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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)
51st
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)
49th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (27th), SOC as a Service (13th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (36th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (43rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of June 2026, in the Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) category, the mindshare of IBM Watson for Cyber Security is 0.8%, up from 0.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Netsurion is 0.8%, up from 0.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
Netsurion0.8%
IBM Watson for Cyber Security0.8%
Other98.4%
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
 

Featured Reviews

Elena Stefanovska - PeerSpot reviewer
Sales Account Manager at InTec System
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
Information Technology Manager at ProfitSolv
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

"From what I have seen so far, this is an excellent product."
"The most valuable feature of this product is innovation, where the research and upgrading of technology never ends."
"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."
"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very stable."
"The customer support is very good."
"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."
"I think Netsurion scales well. We've gone from a small number of agents up to thousands. So I would imagine that it would continue to scale. I don't see any issue with that."
"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."
"The most valuable feature is that we get the events: the alerts about disk space and the security reports that we get once a day, including user lockouts and the like."
"When it comes to threat detection and response, it does a very good job detecting and blocking on its own. And the SOC is a nice added value because they're doing analysis on things that aren't as obvious, on things that you can't just detect with a signature or behavior. Also, any SIEM will come with a lot of noise, so having them do a lot of the initial analysis to find out what's critical and what issues are false alarms is very good."
"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."
"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."
"The biggest lesson I have learned is that the outsourcing of this service has a dramatic impact on the organization."
 

Cons

"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."
"In the future, I would like to see threat intelligence included."
"They need to continue to build the AI capabilities."
"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."
"It would be great if they had a client for phones by which they could push a notification to us, as opposed to via email."
"Communication is always something that can be improved, but I feel that any time we've had a communication issue, it's quickly addressed when we bring those up at the monthly meetings. Usually, it's an individual that wasn't clear in the communication, it's not the process per se. You always have to be able to segregate if the process didn't work or an individual either didn't say the right thing or my people didn't understand what they were being told."
"I would like to see the dashboard come up more quickly."
"Netsurion's SOC can be a bit too aggressive at times."
"The onboarding process was complex, there was quite a learning curve, and few of our technical staff knew what they were talking about on the Netsurion side, but we were expected to do all the work."
"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 weekly reporting could use some improvement. For example, when we handed them our landscape document, it took longer than I would have liked for those details to become noticeable within the reports."
 

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."
"The upfront costs have increased, and we have been locked into this contract. The cost of changing over from it is way too high."
"Licensing is very easy. Our CIO takes care of the billing, but in terms of price point, he hasn't complained, so it must be good."
"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."
"It is a bit expensive as compared to some of the other products that have come out in recent years. Expense-wise, the only downside is that it is not cheap."
"When we first got the EventTracker product, we were using SIEM Simplified. At the time they didn't call it that, but it was more of a service thing. So, there was a bit more hand-holding and getting stuff set up, along with failure reports, that they did during the first one to two years. Then, we decided that the the additional money to have someone do these daily reports wasn't terribly useful, so we discontinued that service."
"Our pricing for Netsurion last year was US $52,000 per year."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
8%
Educational Organization
8%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Construction Company
11%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Performing Arts
10%
Manufacturing Company
9%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business10
Midsize Enterprise7
Large Enterprise7
 

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: June 2026.
900,747 professionals have used our research since 2012.