Sensitive Data Control
It’s an unfortunate fact of business life that bad actors are out there trolling for sensitive data. For them, the risk-reward is relatively low. For those whose data is breached, though, the costs can be exorbitant, whether from loss of intellectual property (IP), being socked with massive fines or losing customer goodwill.
The news isn’t all bad, however. With the assistance of several IBM security tools, organizations can place all of their data, including the most sensitive bits, in locked-down operating environments to avoid much of this. Once that’s done, IBM Z® and IBM LinuxONE™ users, whether in the IBM Cloud® or on-premise, can trust that their most prized asset is safe from prying internal or external eyes.
“Our approach to security is allowing clients to deploy workloads in those IBM Z and LinuxONE environments with the level of security controls we’ve been building into our systems over the past five-plus decades,” says Michael Jordan, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Z Security.
Operational Assurances Versus Technical Assurances
No two businesses are exactly alike, but many share similar security concerns, especially as they adopt hybrid multicloud environments.
As Stefan Liesche, Distinguished Engineer, IBM Z Hybrid Cloud, explains, “There are many reasons why clients are interested in higher levels of security and data privacy, but three of them come up again and again. One, there are regulations, policies and rules that organizations have to adhere to. Two, they’re protecting trade secrets, IP or some other types of digital assets. Three, there are organizations that have been burned before that want to adopt new measures rather than re-experiencing the pain they went through.”
But the how and why of this can become muddled as businesses move from Chapter 1 to Chapter 2 of the cloud story. For a variety of reasons, many of them are now considering placing sensitive data and workloads in the cloud rather than confining them to locally controlled data centers. As a result, they’re choosing a hybrid model where a portion of workload is in the cloud, and a portion on-prem, where these two environments need to interact and exchange data in a secure way.
