IBM, which continues to pivot more and more of its intellectual property from servers and mainframes to the cloud, said Nov. 5 that it has built what it claims is the first intelligent security portfolio for protecting people, data and applications in hybrid clouds.
Big Blue’s new Dynamic Cloud Security portfolio is designed to identify and fix security gaps that can exist between on-premises, cloud, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and mobile applications.
The portfolio is focused on authenticating access, controlling data, improving visibility and optimizing security operations for the cloud. Developed during the past 12 months by about 200 IBM engineers, the new tools can be deployed in the cloud or on-premises, matching the hybrid IT environments customers are managing.
The new service packages use advanced analytics to protect a business’s data and applications across the entire enterprise, whether the data resides in public or private clouds, separate onsite storage arrays or mobile devices, said Brendan Hannigan, general manager of IBM Security Systems.
IBM, along with many other IT vendors, is seeing a stepping-up of workloads being transferred into cloud services for processing due to improved cost, speed and agility factors. While this is happening, most enterprises continue to get headaches making their existing IT systems airtight against attackers, who are becoming increasingly sophisticated and more difficult to detect.
Currently, 75 percent of security breaches take days, weeks or even months to be discovered, significantly increasing the damage inflicted by attackers, IBM said.
IBM’s new cloud security tools use its own in-house, workplace-proven analytics to give companies a clear line of sight into the security status of their entire business—ranging from the data center, to the cloud and down to an individual employee’s mobile device. This single-screen administrative view shows exactly who is using the cloud, what data individuals are accessing and from where they are accessing it, the company said.
Designed to be deployed by different users, whether it be a developer or line-of-business executive, the portfolio also includes analytics and security intelligence for public cloud services such as IBM’s SoftLayer. In addition, Dynamic Cloud Security features IBM’s Managed Security Services platform, which can help secure the cloud for IBM clients as well as clients of companies like Amazon Web Services and Salesforce.com.
Users can also take advantage of the intelligence from more than 20 billion daily security events that IBM’s Managed Security Services team monitors in more than 130 countries. Using this insight, they can identify threats in real time and thus proactively defend their companies from intruder attacks.