Mainframe Enterprise Data Protection

Alvand Solutions recognizes the fact that mainframes continue to support mission critical applications; applications that store sensitive data which requires protection. Alvand Solutions offers a mainframe solution providing clients with the ability to encrypt sensitive information in z/OS environments by leveraging SafeNet’s proven enterprise key management.

The core benefits of implementing this solution include:

• Security
• Performance
• Flexibility
• Manageability
• and availability

How does it work?
The mainframe solution consists of 2 parts: the z/OS Application Connector and the DataSecure® hardware appliance.

From an application running on z/OS, a customer can call into the SafeNet API to encrypt and decrypt information as required. The SafeNet API can be called from any programming language that follows the standard MVS program linkage convention. It can also be deployed in a multiple region configuration in order to facilitate testing of new applications, new software releases, or simply to improve data throughput. Requests are sent over an SSL or TCP connection to a DataSecure appliance that is available via the network. The DataSecure appliance, which holds the encryption key, securely encrypts or decrypts, based on the request, and sends the response back to the application. Through the SafeNet API, the calling application can encrypt or decrypt any arbitrary data and return the encrypted information for storage on DASD, or any other device.

Transform Utility
The SafeNet Transform Utility runs under z/OS and can be used to enable the encryption/decryption in bulk of specific fields within flat files. These fields may be credit card numbers, social security numbers, email addresses, etc. The file itself may be positional or delimited and can contain millions of records. Customers can use this utility to rapidly move large amounts of sensitive data in and out of data stores, thereby enabling the encryption/decryption of the data at extremely fast rates. For example, if 50 million credit card numbers need to be extracted from DB2 and sent to another system in a decrypted form, the SafeNet Transform Utility would be the ideal utility to facilitate the efficient performance of this decryption. Additionally, the SafeNet Transform Utility can be used to enable the encryption of entire binary files for situations where customers do not require field level granularity for protecting data.

Please contact us for additional information or to schedule a meeting to discuss how Alvand Solutions can help you with your organization's Mainframe Enterprise Data Protection needs.