IBM unveils new platform z15 powered with data privacy capabilities

IBM has 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 percent of businesses reported they suffered a data breach caused by a vendor or third party in 2018, according to Ponemon and Opus 2018 Data Risk in the Third-Party Ecosystem: Third Annual Study. 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 modernise 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.

Businesses today have reportedly already completed the first 20 percent of their cloud journey. z15 is uniquely positioned to help companies take this next step in their digital transformation efforts to move mission critical workloads (the other 80 percent) to the cloud by delivering a hyper-secure, agile and continuously available platform.

As the centre of a secured hybrid cloud strategy, today, two-thirds of the Fortune 100 are using IBM Z. With z15, clients can process up to 1 trillion web transactions a day, support massive databases, and scale-out to 2.4 million Linux containers in a single z15 system — up to 2.3 times more Linux containers per core on a z15 LPAR versus a compared bare-metal x86 platform, running an identical web server load. They can address mission-critical latency challenges by delivering up to 30x lower latency and up to 28 times less CPU utilisation on z15 by compressing secure web transaction data before encryption using the Integrated Accelerator for z Enterprise Data Compression instead of using software compression. They can also leverage 12 percent more cores than z14, and 25 percent more memory than z14 to help meet the needs of today’s digital businesses.