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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)
55th
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)
52nd
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
Managed Security Services Providers (MSSP) (30th), SOC as a Service (14th), Managed Detection and Response (MDR) (36th), Extended Detection and Response (XDR) (43rd)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of May 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

"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."
"The most valuable feature of this product is innovation, where the research and upgrading of technology never ends."
"The most valuable feature of this product is innovation, where the research and upgrading of technology never ends."
"The customer support is very good."
"From what I have seen so far, this is an excellent product."
"The most valuable features of IBM Watson for Cyber Security are ease of use and out-of-the-box reports and compliance policies, and if there are aspects that are missing IBM add them in the next release."
"The customer support is very good."
"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very stable."
"We use those standard reports every day and monitor them, and it probably saves us three hours a day because the solution is doing the consolidation of the log files for us."
"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 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."
"It's a deny-all policy, so there's an access list on each machine, and it was effortless to tune it for our software because we have four pieces of intellectual property used in-house, and that was super easy to get up and running compared to some of the other solutions I've seen."
"The 24/7 monitoring and alerting have positively affected our security maturity because now we have people with eyes on our security events 24/7."
"The network alert is the most valuable feature. That way, we in the IT department are aware of user lockout and invalid password attempts way before a user ever even calls in."
"What I like most about Netsurion is the level of visibility and reporting."
"Netsurion's security operations center is critical for us because they provide 24/7 monitoring, we've never had another company meet the same need in the past, and it's a valuable tool to have."
 

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."
"They need to continue to build the AI capabilities."
"In the future, I would like to see threat intelligence included."
"The dashboard could improve in IBM Watson for Cyber Security."
"They need to continue to build the AI capabilities."
"In the future, I would like to see threat intelligence included."
"This is an expensive product, so making it more cost-effective would be an improvement."
"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."
"There are some issues with searches taking a long period of time, but they assured me that they have implemented a new search function that's available in version 9, but which requires a solid-state hard drive... Depending on how many logs you have it could take a long time to return the results if you're looking back prior to the last 30 days."
"I would like to see the dashboard come up more quickly."
"Using Netsurion has not meant we have consolidated cybersecurity technologies."
"I would also like to have a dashboard that I can access anytime to review the real-time data from their website."
"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."
"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."
"They have their programs and tools that you have to put into your own environment. We basically ingest all the log data and then push it out to them. I wish it was a little bit different than that where we just push directly towards them. I do not know if that is a function that they thought would be better in terms of security, but I wish that instead of doing that, it should go from the device to them and not from the device to another system and then out to them. There seem to be some drawbacks to doing that."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"IBM Watson for Cyber Security is very simple to license and is priced well."
"The price of this solution should be lower, although I understand why IBM charges a premium price."
"The pricing and licensing seem very reasonable. The managed service part of it feels like it gives me the equivalent of a full-time engineer for a lot less money. So, I feel it's a good value."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"In the security space, it's hard to quantify your return on investment. So, I don't. We spend about $40,000 a year and so. It's hard to say if the SIEM saved that much money."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Construction Company
10%
Comms Service Provider
9%
Educational Organization
9%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Performing Arts
11%
Manufacturing Company
9%
Construction Company
9%
Financial Services Firm
7%
 

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: April 2026.
893,311 professionals have used our research since 2012.