At IBM Think 2019 in San Francisco, IBM introduced enhancements to IBM Cloud Private to deliver integrated platform management and orchestration capabilities—to help enable a secure private cloud by running the entire private cloud infrastructure on IBM Z.
There are also new additions to the IBM Cloud Hyper Protect family of cloud native services aimed at providing a secure hybrid cloud. This includes three services that bring IBM LinuxONE into IBM’s global public cloud data centers.
The new enhancements were outlined in a blog by Ross Mauri, general manager, IBM Z.
According to Mauri, the enhancements to IBM Cloud Private deliver integrated platform management and orchestration capabilities with a secured private cloud by running the entire private cloud infrastructure on IBM Z. 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 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 the IBM Cloud Hyper Protect family of cloud-native services aimed at providing a secure hybrid cloud, IBM has also added three services that bring IBM LinuxONE into IBM’s global public cloud data centers.
Through the IBM Cloud catalog, IBM says, it is helping to make processes easier for enterprise developers by offering them access to security and resiliency capabilities to modernize their applications in the IBM Cloud.
This includes the general availability of Hyper Protect Crypto Services planned for March 2019 which 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.
There is also an experimental release of Hyper Protect Virtual Servers, enabling developers to instantiate LinuxONE VMs to build out their public cloud solutions. The service can also help IBM Z Linux enterprise clients on their cloud journey with further confidence and assurance.
In December, IBM also announced a beta of Hyper Protect DBaaS, enabling enterprise developers to provision and manage highly secured (PostgreSQL, MongoDB EE) databases in the cloud with data confidentiality.