Security overview

Learn about the security measures related to deploying a data collector on-premises, processing and storing metadata off-premises, and session timeouts or call home with cloud services.

IBM Storage Insights Pro and IBM Storage Insights are cloud service offerings uses one of the following data collection method :

Call home with cloud services to collect detailed configuration, capacity and performance metadata.

A light-weight application that is called the data collector to securely and efficiently send configuration, capacity, performance, and status metadata for analysis to an IBM® Cloud data center and for presentation in the GUI. Call home with cloud services to collect detailed configuration, capacity and performance metadata.
Important:
  • The security policies for collecting, sending, accessing, protecting, and storing metadata for IBM Storage Insights Pro and IBM Storage Insights are identical.
  • After you log in to the service, the security of your web browser session is important. To protect your session, you're automatically logged out after 2 hours 30 minutes of inactivity. For more security during extended use, the duration of an active login session is limited to approximately 8 hours. When you are logged out, you can log in again and pick up right where you left off.

    The timeout durations for a session are set by default and can't be changed.

The key differences between both cloud service offerings lie in the exclusive features that IBM Storage Insights Pro provides to its subscribers, such as capacity planning analysis, reclamation analysis, and tiering analysis, and in the access to the metadata that is presented in the GUI for the cloud service offerings. In IBM Storage Insights Pro, subscribers have access to all of the metadata in the GUI, whereas in IBM Storage Insights, non-subscribers have access to specific capacity and performance metadata only. IBM Support also has read-only access to the set of metadata that they need to troubleshoot and close support tickets.
Tip: In the security documentation, the name IBM Storage Insights is used to refer to both IBM Storage Insights and IBM Storage Insights Pro unless a notable difference exists between the offerings.
To address the security concerns that you might have, the following questions are answered:
  • What security measures are built-in?
  • What is the data collector?
  • What are data collection methods
  • What is call home ?
  • How is the metadata protected?
  • What types of metadata are collected?
  • How long is the metadata kept?
  • Who can access the metadata that is collected?

Lists of the asset, capacity, and configuration metadata and the performance metadata that is collected and stored about your storage systems are also provided.