It’s an ill wind that blows no good, and profits nobody. That old nautical phrase popped into my head when I first heard about the SolarWinds supply chain compromise. We’ll return to that later, and its implications. But first I wanted to take a look at a few of the...
Tried and true, the mainframe is here to stay as the backbone of our digital economy. Even as we advance to include new storage systems, all of our data exists on a mainframe somewhere. In fact, by 2030, there will be 40 trillion mobile transactions per day and the...
Okay, that's it - I hate IT security. And I really think that many folks in IT are actually like Mordac, the Preventer of IT, from the Dilbert comic strip. Okay, that’s not fair... Allow me to back up just a bit to explain where I'm coming from. Recently, one of my...
This has been a fine summer. And I’m not talking about the weather: I mean the whopping fines proposed for infringements of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) by Marriott Hotels and British Airways, followed by an even bigger fine in the US for Equifax –...
Keeping your mainframe secure is probably one of your top priorities. You’re looking at cryptography and introducing multi-factor authentication (MFA). You may even be running SIEM software to keep up-to-date with what’s happening on your mainframe (and elsewhere)....
Your organization has had a data breach. You’ve managed to confirm that it’s not a false alarm, it really is an issue. And now you need to recover from it. What do you do? The US Commerce Department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has produced...
In today’s connected world and with security high on the agenda, IT people across the enterprise have to understand each other. Mainframers need to be able to talk to non-mainframers with clarity, and vice-versa. Managers in the enterprise need to understand both...
One way of looking at mainframe data is that it is either at rest or in transit. Data at rest is data that is not actively moving from device to device or network to network such as data stored on DASD or tape or some other way. Sometimes, data at rest is thought to...
In today’s treacherous world of constant hacking threats and corresponding data breaches, IT security and breach prevention has become a top-line concern for everyone in large IT organizations. With over six million data records lost or stolen every day – that’s...
There was a time when mainframes were in a world of their own, separated from other computing platforms. A world where even the mainframe staff seldom mixed with the distributed people, and managers had no idea what the mainframe did or how it did it. People who...
