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The following example details how a fictitious company, Stark Industries, adopted IBM Zero Trust Execution for AIX (ZTEA) using the standard Advanced ZTEA Consulting Option. This fictitious example will help potential clients better understand ZTEA adoption when using the standard Advanced ZTEA Consulting Option. Adopting ZTEA requires a consulting phase followed by a yearly subscription phase, and this example details what that looks like.
Consulting Phase
In this example, Stark Industries chose to use the standard Advanced ZTEA Consulting Option. Stark Industries' AIX environment consists of 3,000 AIX LPARs. But before deploying ZTEA to their entire AIX environment, they first wanted to evaluate ZTEA on 100 LPARs over the course of a year, from August 1st, 2024 to July 31st, 2025. This initial evaluation period allowed Stark Industries' AIX Administrative Team and Security Team to familiarize themselves with ZTEA. This standard Advanced ZTEA Consulting service included a license for ZTEA for the 100 LPARs for the year. In both the consulting phase and ZTEA subscription phase, Stark Industries obtained the corresponding licensing and support needed for PowerSC.
During this first year, an IBM Technology Expert Labs (TEL) ZTEA consultant assisted Stark Industries' AIX administrative team with ZTEA adoption. This involved the following:
- Installing and configuring PowerSC, needed to monitor ZTEA
- Installing and configuring ClamAV
- Providing training and knowledge transfer for PowerSC and ZTEA
- Assisting with installation of PowerSC, ClamAV and ZTEA updates as they were released throughout the year
- Assisting with debugging issues related to ZTEA adoption
- Assisting with debugging PowerSC or ZTEA issues utilizing his IBM TEL reference lab environment
- Identifying new features needed by Stark Industries for more effective ZTEA deployment
- Assisting with technical issues directly related to malware defense involving ZTEA and PowerSC
NOTE: the standard ZTEA Advanced Consulting option limits its PowerSC consultative assistance to ZTEA integration. Thus, PowerSC consultative assistance did not involve non-ZTEA security measures, such as PowerSC Patch Management, PowerSC Multi-Factor Authentication, etc. ...
For the first four months, Stark Industries focused on deploying ZTEA in ZTEA-Standard risk mitigation mode on all the 100 LPARs. This is the preliminary mode of ZTEA deployment. However, ZTEA provides two additional modes that can be utilized: ZTEA-Trusted and ZTEA-Secure. These modes provide the capability of detecting malware that can't be detected by ClamAV. For the remaining six months, 25 of the 100 AIX LPARs were upgraded to use ZTEA-Trusted mode and another 25 LPARs were upgraded using the ZTEA-Secure mode. The IBM TEL ZTEA consultant assisted with the configuration and knowledge transfer to implement these two advanced configuration modes.
During this initial year, the Stark Industries AIX administrative team met with the IBM TEL ZTEA consultant one more times per week. The frequency of meetings was determined by the technical agenda. Consultative assistance was provided as often as needed to ensure successful and easy adoption of ZTEA.
Subscription Phase
The initial year of consulting allowed Stark Industries to become experts at deploying and administering ZTEA. Because of this, consulting assistance was no longer needed after this initial year, so the company decided to transition to the ZTEA Subscription phase.
After the 1st year of consulting, Stark Industries decided to deploy ZTEA across their remaining 2900 AIX LPARs.
Their AIX environment consists of 10 Power 1080s, each having 240 cores and 25 Power 10 1050s, each having 24 cores each.
The list price for 1-year of ZTEA was:
5000 + (2350 * 30) + (600*20) = 87,000
This calculation was based upon 2025 ZTEA Subscription pricing. This pricing was subject to change, so Stark Industries decided they wanted to lock in to that price for more than a year, so they purchased 5 years, the maximum subscription, of the ZTEA Subscription in one transaction.
The list price for 1-year of ZTEA was:
5000 + (2350 * 30) + (600*20) = 87,000
This calculation was based upon 2025 ZTEA Subscription pricing. This pricing was subject to change, so Stark Industries decided they wanted to lock in to that price for more than a year, so they purchased 5 years, the maximum subscription, of the ZTEA Subscription in one transaction.
The ZTEA Subscription will provide Stark Industries with standard licensing, maintenance and support for ZTEA from August 1st, 2025 - July 31st, 2030.
Stark Industries paid 435,000 (87k * 5) for the 5-year ZTEA Subscription.
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Modified date:
15 July 2025
UID
ibm17239666