IBM i security key to preventing downtime and system outages

According to a report published by the International Technology Group (ITG), the IBM i provides significant total cost of ownership benefits to both large and mid-sized organisations – especially when it comes to cybersecurity and the protection of sensitive data.

‘IBM I on Power Systems for Enterprise Businesses’ compared a number of leading operating systems against the IBM i looking specifically at placing a business value on business resilience and the importance of maintaining security, availability and recoverability.

In the report, ITG compared the costs of six companies operating in supply chains and financial services. The companies profiles ranged from $1 billion to $12 billion and employ between 2,000 to 50,000 plus:

• Manufacturer
• Retail chain
• Industrial distributor
• Bank
• Insurance company
• Services company.

ITG discovered two primary results from their research:

Costs of downtime

I.e., business costs associated with outages averaged 8.3 times higher for use of Windows Servers and 3.4 times higher for use of Oracle Exadata than for use of IBM i. This calculation is for planned outages and unplanned outages of less than three hours duration. Lower IBM i costs of downtime represented three-year business savings of $2.3 million to $32.7 million compared to use of Windows servers, and $0.8 million to $9.3 million compared to Oracle Exadata.

Risk exposure

To severe unplanned outages of 6 to 24 hours duration over three years averaged 12.1 to 3.7 times higher for use of Windows servers and Oracle Exadata respectively than for use of IBM i. These calculations employ a standard probability/impact methodology. These differences translated into $4.5 billion to $5 billion in lower risk exposure for use of IBM I compared to Windows servers, and $1.1 billion to $1.3 billion less than for Oracle Exadata.

ITG looked specifically at security and malware within their research and commented that the differences between ‘IBM I and competitive platforms are not merely significant – they are dramatic. IBM I security incidents are rare, and malware infection is virtually unknown.’

Although security incidents are rare on the IBM i, organisations that operate their businesses on the IBM i cannot afford to be complacent. Contact us today for a free audit of your IBM i (AS/400) environment.

The data provided in the image summarises the number of advisory notices issued by Secunia, a leading security and malware authority, between 2008 and June 2014 on various operating systems.