Over 4 billion records were lost or stolen in the last year — here's how to protect your business

Ross Mauri, general manager, IBM Z, IBM Corporation

The world is facing a data breach pandemic. Last year alone, more than four billion data records were lost or stolen, a 556% increase over 2015, according to the IBM X-Force Threat Intelligence Index. Of the more than nine billion records breached during the past five years, only 4% were encrypted — or securely scrambled — leaving most of that data exposed and vulnerable to attackers, according to Gemalto’s Breach Level Index.

In response to increasing security concerns, regulatory bodies around the world are establishing new standards, such as the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, which tighten data security and protection requirements.

A recent study found that extensive use of encryption is a top factor in reducing the business impact and cost of a data breach. However, encryption is often largely absent in corporate and cloud data centers because current solutions for data encryption in x86-based environments can dramatically degrade performance (and user experiences), and can be too complex and expensive to implement. As a result, only about 2% of corporate data is encrypted today, while more than 80% of mobile device data is encrypted, according to a report, “Pervasive Encryption: A New Paradigm for Protection," from Solitaire Interglobal Ltd.

Why? Because data encryption at scale has been very difficult to do. Until now.

In collaboration with more than 150 clients who cited data protection as their biggest challenge and concern, IBM recently introduced a breakthrough encryption engine that, for the first time, makes it possible for organizations to pervasively encrypt data associated with any application, cloud service, or database all the time — inexpensively and easily without application changes.

The new IBM Z, deeply integrated with IBM Security software, was designed to automate and dramatically streamline security and compliance processes. For example, auditors are expected to manually inspect and validate the security of databases, applications, and systems. Organizations can now immediately demonstrate that data within the scope of compliance is protected and the keys are secure. This can reduce the mounting complexity and cost of compliance. The system also provides an audit trail showing if and when permissioned insiders accessed data.

Banks and others in the financial services industry process thousands of transactions per second to keep the global economy running. To help these organizations more effectively compete in the cloud era, enormous amounts of sensitive data produced by transactions can now have better protection against fraud and cybercrime and be analyzed and monetized using IBM Z — without causing disruption of day-to-day operations. For banks, this means encryption at the click of a button — even while applications are running — and the ability to migrate data from unencrypted to encrypted without impacting service level agreements.

We believe the best approach to securing data and building trust with consumers is to implement layers of security — or layers of encryption wrapped in layers of additional protection, such as multi-factor authentication, identity governance, data activity monitoring, and security intelligence — with strong and pervasive data encryption at the core of the strategy.

A version of this story appeared on IBM’s THINK blog.

This post is sponsor content from IBM and was created by IBM and BI Studios.

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