IBM Systems
The next phase of secured computing: IBM Cloud Private on Z
January 17, 2018
Written by: Rushir Patel
Modern technologies that adversely impact businesses are evolving faster than ever. Ransomware, malware, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, phishing — the list of threats is vast and continues to expand. As new trends emerge, it’s critical for organizations to stay ahead of the curve and act preemptively rather than reactively.
The average cost of a data breach is upwards of $4 million dollars, along with significant reputational damages. Businesses that rely on legacy IT infrastructure are vulnerable to many cyber threats that can completely upend day-to-day business operations.
Deploying the right data-hosting solution can help protect valuable client data and intellectual property, avoiding millions in potential economic losses. IBM Cloud Private has been designed from the ground up for this purpose.
What is private cloud?
Private cloud is essential for customers who have data protection needs based on internal policies, government regulations or industry compliance requirements.
Most businesses move to the cloud for benefits like lower costs and better accessibility. The lesser-known benefits are better resource management tools, more flexibility on scaling and moving workloads across server instances, and better disaster recovery.
IBM Cloud Private provides all of the advantages of a public cloud in a secure, on-premises environment that runs on Linux-based server platforms optimized for data security and cognitive services. IBM is the only cloud provider that gives developers and IT operators a Kubernetes-based open container system integrated with industry-leading IBM middleware, database and analytics software.
The IBM Z advantage
Choice of server platform makes a bigger impact that you might think. IBM Cloud Private is built to run on Linux-based systems to take advantage of open container technology, while retaining the inherent benefits of Z hardware.
IBM Z provides the benefits of extremely potent security, speed, scalability and reliability, which just so happens to line up with the reasons that businesses opt for private cloud. It enables enterprises to accelerate innovation using modern agile processes, integrates securely with existing systems, and provides a strategic platform for multi-cloud integration, all while maintaining the control and compliance organizations need.
Industry-leading pervasive encryption technology automatically encrypts data at rest and in flight for comprehensive data protection. Logical Partitioning provides industry-leading isolation between workloads. IBM Secure Service Container builds upon this isolation and helps protect against internal and external threats, protecting clients from misuse of privileged user credentials, ransomware, malware and other cyber threats for workloads running within.
Transitioning to the cloud
Many enterprise business leaders run their own data centers and have millions of dollars invested into their current hardware and infrastructure. They can’t just one day say “Let’s move all of our workloads onto the cloud,” because they’ll be left with a capital burden tied up in overhead and depreciation costs for their existing equipment.
IBM Cloud Private helps them start the process of transitioning to the cloud in a way that makes more sense from a business perspective. They’re able to install IBM Cloud Private software onto their existing Linux-based infrastructure and start modernizing legacy workloads to run on the cloud, as well as develop new cloud-native applications.
Over time, these businesses will slowly transition their workloads to the private cloud, at which point they can easily be transferred to public clouds if necessary. The new IBM Cloud is aimed at creating a single, seamless cloud experience for clients using any combination of private, public and dedicated cloud environments.
This leads to the eventual goal of businesses being able to open up data centers to work with cloud services, while reducing their infrastructure footprint in a manageable way.
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