IBM Security QRadar Reviews

To be very frank, it's not that much help as of now. We are not getting that many insights from UVA, which we wanted, actually. As of now, we are exploring that UVA, and we have installed it. It's still quite new.

The initial setup is straightforward. 

The solution is still new to us. Currently, it's a work in progress with this. I'm not in any particular condition to tell what exact improvements are required. I will let a few more months go by before analyzing the overall UBS solution QRadar to get to know and final understanding of this particular application.

There are a lot of things that require modification. That's my initial observation, however, I need more time and a few more months to get to know it and get a final understanding of the solution as a whole.

I want a reduction of false positives. I want crisp true positive incidents out of it. I want to see proper user behavior. Whatever algorithm is working in the background, that algorithm should produce accurate, true positive incidents and not false positives.

We are using QRadar as an appliance for the last four years, however, we recently, for the last six months, started using UBS.

I'm not sure about the stability just yet. We've observed a few issues and we raised a supporting ticket for it.

The scalability is very good. It's not a problem.

Technical support has been very supportive. We're largely satisfied with them.

Positive

The initial setup is straightforward and simple. It's not very complex. 

We are using multiple features in QRadar. UVA is just one feature. We have overall 14 data nodes and we are almost 2,500 GB of data integrated with it and we are using multiple applications in QRadar. We have a nine-member team that manages the overall QRadar architecture, not only UBA.

We did a direct integration.

I'm an architect. Normally costs and licensing are handled by senior management.

For UBA, they haven't asked for any extra charges or anything. It's included in the licensing.

We're an IBM partner. We have platinum support with IBM.

We have segregated our data between on-prem and the cloud. All the on-prem data we have integrated with the QRadar. QRadar itself is an on-prem solution. We have QRadar hardware with us.

At this point, I would not recommend the solution to others. 

I'd rate the solution a six out of ten.

We are a solution provider and QRadar is one of the products that we implement for our customers.

The majority of our clients for IBM products are financial institutions. By law, to be compliant, they are only allowed to run the current version of any solutions that have been procured. Specifically for our area, all of the financial institutions such as banks are mandated to use the latest version.

The use cases include the logging and reporting of servers. These are typically operations servers and critical servers. You can also use it to monitor network devices such as switches, routers, and firewalls.

Endpoints are not included for most of the clients.

The most valuable feature is the integration with the GRD, for banking.

The advanced planning management (APM) features should be included. We are facing an issue where many of the software houses in Pakistan have developed their own in-house. They have integrated the APM tool with their monitoring solution. This feature is attracting clients and I think that it should be included.

We have not faced any issues in terms of stability.

This is a scalable product. 

The support from IBM is okay. I would rate them a four out of five.

The initial setup is not very complex. My team has hands-on experience with the product, which is perhaps why they do not complain about its complexity.

The distributor helped us a lot, which is something that we appreciate.

We implement this product for our clients.

There are competing products but IBM is a well-known brand so for the most part, we offer IBM QRadar to our clients.

Overall, IBM QRadar is very good but no product is perfect.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

We make some special demos that we sell to our customers. We work as a technical support L1/L2 for our customers in these cases as well.

The solution allows organizations to check people who work from home or in the office. It can help a company understand who is connected from home. 

Sometimes people give a login and password to colleagues. The security can see the situation when someone logs in locally, and they can see a remote connection. They can see this is from the login and password. They'd be able to tell if something was shared and could dig deep to figure out if it is a breach or if it is something that has been properly shared. 

The SOAR features are very good.

The product is able to handle special requests.

It can effectively search local files.

We are able to deploy in two or more different locations.

The solution is functional right out of the box and it's a pretty simple system with different kinds of solutions that address different types of problems. 

The initial setup is pretty straightforward.  

The solution is stable.

The product can scale.

Technical support is good overall.

Qradar has a lot of integration capabilities with different security products.

If we talk about functionality in general for SIEM systems, it's good.

In terms of the government sector, sometimes they do not have enough money to buy a full SIEM. That's why they ask about some parts of the SIEM system or core. It can be expensive.

It would be ideal if they offered a barebone setup alongside an appliance. It's very interesting for different kinds of customers. Most of them prefer the core appliance, yet some of them prefer barebone.

It would be ideal if the solution offered new connectors to other systems.

The reporting system could use some upgrading.

We've been using the solution for at least the last 12 months or so.

The stability is good. there are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze.

The scalability of the product is very good. Sometimes we get requests for specific functionality and usually, we can accommodate that.

Generally, we are happy with technical support. They are helpful and responsive.

The initial setup is very simple for our customers due to the fact that the first step is a demo for a customer. We need about 5 to 15 working days to make this demo. We talk about making a core system. It's not difficult to make over the Qradar SIEM. After that, if the customer needs some special function for, for example, different parts of the organization, we can propose some separate parts of SIEM. That's about two or eight weeks away. 

In general, for a SIEM project, you are looking at a deployment time of about two til eight months. 

As integrators, we can help advise clients and assist in the deployment process.

IBM Qradar has an interesting scheme for payments. They have annual payments for customers who use subscriptions for some services. I can't see any problem with the current financial scheme for this product generally. It's okay.

We are implementors. Our customers are the ones that use IBM Qradar.

We are an IBM partner.

We strongly recommend to our customers use the latest version of Qradar. It's important for security. We tend to use the latest in general.

Our customer is a government organization, including some ministries. Therefore, they use on-premise deployments only. However, they have some plans for hybrid clouds or private clouds in the next three or four years. That said, it's very hard to say exactly as the work at the ministry is about security. On-premise is deemed to be more secure.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

We provide cloud services to the users, and we have our own cloud setup over here. The major use case is when clients require the SOC to be set up.

Setting up the SOC itself is a huge investment. A customer has to invest a lot to build up the whole SOC environment, so, rather than the customer investing in the SOC environment and building up the SOC, we provide it as a service. Customers don't need to do any up-front investment. They use our service. We manage their security tools and security environment as per the compliance guidelines that come from the Indian government. We follow all those practices, and we help them procure more for their network and infrastructure.

QRadar, Splunk, and ArcSight are SIEM solutions with built-in AI/ML features. They can do the complete investigation and alert the admin about what is happening. They can also do the root cause analysis. 

There are many other features that come with QRadar. It has a more granular log, so you can integrate with various non-IT as well as IT-based components. You can get unstructured data to the SIEM data, and you can identify more what is happening in the network or what is happening in the central head office. You can also identify what is happening between your remote offices. You can also use it to identify what the users in the field are doing on their devices and how things are moving.

From the integration point of view, it is very centric. It gives complete control centrally. If a user is not connected to the system, whenever he comes online, we can see the policy updates over the Internet, and we can ensure that the data that is supposed to be protected is protected.

When it comes to what could be better, it is always what others are trying to do and what is the roadmap. It can have more integration. It should have more flexible RESTful APIs for integration with applications. These are the things that are always in demand for any of the SIEM solutions, not only for QRadar. 

Integration is ever-evolving. Nowadays, different versions of mobile handsets are there and data is getting scattered. Users are using their personal handsets to keep the data of the organization. So, it should have a more flexible integration, irrespective of the flavor of the firmware and iOS or Android version. It should have an API that can seamlessly get integrated. It should also provide more flexible control and a more advanced or analytical view to see what exactly is happening across the globe or network. From wherever a user is connecting and accessing the enterprise data, it should give real-time visibility and predictive visibility about what exactly is happening. These things are already there, but there should be more advanced control in terms of managing the security.

I have been using this solution for five years.

It is absolutely stable. It depends upon how the implementation has been done. We definitely have the skills to do this kind of implementation. We ensure that a customer's environment is absolutely protected.

It is very scalable, but it also depends upon how the implementation was done. We are providing services to one of the major brands in India. They have somewhere around 30,000 devices. We are currently managing more than 1 lakh QRadar users.

QRadar has a good technical team. They provide timely support whenever a ticket is raised.

Deployment of such solutions always takes time because these solutions are not simple. You should have the expertise and you should understand what is really needed for the business. We understand the real business need, and accordingly, we implement the policies.

We have been managing some of the security tools for the past 11 years. We have expert engineers who can help our customers with installation, configuration, planning, designing, and other things.

If you have an environment of 5,000 or 10,000 devices, three to five people should be enough to manage it.

Customers have to purchase a license based on the number of users, devices, and applications they want to protect. It allows you to take a license on a subscription basis for three years or five years.

I would recommend this solution. If you are looking for a SIEM solution, IBM QRadar is one that you should ideally look for.

I would rate IBM QRadar a nine out of ten.

We are a cybersecurity service provider, and I manage the QRadar service for my customers.

Provided that the report is prebuilt and I can find what I am looking for, the reporting is the most valuable feature in this solution. The reports are very good and very presentable.

There are reports that I would like to generate that are either not included, or I cannot find. If there is no report for information that needs to be presented then it is one of the biggest issues for the customer.

The ticketing system is not fully automated and needs to be improved.

There should be an easier permission level that basic users can use to create reports. The users include both end-customers and the technical team.  

The pricing needs to be such that they are more competitive with other vendors.

This is a very stable solution and I don't think that we have lost it once. This is good compared to our other system that had gone down three times.

I would say that it is ok. I can buy licenses when I need to scale the solution.

Our experience with technical support has not been smooth. There is a lot of bureaucracy to get to the technical team. In fact, in some cases, we resolved the issues ourselves and then explained to their technical team how it should be done for other customers.

The initial setup for this solution is complex. There are many different components, and only the IBM technicians have the permission, or credentials, to modify the system online. As a customer, I cannot go in and install it myself. Rather, I am dependent on the IBM professionals.

We used a consultant to assist with the installation of this solution.

I have used several other products including ArcSight, AlienVault, and Splunk. Some of these solutions are on-premises or in-house.

I do not like Splunk, but I think that ArcSight is a good solution. ArcSight is complicated, but it is a more mature solution with much greater options than IBM is offering in QRadar.

This is a good solution, but I am familiar with the capabilities of the other products and IBM needs to make some improvements.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten.

Most of the time, a well-defined rule helps us to detect and investigate different threat scenarios, especially with the QRadar Vulnerability Manager (QVM) and the asset model. It also gives us a historical correlation of who has been using the box, over that time period.

The pre-canned rules and reports in this product are a huge plus. Along with this, they have new apps to integrate different tools into QRadar’s dashboard. These features are most important, since it provides a single pane for viewing and researching the offenses, thus, saving a lot of time and resolving the complexity of the issues.

This product has room for improvement in a lot of areas including the default emailing template that it uses to alert on offenses.

It also needs a lot of work in terms of the flows and the log source parsing. A lot of the times, it is very difficult to add a new/uncommon log source to this tool, as we need to map a lot of fields, rather than simply extracting these from the payload.

QVM is another instance where they need to revise the vulnerability scoring and the proper remediation details.

IBM QRadar is a wonderful product, until they release some patches and that breaks something else. There are many advancements that need to be done in terms of DSMs, when it comes to parsing.

We did encounter stability issues as IBM’s patches are not stable at all. Every time they release a new patch, it breaks certain components immediately and the worst part is, it breaks certain components over a period of 90 days.

Apart from the pricing issues, scaling of the product with the infrastructure is pretty easy and convenient.

Most of the technical support is provided by their L2 support level technicians and I would give them a 7/10 rating.

We have only been using this solution. We have not used any other solutions.

Setting up the equipment and installing it across the network is pretty easy. It is similar to installing a Linux server.

Most of the time, it is easier and cheaper to buy a new product or the QRadar box. For example, with the QRadar Event Collector 1605, as and when you need to expand your EPS and the number of log sources; it’s much cheaper and the boxes usually ship with the default 1000 EPS and 750 log source limit. They have another advantage, i.e., the storage.

We chose this product based on the Gartner Magic Quadrant review. I had gone through a few PoCs and chose this tool, as it is full-proof.

Evaluate your network first. Determine the target audience that you will be monitoring and working on this tool.

It is important to note whether your organization is looking for a compliance-based check mark practice (defensive security), or active threat monitoring and out-of-the-box security posture.

IBM Qradar's ability to simplify the number of events, not only on a technical level but by making that information easy to pan through the orchestration deduplication. It is very impressive given that we have hundreds of devices that send event logs through.

IBM Qradar could improve the reporting. The tool is not designed to report. It's a great operational monitoring tool. You put it on a screen and you watch it. If you want to have analytics out of it, that's a whole different story. You're going to need more people and tools. What should be added is reporting and integration into Power BI, into some capability that produces analytical reports from the source data. IBM does not seem to care to add these features.

I have been using IBM QRadar for approximately 10 years.

The stability of IBM Qradar is good.

IBM Qradar is a scalable solution.

The technical support from IBM Qradar could improve.

I rate the support from IBM Qradar a two out of ten.

The initial setup of IBM Qradar is difficult, you need to know what you are doing to be able to complete the task. It is not easy.

We used three to four specialists to do the implementation depending on how many integration levels you're going to have. If you're managing the flows and going to be managing applications, logical access, patch management, vulnerability management then it can take more time and more people. It depends on the scale that you want to integrate. 

IBM Qradar doesn't come ready for plug and play, for your APIs, integration, and all the other elements you will need a person that knows how to do the IBM QRadar setup. From that perspective, you need to make sure that integration points to the license keys, for validation, and that can be a different challenge if it doesn't work.

My advice to others is they have to have IBM Qradar set for purpose and it depends on the role that you see your SIEM solution playing in the company. If you're offering it as a service to other companies, or you're an IT service provider or security solution provider, then yes, you probably need an enterprise base that is scalable but not with smaller enterprises.

I do think the IoT component of IBM Qradar is lacking. IBM tried and IoT is not specifically aimed at only cameras or what I call physical access points, integration into what I call scale technology. They are areas that would depend on each business to map out what the requirements are. This is not a McAfee endpoint or a Symantec endpoint device that gives you an alert.

There is more competition and innovative application development in this area we've seen in the last few years.

I rate IBM Qradar a seven out of ten.

IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson is aligned with regards to what's happening in the public space in terms of the Phishing attacks that we are seeing prevalent in the market. In the campaigns that which hackers are trying to obtain information, the use cases are very practical. The solution offers quite a bit of protection.  

IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson could be more user-friendly. You need some skills and understanding of what you're looking at, especially if you're going to draw down specific information.

Massive improvement is required in reporting. IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson is not a tool that is known for its reporting capability. It's a highly operational tool that you use for monitoring, you can sit and you can watch your alerts, whether it's flows or EPS, and you set up your playbooks directly. It is not a reporting tool. It is the worst possible tool to ever expect any reporting. It's unfortunate it's not a great reporting tool.

In a future release, there could be a bit more intelligence in terms of predictive accuracy and overall predictions. I haven't been too close in the last two, three, or four months, but I certainly would expect that their technology would be simplified to provide predictive analytics as opposed to retrospective looking back and analyzing past historic data.

I have been using IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson for approximately 10 years.

IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson is a stable solution.

IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson is best suited for large enterprises.

The support from IBM is not great at all. They can offer much better aftermarket support. They don't respond in a timely manner and it's such a challenge to have IBM respond. You have to follow their due diligence process when logging a call on their portal, you need access to their portal, and you have to provide detailed logs, et cetera. If their problem is always about integration, they have to get to the vendors. They can always enhance their support.

I would rate the support from IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson a two out of five.

They do respond but it depends on many factors, such as urgency. When we had an issue with Microsoft integration it took us six weeks to have a solution to the problem.

IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson's initial setup is not straightforward. You have to set up your network infrastructure, IP range, and firewalls, and make sure everything is secure. There's nothing easy about that.

You need application and hardware leads, firewall administrators, network engineers, and server administrators to complete the implementation.

My advice to others is to shop around because IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson is not for small enterprises, it's aimed at your larger environments that have a multitude of infrastructure and networks that are hybrid across different environments. It integrates into quite a few tools, such as your email system, and file systems. 

This tool is not for everybody. IBM doesn't have the sort of tool that helps a five, ten, or twenty user environment. This is not advisable to go and invest in the solution. There are other tools that you could possibly look at that do probably some of the functions in terms of monitoring your playbooks and integration points that are a little bit easier to map to. However, that is not a tool for every organization out there. The solution is targeting major enterprises.

I rate IBM QRadar Advisor with Watson a seven out of ten.

There are quite a few areas they could improve, such as they have a lot of technical manual configs and orchestration could be better.