Who Doesn’t Love Mainframe Trivia

It’s no secret that a mainframe system is a huge business investment. But when it comes to optimizing the ROI on that investment, many companies downplay the importance of what comes after the initial purchase. 

Mainframes, according to DataKinetics’ Larry Strickland, are literally designed to save businesses money, but the outcomes depend greatly on cost-management and optimization strategies that maximize the speed and performance of mainframe workloads. 

In his article “Greening the Mainframe Grass: How to Optimize ROI for Mainframes,” (♧ HINT) Strickland outlines the ways to get the most bang from your mainframe buck. Firstly, Strickland states that you need to keep your workloads running on them – rather than on costly commodity servers. 

Another way to see ideal ROI on your mainframe investment? Modernize the mainframe environment with technologies like z/OS Connect to run modern, API-driven applications on mainframes.

Cost aside, the idea that mainframes are inherently more secure than commodity servers is part of their still broad appeal for top organizations. Their simplified architecture may indeed make them less vulnerable to hackers, but Christopher Tozzi argues that this is no reason to get lazy about securing your Mainframe system.

In his article, “Best Practices for Closing the Mainframe Security Gap” (♧ HINT) Tozzi addresses some of the critical security gaps in mainframe systems. You’ll want to read the whole article to get the deep-dive, but suffice it to say that security risks abound – from vulnerabilities within operating systems to the lack of security expertise of mainframe engineers. 

While modern cybersecurity solutions don’t generally cater to mainframes, Tozzi outlines ways that mainframe admins can help close the gap between securing their mainframes and securing the rest of their IT estates.