IBM Power Security: What Today’s CISOs Are Rethinking in 2026
January 19, 2026
Michael Hannan
Chief Information Security Officer
For much of my career, enterprise security strategy centered on a single goal: keeping attackers out. Firewalls hardened. Patches applied. Alerts tuned. If the perimeter held, we considered the system secure.
That mindset no longer reflects reality.
Today’s threat landscape, paired with rising regulatory expectations, has fundamentally changed what it means to secure mission-critical infrastructure. This shift is especially apparent in organizations running core workloads on IBM Power, where availability, compliance, and long-term stability are non-negotiable.
Across regulated industries, the conversation has moved beyond whether IBM Power is secure. The more relevant question now is how security strategies on the platform must evolve to address modern risk, operational continuity, and future threats.
Security Is Moving Down the Stack
One of the most significant trends in enterprise security is a move away from tool accumulation and toward foundational controls. Organizations are reassessing where security truly belongs, and increasingly, the answer is at the infrastructure layer.
IBM Power has long taken this approach. Security is embedded directly into hardware, firmware, the hypervisor, and the operating system rather than layered on later through compensating controls. This matters because many of today’s most damaging attacks exploit weaknesses below the operating system, areas that traditional security tools often struggle to monitor effectively.
From a risk management perspective, platforms with fewer underlying vulnerabilities require less emergency patching, fewer reboots, and experience fewer unplanned outages. That reduction in operational friction directly supports both security outcomes and business continuity.
Resiliency Has Become as Important as Prevention
Another clear shift is how CISOs define success. Preventing attacks remains critical, but it is no longer sufficient on its own. The ability to detect, respond, and recover quickly has become equally important. In short, cyber resiliency is equally as important as prevention.
Security incidents today often bring prolonged operational disruption, regulatory scrutiny, and reputational damage that far outlast the initial event. As a result, security leaders are asking different questions:
- How quickly can we detect malicious activity?
- How confidently can we recover clean data?
- Can the business continue operating during an incident?
Modern IBM Power environments increasingly reflect this thinking by integrating detection and recovery capabilities directly into the platform. Rather than relying solely on downstream tools, infrastructure-level controls support earlier detection and faster recovery, helping organizations reduce blast radius and limit business impact when incidents occur.
Compliance Is Driving Architecture Decisions
Regulatory expectations have also evolved. Many frameworks now emphasize operational resilience and recoverability, not just policy compliance or documentation.
This is where platform-level security becomes a strategic advantage. IBM Power environments are commonly used in industries with strict compliance requirements precisely because they support strong isolation, predictable behavior, and long-term workload stability.
Lower vulnerability exposure, fewer disruptive patches, and predetermined recovery processes simplify audits and reduce strain on security and operations teams. For many organizations, these architectural qualities are becoming just as important as individual security controls.
Quantum Risk – From Theory to Planning
Quantum computing is no longer viewed as a distant academic concern. Security leaders are actively planning for scenarios in which encrypted data stolen today could be decrypted in the future.
What matters now is readiness. IBM Power environments are increasingly evaluated on their ability to support quantum-safe cryptography, cryptographic visibility, and long-term data protection without requiring disruptive platform changes later.
For teams managing long-lived IBM i, AIX, and Linux workloads, this forward readiness is particularly important. Infrastructure decisions made today are likely to remain in place well into the next decade, making future-proof security a practical requirement, not a theoretical one.
What This Means for IBM Power Practitioners
IBM Power does not need to catch up to modern security expectations. In many ways, it already aligns with where enterprise security strategy is heading.
For practitioners and IT leaders managing IBM Power environments, the opportunity now is to:
- Reevaluate security posture through a resiliency lens
- Leverage platform-level controls to reduce complexity and operational risk
- Align infrastructure strategy with evolving regulatory and cryptographic requirements
Security today is no longer defined solely by stopping attacks. It is defined by the ability to continue operating securely, compliantly, and confidently when disruptions occur. That is the standard modern infrastructure must meet.
