By all accounts, a mainframe renaissance is here. After years of negativity and predictions about the impending death of the mainframe, the technology is experiencing a resurgence and wide adoption this year, with even greater growth predicted beyond 2019.
Case in point: IBM's Z series mainframe sales are up 70% year-over-year. And a recent Compuware survey showed that mainframe workloads are increasing. Currently, 57% of enterprises with a mainframe run more than half of their critical applications on the mainframe, but that number is expected to rise to 64% by next year, according to Compushare.
As the face of IT has changed, the mainframe has kept up with trends, with its ever-evolving ability to provide the performance and number-crunching required by technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.
But while mainframe technology has evolved to meet the trends, the security processes and practices needed to keep the platform secure haven't exactly kept up. It's not for lack of technology and tools, however. The phenomenon is largely due to a series of misconceptions among IT professionals around mainframe security. Those misconceptions are placing countless businesses — and an enormous amount of sensitive customer data — at serious risk.
Debunking MisconceptionsI've spent the majority of my career in mainframe security, and the one mistaken belief I come across consistently is that the mainframe is inherently secure. What I hear is that mainframes have security built into them from the ground up — that through cryptographic hardware acceleration and a secure operating system, mainframes fulfill the critic ..
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