IBM zSeries Mainframe (z/OS) Data Destruction Compliance - 4 April 2011
Without doubt, data loss incidents expose businesses and their partners, customers and employees to a plethora of risks and associated problems.  Typically, opportunistic, unauthorized or rogue access to sensitive, personal, confidential and Mission Critical data all too often results in identity theft, competitive business challenges, naming but a few, which adversely impact many areas, including but not limited to:
 

■	Business reputation and perception

■	Monetary via noncompliance penalties and associated litigation

■	Media coverage

■	Personal consumer credit ratings

Unless we implement proactive processes to secure data from inception to destruction, vis-à-vis cradle to grave, data loss challenges worsen.  In fact, millions of individuals are impacted by data loss every year, as criminals increase their sophistication for gaining unauthorized information access.  As we all become more dependent on technology, the associated collateral damage will continue to grow exponentially.  Thus today there is no such thing as the low-risk organization or low-risk personal information and so it follows that business trustworthiness is the least of our concerns, perhaps data security is…

Data Destruction – The Challenge
The full and complete destruction and thus secure erasure of data is a mandatory requirement of both Business and Government regulations, in addition to those policies deployed by each and every business.  Regulatory compliance examples include the EU Data Protection Directive, Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard, Sarbanes-Oxley Act, supplemented by many other compliance mandates, encompassing The UK, Europe, The USA and indeed globally.  There are many occasions when data destruction is required, for example:

XTINCT: The One-Stop Integrated High Function Solution for Disk & Tape Data Destruction
Unlike other competitive solutions that are specialized for one particular storage media, either disk or tape, XTINCT performs a secure data erase for both disk and tape data. XTINCT meets all the requirements of US Department of Defense 5220.22-M (Clearing and Sanitization Matrix for Clearing Magnetic Disk) by overwriting all addressable locations with a single character. XTINCT also meets the sanitization requirement by overwriting all addressable locations with a character, its complement, then a random character, followed by final verification. XTINCT meets the requirements of most users by overwriting the tape and use of the hi-speed data security erase patterns. It should be noted, for tapes, the DoD only considers degaussing or pulverizing the tape to be a valid erase!

In addition to providing a complete audit trail and comprehensive reports to satisfy regulators, XTINCT surpasses NIST guidelines for cleaning and purging data. XTINCT also satisfies all federal and international requirements including Sarbanes-Oxley Act, HIPAA, HSPD-12, Basel II, Gramm-Leach-Bliley and other data security and privacy laws.

From a resource efficiency viewpoint, XTINCT is re-entrant and fully supports sub-tasking. Multiple volumes can be processed asynchronously, whereas other tools, like ICKDSF, run serially. XTINCT makes extensive use of channel programs, so many functions operate at peak efficiency by only using enough CPU time to generate the channel programs, with the rest of the operation being carried out by the channel subsystem. This dictates that XTINCT does not overly utilize valuable CPU time.

Summary
For more information, please visit our XTINCT Product Portal to discover how your organization can deliver fully compliant data security from cradle to grave, safeguarding full data destruction.  As and when appropriate, we will also match any current pricing quotation for competitive solutions.  Please Contact Us for a no obligation discussion regarding your requirements.  Thank you.

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XTINCT permanently destructs z/OS tape & disk data via resource efficient high function  processes, eradicating concerns that "if you torture the data long enough it will confess"!

"if you torture the data long enough it will confess".

Ronald Coase

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