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In our hybrid cloud world, IT leaders view choice and control as strategic assets when it comes to their infrastructure. But when deploying hybrid cloud strategies one of the biggest challenges for enterprise cloud adoption is security, often slowing down the digital transformation process. Concerns ranging from trust to data protection and compliance are top of mind, which is why bringing unprecedented levels of security into the IBM Cloud for enterprise developers is high priority.

This year at Think, we’re proud to showcase our advancements across our IBM Z Cloud portfolio and demonstrate how our clients are taking advantage of these solutions to help better protect data.

Today, we announced significant enhancements to IBM Cloud Private (ICP) to deliver integrated platform management and orchestration capabilities with a highly secured private cloud by running the entire private cloud infrastructure on IBM Z. These updates will include:

Enhancements for IBM Cloud Private on Z, planned for GA in March 2019, include:

• ‘Manage from Z’ capability across all Linux distributions that now allows customers to run and manage their Kubernetes-based private cloud workloads from IBM Z/LinuxONE
• IBM Spectrum Scale which brings high availability (HA) capability with the persistent storage support needed for enterprise private cloud deployments
• An expanded content catalog for LinuxONE to support open source and IBM toolchains, workloads and applications on IBM Cloud Private on Z
• Secure Service Container for IBM Cloud Private on Z, which provides customers with the ability to help protect their containerized workloads from internal and external threats

In addition, we announced a progression of the new IBM Cloud Hyper Protect family of cloud-native services aimed at providing a highly secured hybrid cloud. This includes three services that bring IBM LinuxONE into IBM’s global public cloud data centers. Through the IBM Cloud catalog, we’re making life easier for enterprise developers by offering them easy access to industry-leading security and resiliency to modernize their applications in the IBM Cloud with just the click of a button. This includes:

• GA of Hyper Protect Crypto Services planned for March 2019: Provides businesses with encryption key management service with a dedicated cloud hardware security module (HSM) built on FIPS 140-2 level 4-based technology with certification currently in progress. This is designed to enable Keep Your Own Key (KYOK) for cloud data encryption. Enterprises can not only fully manage their encryption keys on the cloud, but they will also have exclusive control of the HSMs that protect those keys. IBM Cloud for VMware will support this KYOK through Hyper Protect Crypto Services.
• Experimental release of Hyper Protect Virtual Servers: Developers can now instantiate LinuxONE VMs to build out their public cloud solutions with hyper protection. This service can also help our IBM Z Linux enterprise clients on their cloud journey. This service will help enterprise applications on IBM Z embrace cloud with further confidence and assurance.
• In December, we also announced a beta of Hyper Protect DBaaS: Enterprise developers can now provision and manage highly secured (PostgreSQL, MongoDB EE) databases in the cloud with industry-leading data confidentiality.

We’re also working with clients like Shuttle and one of their lead portfolio companies, DACS, a global digital asset services company, combining hyper secure safeguarding of digital assets with value added asset servicing for institutions and individuals. Phoenix-Systems, a Swiss software company, is using Secure Service Containers for IBM Cloud Private (SSC4ICP) to create digital asset custody platforms–a burgeoning area that will be critical for the world’s largest banks.

On another front, through a strategic initiative, we’re working with Solitaire Interglobal (SIL) on a use case. They are applying IBM Cloud Hyper Protect services on LinuxONE to help ensure that their unique Wenebojo IP is both certified to the highest level of FIPS 140-2 for commercial security and capable of scaling as their content collection grows.

These clients showcase the importance of helping IT leaders take advantage of the best of IBM Z and LinuxONE– security–while helping to deploy and manage a hybrid cloud approach, to develop how and where you want–on premises, or on private, and now public clouds. With these updates, IBM Z and LinuxONE provide a highly secured hybrid cloud, helping clients on their journey to cloud at enterprise scale.

But it’s not all about cloud. This week, the Open Mainframe Project announced several application updates to Zowe as part of Zowe 1.0 to make the framework more even consumable and secure. With more than 1,700 beta downloads, 700+ members of the project’s communications tool and over 50 committers in the Zowe community, the overall excitement and acceptance of the project from the developer community has been outstanding. With Zowe 1.0, we’re keeping our promise to enterprise developers: to make IBM a modern and open platform.

Last week, we also announced new capabilities around unit testing, called IBM Z Open Unit Test, based on the Zowe framework. While it may seem small, to date, testing tools have been manual–making them heavy, complex and difficult to use–slowing developers down at a time when agility is more critical than ever. Automating testing should improve their experience pushing out applications.

Heading into Think 2019 this week in San Francisco, I’m energized by all of this momentum, and I hope you are too. To learn more, please visit us at the Cloud and Infrastructure Village at the Moscone Center through February 15th.

The post The Best of IBM Z and LinuxONE in the public and private cloud appeared first on IBM IT Infrastructure Blog.