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High performance data encryption
Whether your organization is in financial services, healthcare or the public sector, you face a serious challenge - securing sensitive customer and business data. Increasing regulatory and compliance requirements are driving the need for data security. Encryption is a powerful and widely used technology that helps protect data from inadvertent or deliberate compromise.

IBM announced that data encryption capabilities are now standard on newly ordered IBM System Storage™ TS1120 Tape Drives. Encrypting data at tape speed helps to avoid the need for host-based encryption of data — and the concurrent drain on host performance — or the use of specialized encryption appliances. This capability supports high volume data encryption of tape data, helping protect information if tape cartridges are lost or stolen.

Businesses today are focused on the importance of securing customer and business data. Increasing regulatory requirements are driving the need for the security of data. Encryption is a powerful and widely used technology that helps protect data from loss and inadvertent or deliberate compromise. The IBM System Storage™ TS1120 Tape Drive now includes data encryption capabilities within the drive itself, helping to avoid the need for host-based encryption of data—and the concurrent drain on host performance—or the use of specialized encryption appliances. This capability is intended to provide customers with greater ability to protect information if tape cartridges are lost or stolen by supporting the storage of the data in an encrypted form.

The IBM Encryption Key Manager component for the Java™ platform, which is supported on a wide variety of environments including z/OS®, i5/OS®, AIX®, HP, Sun, Windows and Linux, can help generate and manage encryption keys for TS1120 tape drives across the enterprise. This feature uses standard key repositories on supported platforms and supports three different encryption management methods: application managed, system managed, or library managed.

The TS1120 tape drive supports transparent encryption, minimizing application changes in the system and library managed implementations. The encryption capability is supported when the TS1120 tape drive is integrated into or attached to the IBM System Storage TS3500 Tape Library, the IBM System Storage TS1120 Tape controller, the IBM TotalStorage® 3494 Tape Library, the IBM 3592 Tape Frame Model C20 or is used in stand-alone environments.

For application managed encryption, IBM Tivoli® Storage Manager has been enhanced to control the encryption process, and is designed to generate and provide keys to the TS1120 tape drive.

The TS1120 encryption solution benefits from IBM's decades of mainframe expertise in encryption and encryption management. The z/OS operating system has provided encryption key management for over 15 years, allowing you to generate keys, manage them based on customer policies, and recover keys when necessary. When used with z/OS, the TS1120 leverages System z's unique security and cryptographic features to provide a powerful solution for enterprise-wide encryption key storage and management. z/OS also provides information for audit compliance, as well as management and access controls.

In October 2005, IBM enhanced encryption capabilities with the announcement of the IBM Encryption Facility for z/OS — a software-based product that's designed to leverage mainframe cryptography to encrypt data that's then written to tape drives. This host-based solution is ideal for businesses that need to exchange data with business partners who utilize non-mainframe platforms since it may not require installation of any additional or special purpose hardware to support data encryption and decryption.

With the tape subsystem-level encryption, you have the flexibility to use z/OS centralized key management to provide a long term repository for the tape-encryption keys. z/OS centralized key management is designed to offer exceptional security and availability with a single point of control and excellent disaster-recovery (D/R) capabilities. Customers can opt to store their keys for all supported servers in the z/OS system leveraging TCP/IP for the transfer of key information between servers.