IBM z13 Helps Avoid Costly Data Breaches

A global study sponsored by IBM and conducted by the Ponemon Institute found that the average cost of a data breach for companies surveyed has grown to $4 million, representing a 29 percent increase since 2013. With cybersecurity incidents continuing to increase with 64% more security incidents in 2015 than in 2014 the costs are poised to grow.

z13–world’s most secure system

The z13, at least, is one way to keep security costs down. It comes with a cryptographic processor unit available on every core, enabled as a no-charge feature. It also provides EAL5+ support, a regulatory certification for LPARS, which verifies the separation of partitions to further improve security along with a dozen or so other built-in security features for the z13. For a full list of z13 security features click here. There also is a Redbook, Ultimate Security with the IBM z13 here. A midsize z, the z13s brings the benefits of mainframe security and mainframe computing to smaller organizations. You read about the z13s here on DancingDinosaur this past February.

As security threats become more complex, the researchers noted, the cost to companies continues to rise. For example, the study found that companies lose $158 per compromised record. Breaches in highly regulated industries were even more costly, with healthcare reaching $355 per record – a full $100 more than in 2013. And the number of records involved can run from the thousands to the millions.

Wow, why so costly? The researchers try to answer that too: leveraging an incident response team was the single biggest factor associated with reducing the cost of a data breach – saving companies nearly $400,000 on average (or $16 per record). In fact, response activities like incident forensics, communications, legal expenditures and regulatory mandates account for 59 percent of the cost of a data breach. Part of these high costs may be linked to the fact that 70 percent of U.S. security executives report they don’t even have incident response plans in place.

The process of responding to a breach is extremely complex and time consuming if not properly planned for. As described by the researchers, the process of responding to a breach consists of a minimum of four steps. Among the specified steps, a company must:

• Work with IT or outside security experts to quickly identify the source of the breach and stop any more data leakage
• Disclose the breach to the appropriate government/regulatory officials, meeting specific deadlines to avoid potential fines
• Communicate the breach with customers, partners, and stakeholders
• Set up any necessary hotline support and credit monitoring services for affected customers

And not even included in the researchers’ list are tasks like inventorying and identifying the data records that have been corrupted or destroyed, remediating the damaged data, and validating it against the last known clean backup copy. Am surprised the costs aren’t even higher. Let’s not even talk about the PR damage or loss of customer goodwill. Now, aren’t you glad you have a z13?

That’s not even the worst of it. The study also found the longer it takes to detect and contain a data breach, the more costly it becomes to resolve. While breaches that were identified in less than 100 days cost companies an average of $3.23 million, breaches that were found after the 100-day mark cost over $1 million more on average ($4.38 million). The average time to identify a breach in the study was estimated at 201 days and the average time to contain a breach was estimated at 70 days. The cost of a z13 or even the lower cost z13s could justify itself by averting just one data breach.

The researchers also found that companies with predefined Business Continuity Management (BCM) processes in place found and contained breaches more quickly, discovering breaches 52 days earlier and containing them 36 days faster than companies without BCM. Still, the cheapest solution is to avert breaches in the first place.

Not surprisingly, IBM is targeting the incident response business as an up and coming profit center. The company increased its investment in the Incident response market with the recent acquisition of Resilient Systems, which just came out with an updated version that graphically displays the relationships between Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) and incidents in an organization’s environment. But the z13 is probably a better investment if you want to avoid data breaches in the first place.

Surprisingly, sometimes your blogger is presented as a mainframe guru. Find the latest here.

DancingDinosaur is Alan Radding, a veteran information technology analyst writer. Please follow DancingDinosaur on Twitter, @mainframeblog. See more of his IT writing at technologywriter.com and here.