newsroom

From time to time, we invite industry thought leaders to share their opinions and insights on current technology trends to the IT Infrastructure blog. The opinions in these blogs are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of IBM.

As blockchain technology flourishes, so do new protocols for managing currency exchanges, financial transactions, and other types of data.

In recent years, people have been blinded by the hype around blockchain-based assets, eager to make quick and substantial returns. The result? Security dropped down the priority list, even for issuing entities such as Initial Coin Offering (ICO) providers.

Now, the need to build better, more secure foundations for these blockchain-based projects and digital assets has become urgent.

That’s why we came together to establish Kore Technologies. We realized that all the platform solutions on the market shared the same limitations, so we united to overcome this gap in the market.

Collaborating for success

In a tight-knit collaboration with Phoenix Systems, a company that designs innovative IT architectures focused on process automation, we began looking for a suitable platform to support our new offering. In IBM LinuxONE and IBM Secure Service Container, we found the ideal secured, high-performance stack for our newly built digital asset management platform: KORE.

With guidance from IBM, we evaluated the proposed solution thoroughly, and found that it was a perfect match for our requirements. Together with our partner Securosys, we built a platform that offers end-to-end lifecycle management with bank-grade security, with no third parties and no media breaks[1].

KORE enables companies to issue, manage, trade, and validate digital assets in the most secure and compliant way. It can handle any tokenization use case, including Initial Token Offerings and Security Token Offerings, as well as wallet custody services, blockchain transactions, digital asset management, and other Hyperledger applications.

Secure to the core

Using IBM Secure Service Container helps us prevent tampering and unauthorized access to data by running workloads in locked-down virtual servers.

By combining the IBM technology with the Primus Hardware Security Module (HSM) from Securosys, KORE can issue trusted digital assets securely1. Clients of all sizes — from small companies to big institutional investors — can deploy Phoenix Systems’ on-premises private cloud to host KORE, offering them a safe and reliable environment. We believe the Securosys solution enables secure implementation of all cryptographic operations in a highly available HSM cluster. By including multi-signature for extensive access control, we allow corporate users to implement business processes in any enterprise application.

With IBM LinuxONE, Phoenix Systems and Kore Technologies can encrypt 100 percent of the application, cloud service, and database data without application changes — delivering security and privacy for clients1.

Boosting blockchain adoption

Companies creating Token and Security Token offerings are already using KORE to support their clients, taking advantage of the exceptional security to trade with confidence in a dynamic market.

Going forward, every player that digitizes assets using private keys will need this kind of infrastructure offering. We are keen to support the thriving digital asset ecosystem with our top-shelf stack. By moving fast on this opportunity, we can help implement some of the creative tokenization models that we’re seeing emerge.

Phoenix Systems and Kore Technologies offer enterprise-class services to the nascent crypto industry, with a particular focus on secure data management. That’s only possible when working with the best. IBM and Securosys offer the unparalleled infrastructure that allows us to maintain our high security standards, uninterrupted.

[1] IBM Journal of Research & Development, Volume 62, Paper 2, March/May 2018

The post Phoenix Systems and Kore Technologies bring bank-grade security to blockchain-based digital assets appeared first on IBM IT Infrastructure Blog.