In today”s environment, where businesses build so much of their revenues and reputations on the Internet, there are few things more critical to an IT organization than computer fraud and security protection. Data breaches impact revenue, uptime, operations, productivity, brand loyalty and customer goodwill. They also expose the organization to massive negative publicity and potentially huge regulatory fines. A study by the Ponemon Institute released in 2013 indicated that the average cost of a single data breach incident in the U.S. was $5.4 million.
Employees and other insiders create a particularly insidious threat. Forbes Magazine cited “internal threats” as the third most significant cyber security threat for 2013, stating that internal attacks can be the most devastating because of the type of data that privileged users can access and the amount of damage they can inflict. Insider threats can also take longer to be detected. According to a survey by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the U.S. Secret Service, malicious insiders were typically able to get away with fraud for nearly 32 months before being detected.
There are several ways that organizations can focus on security and fraud detection to amp up their levels of protection. One is to make sure they are building their mission-critical applications and important strategic initiatives on top of a secure platform. In today’s computing environment, the most secure platform – by far – is the IBM System z mainframe. In fact, the System z is the only computing platform that has never been breached on the Internet – and it’s not as if people don’t try.
With the Common Criteria Evaluation Assurance Level 5 (EAL5) awarded by International Standards Organization, System z has the highest security rating or classification for any commercially available server. The EAL5 ranking can provide customers the assurance and confidence that they can run many different applications containing confidential data on one System z, which is divided into partitions that keep each application’s data secure and distinct from the others. This isolation allows images supporting different operating systems to run in different partitions on a single mainframe.
Many of the world’s top banks and retailers rely on the mainframe to help secure sensitive business transactions. The best way to secure information is to encrypt it. IBM Z provides pervasive encryption with exceptional performance and function via cryptographic coprocessors and accelerators that are individually specialized to address encryption of data in-flight and at rest with no application modifications required.
