nuBridges Eases i/OS Integration for Tokenized Data

Corrrected: June 2, 2010

by Alex Woodie

nuBridges last week unveiled a new adapter that will make it easier to implement tokenization in the i/OS environment. The nuBridges Protect Adapter for IBM's i/OS, unveiled at last week's COMMON conference, will basically handle all the underlying Web services communications with nuBridges Token Manager, leaving i/OS programmers to work in their familiar RPG, COBOL, and C environments.

nuBridges, which unveiled its nuBridges Protect Token Manager product a year ago, is a strong advocate for using tokenization--which replaces sensitive data with meaningless surrogate values, or tokens--either on a standalone basis or in conjunction with encryption, which shares similarities with tokenization but has its own set of limitations (namely, there is more work involved in encrypting data stored in multiple locations, and the field values don't maintain the same length and type with encryption, making it worthless for testing).

With last week's launch of the new i/OS adapter for its nuBridges Protect, the Atlanta, Georgia, company says it has streamlined the integration between its Protect and Protect Token Manager products for System i customers. This will allow System i shops to more easily adopt tokenization to protect inbound sensitive data in applications such as online shopping carts, order management, billing systems, and payroll, the company says.

The new adapter was developed to automatically handle the Web services-based communication that exists between Protect running on i/OS and Token Manager running on Windows, Unix, or Linux servers. It's worth pointing out that the adapter was not designed to work with the version of the Java-based Token Manager product that runs on i/OS (via PASE), which is ideal for customers running a pure i/OS environment.

Instead, the new adapter is targeted at customers that want to manage Token Manager from a distributed system, while retaining the capability to receive tokens on the i/OS server (and not to redeem them for protected data, such as credit card numbers). The new adapter also helps to minimize the scope of PCI audits on the i/OS server, since it is only holding tokens and not redeeming them for de-tokenized data, according to nuBridges.

In any event, the end result of launching the adapter is to eliminate the need for System i shops to worry about the nitty gritty SOAP and XML communications that occurs between Protect running on i/OS and Token Manager running on Windows, Linux, or other "distributed" platforms. All the System i staff has to worry about is dealing with the RPG, COBOL, or C APIs to integrate Protect with their business applications, which they would need to do anyway to enable nuBridges tokenization or encryption (the product does both, and also provides key management and logging).

"We recognized the challenges many heterogeneous organizations are facing in leveraging tokenization on their business-critical IBM i systems," states nuBridges vice president of product management Gary Palgon in a press release. "There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to taking advantage of Web services on the IBM i. We developed the nuBridges Protect Adapter for IBM i to simplify Web services calls for tokenization so that companies can reduce risk and PCI DSS audit scope throughout their enterprises more easily."

The new adapter also streamlines implementation on System i servers and enables the Protect Manager to take advantage of the System i's native security and logging capabilities. nuBridges also announced that the product will support "alternate" character sets, which enables it to work with multiple languages. The adapter is available immediately.

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This article was corrected and clarified. nuBridges does offer a version of Protect Token Manager that runs natively on i/OS through PASE, not just on distributed systems. IT Jungle regrets the errors.

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