On the 28^th November 2017 IBM announced¹ it would stop supporting TLS 1.0 and 1.1 in several of its cloud products as from the 1^st of March 2018. TLS 1.2 will continue to be supported. The change follows IBM’s commitment to offering secure cloud services and adhere to industry best practices.

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is a cryptographic protocol that allows HTTPS to conduct secure transactions on the Internet. TLS 1.2 was drafted in RFC 5246² in August 2008 and later further refined in RFC 6176⁰. TLS 1.3 is “in the making” as an IETF working draft³ since July 2017.

In order to connect to services that are affected the by the change (after 1^st March 2018), users will be required to use a client that supports TLS 1.2.

Other organizations have either already disabled TLS 1.0 or have announced to do so. For example Trend Micro⁴ disabled TLS 1.0 earlier this year and TLS certificate provider Comodo⁵ did the same recently (in June 2017).

After numerous vulnerabilities allowed cyber criminals to break secure connections, the industry prompted for a quick adoption of TLS 1.2 and deprecate the earlier version. However, non updated software could still be requesting connections over TLS 1.0. The transition had to be smoooth. In fact, in March 2016 when MaxCDN announced⁶ it was deprecating TLS 1.0 concerns were raised by consumers that the move would leave web browsers in the older versions of Android deprived of connectivity.