ARMONK, NY--(Marketwire - April 8, 2008) - IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a breakthrough in safeguarding virtual server environments and introduced new software to help businesses better manager risk. The company said the advances can provide businesses with substantial improvements in securing information, applications, and information technology (IT) infrastructures around the globe.

News Facts

 -- Today IBM announced:
    -- A breakthrough research initiative from IBM X-Force and IBM
       Research, code-named "PHANTOM," which offers businesses a new means
       of securing virtualized server environments.  At PHANTOM's core is
       industry-leading network and host intrusion protection used to guard
       the virtual environment and the machines from the inside out. The
       new technology sits in a secure, isolated partition and integrates
       with the hypervisor -- the layer of management software that
       coordinates calls between operating systems and computer hardware.
    -- New software from Tivoli that helps businesses reduce the cost and
       complexity associated with securing data.
 -- Together, these advances can provide substantial improvements in
    securing information, applications, information technology (IT)
    infrastructures and users, as part of IBM's effort to help its clients
    improve their own business sustainability.
 -- IBM's approach to business and information technology security is to
    strategically manage risk end-to-end while supporting governance and
    compliance initiatives across five domains -- information security;
    threat and vulnerability; application security; identity and access
    management and physical security. This approach helps businesses
    attain sustainable processes that can withstand the emergence of
    new threats, regulations and changes in the business environment.

Links to Additional Information

-- Future of Data Security podcast

-- IBM Video

-- Official IBM Press Release

Quotes:

"As sophisticated crime organizations infiltrate business processes and surreptitiously siphon off enterprise data, they are rapidly outpacing the advances of many of today's security offerings," Val Rahmani, general manager for IBM Internet Security Systems said. "In order to withstand and overcome the explosion of tomorrow's threats, enterprises must fundamentally change their security strategies and move to a model of business sustainability -- a strategic approach in which security is designed into processes and systems to reduce risk and ensure long-term business enablement."

"Many businesses today have no formal, scalable process to manage thousands of encryption keys across several terabytes of data. IBM Tivoli Key Lifecycle Manager helps reduce the complexity and cost of managing the key lifecycle by automating the management process from key registration to changes and updates to archiving and destruction of tapes," said Al Zollar, general manager, IBM Tivoli Software. "We intend to build upon this first release with future capabilities that support a broad range of storage formats and supporting software and hardware in our continued effort to help clients improve security of their sensitive company information while also supporting compliance requirements."