IBM Corp. today previewed upcoming updates to its Cloud Pak for Security product that it says will give cybersecurity professionals a more complete view of the risks facing their organizations.

IBM’s Cloud Pak product line is a set of applications focused on automating several different use cases ranging from data integration to infrastructure management. They’re all based on its Red Hat subsidiary’s OpenShift Kubernetes platform. Cloud Pak for Security is, as the name suggests, a threat prevention solution companies can use to find and remediate security issues such as malware infections. 

The enhancements announced today include what IBM describes as a “built-in data security hub.” The hub shows where sensitive datasets are stored inside a company, identifies who has access to them and makes it possible to track how records are used. IBM says the feature will enable cybersecurity professionals to search for potentially vulnerable data repositories from the same place where they look for other types of issues such as malware infections.

Cloud Pak for Security doubles as a hacker tracking tool. It provides an integration with X-Force Threat Intelligence, a data feed maintained by IBM that provides up-to-date information about breaches, ongoing cyberattack campaigns and other threats. IBM is broadening this part of Cloud Pak for Security by adding integrations with five additional, external threat intelligence feeds provided by Cisco Systems Inc., the SANS Institute and others.

The vision is to give enterprises an all-in-one platform their security teams can use to keep an eye out for potential threats both inside and outside the corporate network, as well as monitor usage of sensitive data. The benefit of centralizing everything in one place is better usability.

“Complexity is the greatest challenge facing our industry, forcing resource-strapped security teams to manually connect the dots between disparate tools and sources of security data,” said IBM Security Vice President Justin Youngblood. “With these updates, we will be the first in the industry to bring together external threat intelligence and threat management alongside data security and identity.”

The data hub feature and five threat intelligence feed integrations are set to roll out this quarter. IBM plans to follow up the update by adding support for yet more threat intelligence sources in early 2021. Concurrently, it’s bringing to market new service options to help companies with the deployment and management of Cloud Pak for Security. 

Photo: George Rex/Flickr