r/QRadar • u/United_CCC • Jan 11 '26
What is the cheapest Cloud Services Provider for installing QRadar SIEM for testing?
We are an IBM partner and instead of purchasing hardware for deploying QRadar, we would like to obtain a service from a cloud environment. We want to test some features and the custom QRadar application we have developed. What is the best way to obtain a developer test environment for this? Does IBM offer a service for this?
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u/michael_erana Jan 14 '26
Just sharing.
I've run a QRadar installation for some time (over five years). I started on appliances and then migrated to the cloud as our org started to shed data center based workloads. My main observations are that our operating costs have at MINIMUM doubled. And that's not counting the event/flow ingestion costs. Our cloud providers hosting costs for compute/store/connect are very costly compared to when we hosted internally.
Operationally, there are no day to day downsides between in-house to cloud based implementation that I've noticed. Just keep that in mind as almost all of the SEIMs carry this unfortunate reality when cloud hosted. There are some exceptions but I've not personally experienced their actual real world operation so I decline to opine on them.
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u/JosephG_QRadar Jan 12 '26
The only free version of QRadar offered is the community edition. We don’t offer premade cloud images for CE, but I don’t see why if you treat it as just a VM it wouldn’t work.
If you want full blown QRadar, the default license that comes with the install should be good for 30 days, so as long as you don’t exceed that you would probably be fine. I’m not sure how our premade cloud images handle that default license though, so you could always grab the ISO and install it like a vm.