While a large chunk of the world seems to think that mainframes are out of date and barely hanging on by the skin of their teeth in organizations that haven’t woken up to modern computing techniques, the rest of us know that mainframes, particularly the z14, are the...
Mainframe files/datasets are liable to change quite often. After all, people are using those files so they are likely to be modified/updated. So how could you tell whether there had been a legitimate change to the file or it had been hacked? How can you verify that...
To be honest, mainframes are pretty secure, aren’t they? We’ve had RACF and other External Security Managers (ESMs) for years. On top of that, the new z14 gives us pervasive encryption. And there are any number of logs recording what’s going on on Z, and we can run...
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...
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...
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...
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)....
We all know why mainframes are good – all that reliability, availability, and security stuff that we’ve been hearing about for many years. The question then becomes: how can we make mainframes better? IBM’s new Z15 mainframe announcement shows how security can be...
For many years, it seems, management and the distributed IT team have, more-or-less, ignored the mainframe. The mainframe has been quietly keeping the company in business, running all those transactions, and being reliable, powerful, scalable, and secure. All the...
Let me start by telling you a story… Once there was a big town and everyone went to school and learned to read and write and they bought and shared books. They liked reading. Then, some of the townspeople decided that it would be beneficial for everyone if the town...
