IBM today announced IBM z15, a new enterprise platform delivering the ability to manage the privacy of customer data across hybrid multicloud environments. With z15, clients can manage who gets access to data via policy-based controls, with an industry-first capability to revoke access to data across the hybrid cloud.
The movement of data between partners and third-parties is often the root cause of data breaches. In fact, 60% of businesses reported they suffered a data breach caused by a vendor or third party in 2018. With the growing adoption of hybrid multicloud environments, the challenge of maintaining data security and privacy only grows more acute and challenging.
The IBM z15 system culminates four years of development with over 3 000 IBM Z patents issued or in process and represents a collaboration with input from over 100 companies. Key z15 innovations from these investments across IBM Systems and Research include:
• Encryption Everywhere – Building upon pervasive encryption, IBM unveiled new Data Privacy Passports technology that clients can use to gain control over how data is stored and shared – enabling the ability to protect and provision data and revoke access to that data at any time, not only within the z15 environment, but across an enterprise’s hybrid multicloud environment. z15 also can encrypt data everywhere – across hybrid multicloud environments – to help enterprises secure their data wherever it travels.
• Cloud-Native Development – Can give clients a competitive advantage by evolving how they modernize apps in place, build new cloud-native apps and securely integrate their most important workloads across clouds. Clients are already using IBM Z for their mission-critical workloads to build, deploy and manage next-gen apps and protect data through advanced security.
• Instant Recovery – An industry-first approach to limiting the cost and impact of planned and unplanned downtime, enabling users to access full system capacity for a period of time to accelerate shutdown and restart of IBM Z services and provide a temporary capacity boost to rapidly recover from lost time.
South African company, Emid uses IBM z/OS on its z14 ZR1 server to run multiple, highly secure client environments, ringfenced to ensure no unauthorised access to data. As the company operates in heavily regulated markets, ensuring strong security is essential. Emid also provides each customer with separate database and transaction handling resources, and runs separate logical partitions (LPARs) for development and test environments, helping it continuously add new capabilities to the core C4 solution.
Emid has undertaken extensive training on this new Z security capability, and pervasive encryption is now firmly on its strategic roadmap.
Quotes:
To be attributed to Johan Bosch, Executive Director at Emid
“The financial services landscape is rapidly changing and we needed IT infrastructure capable of supporting numerous banks simultaneously, and offering exceptional performance, reliability, scalability and security for our cloud-hosted C4 core-banking solution,” says Johan Bosch, executive director at Emid. “For us, running on IBM , enables established banks to increase their agility and compete better with fintech start-ups. It also helps the fintechs themselves to rapidly roll out trusted customer services, including transactional accounts, lending, card management services, and omni-channel banking services.
“When it comes to high-volume transaction processing, we believe that the IBM Z platform is in a league of its own,” Bosch says. “We have enormous confidence in IBM Z as our strategic platform and as our business grows, the platform grows with us, and we look forward to introducing pervasive encryption to provide even better protection for our clients’ sensitive data. By migrating Linux from x86 to the same z14 ZR1 server that runs our core-banking systems on z/OS, we expect to achieve significant cost savings but also to enhance the security and resilience of those Linux workloads.
“The IBM Z platform delivers the stability, security, scalability and performance that the banking industry demands,” Bosch says. “For me, it’s the only solution that can really deliver. In the team’s 30 years working with the technology, we’ve never encountered security issues or downtime.”