Here's why IBM Z Mainframe Wants to Encrypt the World

IBM’s new approach to fight cyber criminals is a mainframe that enables encryption of an entire dataset and renders it useless to hackers.

Hackers are everywhere and even ships in high seas can be compromised by their malicious deeds.

According to IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index, more than 4 billion records were leaked in 2016 alone, which is over a 500% increase from the previous year.

As cyber criminals keep on keeping up with security companies, there’s urgent need to find novel approaches and countermeasures.

Securing Data by Making it Unreadable

Think about it: if all sensitive data is efficiently encrypted and hackers can’t decrypt it, they wouldn’t be able to take advantage. Their attempts to breach security systems would be pointless.

A recent study by the Ponemon Institute reveals that, after using effective incident response teams, the extensive use of encryption is the second factor in reducing the cost of data breach (by an average of $16 USD per record).

However some companies show passivity when it comes to data encryption; some just don’t bother, while others can’t afford to encrypt everything.

Current data encryption solutions (on-premises or cloud-based) can degrade systems performance, aside from being too complex and costly to deploy in the first place.

As a result, IBM estimates that, since 2013, of over 9 billion data records stolen, only 4% of the data was ever encrypted, and the company wants to remedy this.

One-Click Encryption With IBM Z Mainframe

IBM’s security solutions span the whole spectrum, from hardware and software to web services, but the company has a “universal encryption” approach to the problem of data protection.

As a leading tech company, IBM wants to put an end to the global pandemic of security breaches and to do that it is betting on full encryption of sensitive data.

IBM has been making significant progress in cryptographic technology, mainly with its Z series mainframes. We just witnessed the introduction of the 14^th generation of the system.

Called IBM Z, or z14, the mainframe is a system that enables the encryption of all data contained in databases, apps or the cloud, at any time, with just one-click.

Powered with a novel encryption engine, IBM Z is much faster and can run 12 billion encrypted transactions per day, without being a detriment to performance.

The IBM Z boasts many other features, including Blockchain technology, for businesses of any scale to make use of it.

Nevertheless, IBM’s “full encryption” system might not keep hackers totally at bay. Cyber attacks can still target sensitive “encrypted” data and steal it.

It remains to be seen if hackers would ever be able to decrypt it.

How could this solve our data security problems?