The newest addition to IBM Corp.’s Bluemix cloud development toolkit is an integration service aimed at reducing the amount of work involved in making applications compatible with Identity Mixer, a homegrown login system that was released under an open-source license earlier this year. The project is touted as a way for organizations to mitigate the impact of data breaches on their operations and users, a long-coveted goal that has so far proven elusive despite a steady increase in corporate cybersecurity budgets over the past few years.

Much of that spending goes toward safeguarding information that is not actively used or even necessary to deliver services. Netflix Inc., for instance, requires you to provide your exact date of birth before buying a subscription when in theory, the company could make do with only a confirmation that you exceed the legal age limit needed to make an account. That’s the kind of privacy-conscious interaction Identity Mixer is meant to facilitate among providers and their users.

The software serves as an encrypted repository for personal details such as names, addresses and credit card numbers that IBM says is light enough to run on mobile devices, which avoids the need to trust its contents to a third party. Supporting applications will be able to pull the information they need to authenticate a particular request from Identify Mixer without having to access any of the other data inside, leaving your privacy intact while reducing their security liability.

The potential cost benefit for providers is twofold. Cutting the amount of sensitive data stored on behalf of users not only lowers the number of regulations and industry standards that have to be met in order to sustain operations but can also help mitigate damages in the event that a breach occurs. The less hackers manage to steal, the less money has to be spent on settling class-action lawsuits and repairing brand reputation. IBM hopes that making Identify Mixer easier to implement with Bluemix will help encourage prospective adopters to embrace the benefits of the project faster.

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