UPDATED 21:00 EST / FEBRUARY 21 2019

CLOUD

Q&A: Ensuring security across environments with an improved hybrid cloud

With hybrid cloud identified as enterprise endgame, information technology support companies are restructuring offerings to best serve heterogeneous workloads and environments. IBM’s new private cloud service updates aim to create a streamlined path for cumbersome enterprise businesses embarking on their multicloud journey.

Rohit Badlaney (pictured, right), director of IBM Z as a service and blockchain at IBM, and Nataraj Nagaratnam (pictured, left), chief technology officer, distinguished engineer, and director of cloud security at IBM, spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the IBM Think event in San Francisco. They discussed IBM’s Hyper Protect Services and how the new offering aims to ensure security across cloud and on-premises environments. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Furrier: You guys had some big announcements around capabilities. What’s the news?

Badlaney: We announced our IBM Cloud Private set of products fully supported on our LinuxONE systems and the extensions around hyper-secure workloads through a capability called the Secure Services Container, as well as giving our traditional z/OS clients cloud consumption through a capability called the z/OS Cloud Broker. It’s really looking at how to cloudify the platform for our existing base, as well as clients looking to do digital transformation projects on-prem.

Furrier: Can you explain Hyper Protect?

Nagaratnam: Hyper Protect Services leverage the underlying security, hardening and offering that as a service so you don’t need to know Z or LinuxONE from a consumption perspective. We provide that with the highest level of security that LinuxONE servers from us offer. Another example is database as a service, which runs in this Hyper secure environment. Not only encryption and keys, but leveraging down the line pervasive encryption capabilities so nobody can even get into the box.

Furrier: How do you look at containerization? Does that fit into secure protect?

Nagaratnam: When people are modernizing their apps or building cloud-native apps, it’s built on Kubernetes and containers. Across both the IBM Cloud Private on Z, as well as Hyper Protect, underlying it’s all about containers. As we deliver these services for customers, they can deploy on this environment or consume these as a compute. Fundamentally, it’s Kubernetes everywhere. We are taking that journey into the most austere environment with a performance and scale of Z and LinuxONE.

Miniman: Security is an ongoing journey, but one of the things that has a lot of people concerned is adding [internet of things] into the mix. How do those type of applications fit into these offerings?

Nagaratnam: Our mission is to make it simple for a developer to build secure applications so that you can connect your IoT to your business process and your back-end application seamlessly in a multicloud and hybrid-cloud fashion. That’s where a cloud-native perspective comes in, building some of these sensitive applications on Hyper Protect or Z/LinuxONE, and private cloud enables that end to end.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the IBM Think event. (* Disclosure: IBM sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither IBM nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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