educational Organization
13%
Comms Service Provider
7%
Computer Software Company
26%
Government
8%
Performing Arts
7%
Manufacturing Company
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

Ask a question
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What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Netsurion Managed Threat Protection?
Their pricing is high. I don't know if it's a barrier. The quality speaks to the price. The price is the price. They provide what they promise. From a purchasing perspective, I just have to come ba...
What needs improvement with Netsurion Managed Threat Protection?
There is one area that needs improvement and that is with the agents and the server that's on-site. The system requirements are very, very high. So I need a pretty powerful server to run. If they c...
 

Also Known As

No data available
Netsurion Managed Threat Protection, Netsurion EventTracker
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Information Not Available
The Salvation Army, The FRESH Market, Pacific Western Bank, NASA, American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons (AAOS), and Talbot’s Stores
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM Watson for Cyber Security vs. Netsurion and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
861,524 professionals have used our research since 2012.