To encrypt or not to encrypt…

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That question has been on the mind of many of our customers for some time now. In this digital era, data breaches, hacks or any other exposure of personal data is a nightmare for any customer, both financially and for their reputation. One (part of the) solution is encryption, because loosing encrypted data isn’t directly regarded as a mortal sin. Backed by the General Data Protection Regulation (intended to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union) that will be enforceable in May 2018, encryption is becoming increasingly important for companies.

The downside of encryption was, or rather used to be, cost: encryption is a processor intensive process, impacting response times, possible software cost and overall performance of your systems. And what do you want or need to encrypt? Managing, maintaining and auditing this process is not something to take lightly.

With this in mind, the new IBM z14 mainframe provides pervasive encryption. Every core on the new z processor has a cryptographic co-processor and additional crypto cards can be added, so speed is no issue. This way the impact of encrypting data is far less, because it’s offloaded from the regular workload-processing processors to dedicated, tamper-proof hardware. For example, removing or tampering with a crypto card, will result in a complete wipe of all keys on the card.

All this combined makes the z14 the perfect machine to encrypt everything, whether it’s done on application, database or file level. No matter whether the data is in flight or at rest.

Is that all there is to this new z14?

Well, of course it is faster and has more capacity than its predecessor, it has a more efficient cache design and new I/O features. The z14 utilizes these (newer, faster) z processors for compute and a mix of dedicated z and POWER processors for the I/O infrastructure.

And of course fault tolerant, because everything is redundant; from error checking and error handling within the chips to RAIM memory and physical hardware. As the machine is open (it not only runs z/OS but also Linux and several other OS’s) it makes cloud computing with handling huge workloads cost effective.

Read the IBM z14 study >>>