Illumio Brings Zero Trust Segmentation to IBM Z and LinuxONE

Today’s enterprises rely heavily on IBM Z. Without the modern mainframe, the world’s economy would grind to a halt.

Consider this: If every IBM Z in the world were taken down by a cyberattack, you would not be able to reserve an airplane ticket for your next vacation, use your credit card to buy a birthday present for a good friend, or get that tax credit you need to help pay for your kitchen renovations.

And as organizations adopt hybrid cloud strategies that introduce different IT security challenges and more complexity, the stakes are higher than ever to act proactively to reduce the attack surface, minimize vulnerabilities, and prevent data breaches.

Undoubtedly, IBM Z and LinuxONE have a reputation as being highly scalable and secure while delivering 99.99999% availability. IBM LinuxONE combines the advantages of both commercial (IBM Z) and open source (Linux) systems with innovative data privacy, security and cyber resiliency capabilities.

Both server platforms are designed to offer pervasive encryption for business-critical workloads and databases — protecting data-at-rest, in-transit and in-use without impacting Service Level Agreements. More specifically, IBM Z and LinuxONE have built-in security with:

• integrated FIPS 140-2 level 4 compliant hardware security module (HSM),
• built-in trusted execution environments for confidential computing at-scale, and
• industry-leading crypto performance per-core.

While IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms provide high-availability, resiliency, and infrastructure-level security, a more effective and modernized security approach is required to gain visibility into application environments to combat cyber threats.

Modernizing security with a Zero Trust approach on IBM Z and LinuxONE

Illumio and IBM are partnering to help you rethink security for your mission-critical workloads while advancing your Zero Trust journey. By complementing IBM Z and LinuxONE security with micro-segmentation, Illumio gives enterprises a unique solution for addressing a broad set of threat vectors.

With this in mind, Illumio is pleased to join the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center to help organizations modernize and secure IBM Z and LinuxONE workloads with a robust application security strategy.

Illumio’s trusted segmentation solutions running on IBM Z and LinuxONE trusted infrastructure provide a truly unique approach to Zero Trust, addressing threat vectors at both the hardware and software layers of the stack.

With Illumio Core now available on IBM Z and LinuxONE, organizations can address the need for hybrid environment security controls in three important ways:

• See risks: Get both real-time and historical visibility into application traffic, security policy, usage, access and risk exposure across the hybrid environment.
• Isolate attacks: Assess and prioritize risks, automatically build and recommend rules, and apply Zero Trust policies across IBM Z and LinuxONE systems, helping reduce the attack surface.
• Secure data: Orchestrate and enforce security policies across IBM Z and LinuxONE systems to mitigate exposure, lower operational costs and accelerate your path to Zero Trust — all with no impact on computing performance.

The Zero Trust experts

Illumio’s Zero Trust approach for IBM Z and LinuxONE effectively helps organizations modernize security with a proven approach to addressing cyber risks at both the hardware and software layers of the stack, giving enterprises confidence that their mission-critical workloads and most sensitive data are protected from ransomware and cyberattacks.

Check out the IBM Z and Cloud Modernization Center that helps organizations take a more guided approach to accelerate digital transformation by modernizing legacy applications and data in their existing IBM Z or LinuxONE environment.