ArcSight vs QRadar - Key Differences and Comparison

As you know, cyber-attacks would severely damage enterprises if the security systems are not appropriately managed. It is essential that we detect threats in the environment earlier before they could attack and harm data and other resources. In this way, ArcSight and QRadar are two well-known SIEM (Security Identification and Event Management) tools that provide effective threat control and protection to networks in the best possible ways.

This blog will compare the two technologies, ArcSight and QRadar, in terms of their various aspects, such as products, features, deployment, pricing, and benefits.

• What is ArcSight?
• What is QRadar?
• ArcSight Vs QRadar - Products Offered
• ArcSight Vs QRadar - Searching Behaviour on Google
• Comparison of Key Features
• Solutions Provided
• How can be they deployed
• Strategies Followed
• ArcSight Vs QRadar - Pros and Cons
• Business Outcomes
• Pricing

What is ArcSight?

ArcSight is the security solution tool offered by Microfocus, which provides you with real-time threat detection based on SIEM. As ArcSight makes extensive visibility across enterprises, it mitigates threats through real-time threat detection and AI-based analytics. With automated workflow, ArcSight provides effective threat detection, threat analysis, and generates insights.

What is QRadar?

QRadar is another SIEM tool offered by IBM, which provides an advanced solution to detect threats in your network quickly and prioritize the mitigation of threats through intelligence solutions. Initially, it collects security log data of the entire environment, analyses it, and finally detects threats. At best, QRadar optimizes data usage through effective normalization and aggregation processes, making data exploration as simple to identify threats.

ArcSight vs QRadar – Products Offered

Microfocus offers powerful products such as ArcSight ESM, ArcSight Intelligence, ArcSight Recon, ArcSight Security Open Data Platform, ArcSight SOAR (Security Orchestration Automation and Response), and ArcSight Sentinel.

• ArcSight ESM (Enterprise Security Manager): Offers faster and advanced threat protection to your SOC – Security Operations Center. Works alongside other tools such as ArcSight Intelligence and ArcSight Recon to deliver the best results.
• ArcSight Intelligence: Provides you insights about networks and threats based on behaviour analytics and detects unknown threats precisely.
• ArcSight Recon: Collects, organizes, and enriches data effectively. The built-in templates ease the compliance requirements for data security.
• ArcSight Open Platform: Enriches raw data and simplifies them in order to be analyzed by analytical tools. Collects data from all the sources and widens security monitoring throughout your enterprise.
• Arc SOAR: Automates tasks, prioritizes, and supports to respond quickly to threats. Generates useful reports to make confident and concrete decisions instantly.
• ArcSight Sentinel: Manages large data volume and detects threats with greater visibility. Manages risks proactively.

On the other side, QRadar offers you comprehensive solutions such as QRadar XDR Connect, QRadar EDR, QRadar SIEM, QRadar SOAR, and QRadar NDR.

 Let us see the primary objective of these tools one by one.

• QRadar XDR Connect: Automates SOC and streamline workflows. Optimizes time by prioritizing the most pressing security issues firsthand. Easily connects with other tools, detects threats across multiple sources, and gains actionable insights.
• QRadar SIEM: Generates actionable insights through intelligent security analytics. Attains comprehensive visibility across the entire environment and supports you to encounter critical threats.
• QRadar NDR: Detects threats by tracking and analyzing the high volume of data transfer across networks from start to end across a network. Over and above, uncover hidden threats amidst the large quantity of data flow.
• QRadar SOAR: Supports speeding up threat detection and response measures through automation. Increased visibility across the incidents allows you to make decisions confidently.

ArcSight Vs QRadar –  Searching Behaviour on Google

According to Google Trends, both platforms have been highly interested in people for the last five years. Even though ArcSight had been searched by people five years before, both the products are interested people almost equally in recent years.

ArcSight Vs QRadar – Comparison of Key Features

ArcSight Vs QRadar – Solutions Provided

ArcSight provides solutions for large-scale enterprises and mid-market companies of all types, including Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, the Public Sector, Government Services, Telecommunications, and Transportation. In addition, ArcSight offers you various solutions such as advanced threat detection and response, people-centric attack mitigation, pre-emptive threat detection, and SecOps compliance.

On the other hand, QRadar provides security solutions to mid-market enterprises and small businesses as well. Computer and Network Security, IT and services, banking are the main sectors where QRadar can be leveraged. Specifically, QRadar helps you detect threats and remove them from networks as soon as possible. Aside from this, QRadar offers you a range of solutions such as cloud security, endpoint security, incident response, insider threats, network security, ransomware removal, threat hunting, and threat intelligence. According to a McKinsey survey, 50 % of the threats are made internally. In this way, QRadar is best to encounter internal threats.

ArcSight Vs QRadar – How can be they Deployed?

ArcSight Vs QRadar – Strategies Followed

1. ArcSight

• Categorization and Normalisation: These processes just help you convert the security logs into a unified format. Therefore, it accelerates the process of identifying severe threats at the very beginning and resolving them.
• Layered Analytics: It supports your SOC to detect threats before they can cause harm to networks. ArcSight combines three analytic solutions and forms a layered analytic, which will help to open up new insights and achieve holistic threat protection.
• RTC Engine: The real-time advanced and multi-dimensional correlation engine achieves speedy threat detection and response through intelligent rules and dashboards.
• Unsupervised ML: ArcSight implements unsupervised machine learning to identify insider threats and outside attacks. And the AI-enabled security analytics and UEBA (User and Entity Behaviour Analytics) support you to identify the elusive threats.

2. QRadar

• Zero Trust: As per this strategy, QRadar generates alerts for threat detection by examining every single security log thoroughly. Not only does it detect threats, but it prioritizes them and acts on them.
• Federated Search: According to this strategy, security solutions, end-point reduction, and security tools can be connected for analyzing data stored across various data sources. It helps you to uncover the hidden threats from the disparate data too.
• Orchestration and Automation: With the support of automation tools and third-party integrations, threats are identified quickly and responded to quickly. So, it increases productivity and efficiency.

ArcSight Vs QRadar – Pros and Cons

ArcSight - Pros

• Best for distributed enterprises due to its scalability
• Good in real-time activity monitoring, incident reporting, and asset management
• Good in vulnerability assessment
• Achieves real-time correlation
• Dashboards and visualization are highly equipped

ArcSight - Cons:

• Deployment is limited
• A complex tool to implement and maintain
• Hard to troubleshoot for a large environment

QRadar - Pros

• Enriched features with ‘N’ number of use cases
• Good in threat intelligence, advanced analytics, and data examining
• Easy and more options for the deployment
• Strong security needs can be addressed
• Gains good visibility across both on-premises and cloud for threat detection

QRadar - Cons

• Cost is comparatively higher than ArcSight
• Complex licensing process
• Needs extra learning to be familiar with the tool.

ArcSight Vs QRadar – Business Outcomes

ArcSight:

• The security issues can be easily communicated through dashboards, reports, trends, etc., which can be shared with other systems and departments either in package form or syncing processes.
• While sharing data with external big data platforms such as Hadoop, ArcSight easily integrates with those platforms; as a result, it helps to detect threats and mitigate them effectively.
• ArcSight intelligence helps you identify unknown threats presumingly and prepares people to prevent them before they arise.
• The workflow automation feature of ArcSight prioritizes threats and escalates them automatically, which reduces the meantime to respond to threats.
• Enriches data by aggregating and normalizing processes, which in turn helps you improve performance and ROI.
• Supports people-centric attack mitigation and operational efficiency.
• Achieves pre-emptive threat detection and SecOps compliance.

QRadar:

• Achieves centralized visibility across security logs and flows across the entire organization
• QRadar NDR eliminates blind spots in the network by covering the entire data flow
• Through Machine Learning capabilities, QRadar helps you detect threats automatically and faster before any severe damage occurs.
• Reduces dwell-time by automating manual tasks using playbooks along with guided workflows
• Organizes systems and tools effectively during optimization and scaling processes
• Pre-built templates and reports allow you to speed up the internal and external compliances.
• End-to-end security can be achieved in the complex hybrid cloud environment.

ArcSight Vs QRadar – Pricing

QRadar provides you with three types of pricing: enterprise-wide, usage-based, and appliance-based.

On the other side, ArcSight makes pricing based on data ingestion and events per second.

Conclusion

While analyzing and comparing the different aspects of ArcSight and QRadar, both ArcSight and QRadar have excellent features to ensure security across the environment aforementioned. Though QRadar is popular in the market, ArcSight is no way less than QRadar in terms of its features and benefits. Above all, there is no hard and fast rule when choosing a product. Just stay up to date while choosing a product that precisely meets your demands.