IBM Z provides a simple way to encryption and fight Cybercrime

By Oscar Michel, Masters in Journalism, DCU

IBM unveiled on IBM Z, the next generation of the world’s most powerful transaction system, capable of running more than 12 billion encrypted transactions per day.

With IBM Z it is now possible to encrypt data associated with any apps, clouds or database.

The launch of IBM Z that took place in Armonk, NY on July 17th ushers in new era of data protection. $8 trillion of the global economy will be stolen via cybercrime by 2022. Since 2013, 9 billion data records were lost or stolen. Only 4% of the data records were encrypted making the data vulnerable to theft.

“The vast majority of stolen or leaked data today is in the open and easy to use because encryption has been very difficult and expensive to do at scale. We created a data protection engine for the cloud era to have a significant and immediate impact on global data security” said Ross Mauri, General Manager of IBM Z.

The main issue with encryption is that it can degrade the performance and therefore the user’s experience and can be too complex and expensive to manage. Only 2% of corporate data is encrypted today.

IBM Z brings significant advances in cryptography technology, building on a proven encryption platform that safeguards the world’s banking, healthcare, government and retail systems. IBM Z pervasive encryption delivers breakthroughs including Pervasive encryption of data at all times, tamper-responding encryption keys and encrypted APIs.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will require organisations to report data breaches to the regulatory authority within 72 hours and face fines of up to 4% of annual worldwide revenues or 20 million Euro, unless the organisation can demonstrate that data was encrypted and the keys were protected.

The US Federal Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) provides guidance on the use of encryption. Singapore and Hong Kong has done the same. The New York State Department of Financial Services published requirements regarding encryption in the Cybersecurity Requirements for Financial Services Companies.

The war against cybercrime has started and encryption is the solution.

IBM Z  also created the most secure Blockchain Service by running IBM Blockchain services to provide the highest commercially available levels of cryptographic hardware.

“The powerful combination of IBM Z encryption and secure containers differentiates IBM Blockchain services on the cloud by supporting the trust models new blockchain networks require,” said Marie Wieck, general manager, IBM Blockchain. “Enterprise clients also benefit from the ease of use making management transparent to the application and the user.”

Regarding to the Transaction System for the Cloud Era, enormous amounts of sensitive data produced by transactions can now be better protected against fraud and cybercrime, analysed, and monetised using IBM Z. Encryption will be easy, fast and won’t impact to service level agreements.

IBM has also announced new Container Pricing models for IBM Z. Microservices and applications will enable clients to maximise the value from security-rich on premises entreprise systems in real time. Application development and test with the freedom to triple capacity of all development environments on z/OS to support latest DevOps tooling and processes. Payment systems pricing based on the business metric of payments volume a bank processes, not the available capacity.

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