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Voltage Security Simplifies Modern Encryption for z/OS Environments
Posted: Tue Oct 11, 2011 04:51:42 PM
 

Voltage Security

Cupertino, Calif. – October 11, 2011 – Voltage Security, the world leader in data-centric encryption and key management, today announced Voltage SecureData z/Protect™, breakthrough technology that makes encryption dramatically easier for any application in any z/OS environment. While traditional encryption solutions for z/OS and other platforms require hundreds of lines of code to encrypt data, the new API in Voltage SecureData z/Protect needs just one. With the addition of this next-generation release, Voltage SecureData now features the widest mainframe, midrange and open system platform support available in encryption.

Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) Cherri Heart of BJ's Wholesale Club, said: "Voltage has helped us approach security beyond simply maintaining compliance. We now protect data persistently and transparently across the sophisticated data flows within BJ's Wholesale, without the disruption and complexity of traditional approaches. With Voltage SecureData z/Protect, we can add encryption to applications seamlessly."

"Data protection in most z/OS environments today encounters the following barriers: (1) getting application owners to adopt an encryption approach; (2) integrating encryption into the environment; and (3) ongoing administration of the encryption solution," said Ted Alexander, senior partner of Atlanta, GA-based The Praxium Group, Inc. "Voltage SecureData z/Protect addresses all these and more by tremendously simplifying the encryption process, and enabling data to be protected everywhere—on the mainframe, web services, and every point in between."

While usually out of the public eye, mainframes constitute a significant, vital and even growing sector of the technology market. More than 80% of businesses globally, including 90% of Fortune 1000 corporations, rely on the unmatched security and RAS (reliability, availability, serviceability) of this technology. Most importantly, 90% of mission-critical applications at enterprises worldwide run on z/OS. As a result, IBM's Q2 earnings release reports that revenue from z/OS mainframe server products increased 61% year-over-year.

"Voltage's unique approach fills the clear gap in mainframe encryption solutions available today," said Mark Bower, vice president of Product Management at Voltage Security. "Prior to this, the alternatives have been overly complex, with potential for errors and extensive training needed for users—especially for programmers expert in COBOL and Assembler who traditionally would need to re-architect legacy code from the ground up. Voltage SecureData z/Protect simply changes all that."

Mainframes running z/OS use Customer Information Control System (CICS) for transaction processing—itself a huge market, given the tens of billions of CICS transactions each day, from banking and financial transactions to inventory control, to servicing web requests. However, traditional solutions for encrypting data offered by many security vendors are incompatible with CICS. Voltage SecureData z/Protect bridges that gap and offers a dramatically easier way to add native encryption in any z/OS environment, including batch, DB2 and IMS— everywhere the company has data.

Voltage SecureData z/Protect takes advantage of the native z/OS security subsystem, speeds implementation on the application side, and leverages the System z hardware's own facilities to complete the task. In addition, the training process is now much easier for application owners who must add encryption. The release features centralized policy administration, which greatly reduces the need to understand much of the underlying code.

The new solution meets the needs of enterprises that run z/OS at the core of the information infrastructure, but have difficulty encrypting the data residing on multiple applications—a process that is both complex and costly. By contrast, Voltage SecureData z/Protect features unprecedented simplicity and requires minimal change to the existing infrastructure while delivering the highest level of security available.

 
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