IBM (NYSE: IBM) today 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. With the growing adoption of hybrid multicloud environments, the challenge of maintaining data security and privacy only grows more acute and challenging.

“While organizations continue to rapidly adopt hybrid multicloud strategies, we are seeing an increasing concern over privacy and data security as a result of data movement from one environment to the other,” says Miguel Vega, Vice President, IBM Systems, Middle East and Africa. “IBM Z is central to IBM’s hybrid cloud strategy, and with the launch of z15, our clients will have the flexibility to adopt the cloud they want, with the privacy and security they need.”

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 modernize 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.

Rising Importance of Data Privacy in Doing Business

A new IBM commissioned study conducted by The Harris Poll released today found that 64 percent of all consumers have opted not to work with a business out of concerns of whether they could keep their data secure. However, that same study found 76 percent of respondents would be more willing to share personal information if there was a way to fully take back and retrieve that data at any time. With z15, pervasive encryption is designed to extend across the enterprise enforcing data privacy by policy even when it leaves the IBM Z platform. With this industry-first capability, clients can offer new services and features that give their consumers stronger control over how their personal data is used.

The Next Phase of Digital Transformation – Moving Mission-Critical Work to the Cloud

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 center 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.
• Address mission-critical latency challenges by delivering up to 30x lower latency and up to 28 times less CPU utilization on z15 by compressing secure web transaction data before encryption using the Integrated Accelerator for z Enterprise Data Compression instead of using software compression.
• Leverage 12 percent more cores than z14, and 25 percent more memory than z14 to help meet the needs of today’s digital businesses.

Data-Centric Privacy Controls

Data Privacy Passports is a consolidated data privacy solution that is engineered to extend clients’ ability to deliver privacy by not only protecting data on-premises at the infrastructure level, but allows clients to provision data rules to manage individual user access across private, public and hybrid cloud data at the data level.

Bringing Cloud-Native App Development to IBM Z

Last month, IBM announced intent to deliver Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxONE. This offering will accelerate the transformation to greater portability and agility through integrated tooling and a feature-rich ecosystem for cloud-native development on Linux on IBM Z and LinuxONE offerings. Cloud developers can deploy z/OS applications on OpenShift with no special Z skills required.

Mission-Critical Work Done with No Time Lost

For both planned and unplanned downtime, Instant Recovery brings clients the ability to unlock the full power of z15, spinning up built-in cores to return to pre-shutdown SLAs[9], while uniquely catching up on business transactions up to 2.5x faster [10] than previously possible.

For more information on z15, visit www.ibm.com/z15.