The Cost of the Wrong Choice The adage says, “You’ve got to spend money to make money.” But in the world of mainframes, that’s not always true. You can often spend the same amount and still save money. For example, a 1% increase in your mainframe IT budget can yield...
From Mainframe to Cybersecurity: Experience Is the New Superpower If you’ve written COBOL, debugged Assembler, or know how to resolve an S0C7 abend, chances are you belong to an older—and increasingly rare—demographic in tech. If you’re a woman, that group is even...
Passwords Aren’t Enough to Modernize Mainframe Security Security is the backbone of any organization’s control environment. In today’s hyper-connected economy, protecting against IT threats is not just a technical requirement—it’s a business imperative. A single...
Collaborating for Modernizing Mainframe Data Protection As enterprises accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, mainframe environments face unprecedented challenges in balancing mainframe data protection with modernisation. Traditional approaches to...
Most likely, you have heard the generic acronym RAS, which typically stands for Resiliency, Availability, and Serviceability. However, in the world of time synchronization at IBM, we changed RAS to mean Resiliency, Accuracy, and Security. From RAS to IBMz17 Timing,...
In October 2025, Planet Mainframe published the first article of this two-part series on IBM z17 Time Synchronization Enhancements. That article focused on time synchronization resiliency and accuracy enhancements introduced on IBM z17. This article continues with a...
Mainframes have always had a bit of a superhero reputation: rock-solid, ultra-secure, and always up. They’ve powered banks, airlines, and governments for decades without so much as blinking. But I want to share an uncomfortable truth: even the most secure systems in...
A few years ago, the idea of letting artificial intelligence (AI) tweak a production mainframe system on its own would’ve made even the most daring system programmer break out in a cold sweat. We would have heard, “Let the machine make the change? Not on my watch.” ...
A 5-Minute Quiz to Cut Through the Hype Mainframes remain pillars of the global digital economy, clearing transactions, securing data, and keeping industries like banking, insurance, and healthcare running 24/7. While the hardware stays rock-solid, the legacy...
Mainframes Bring AI to the Data When the general public hears“mainframe,” they may picture a massive machine from the early days of computing, a relic of a bygone era. However, we know that perception is flawed. The mainframe isn’t a museum piece; it’s the...
