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SOAs Meet Mainframe Security


By Stuart Burris
May 15, 2007 —  (Page 1 of 3)
Mainframes used to be primarily protected by physical access. Terminals were hardwired to the mainframe, with the whole network housed within 150 feet of the mainframe itself. A limited user base had access to the mainframe, and the mainframe was tightly controlled by a knowledgeable young staff of IT professionals. There was a great deal of visibility into who was using the mainframe, as well as when and how, due primarily to these physical circumstances.

It, of course, helped that often the terminal rooms literally sat behind large glass walls to allow managers to keep an eye on what was going on. This transparency extended beyond the windows of the glass house. COBOL is a very structured language, and easy to read, which makes creating malevolent programs difficult. It’s hard to hide a Trojan horse, or even a virus without a fellow developer or manager noticing the code. A host of other factors lock down the mainframe even further: the OS’s ability to isolate hardware and software so that software applications can’t interfere with each other, networking protocols and hardware capabilities allow for complete separation and portioning of mainframe resources, identification and validation of terminal and user access, and tools like RACF, Top Secret and ACF2.

I talk with a lot of enterprise architects who are actively pursuing SOA initiatives and are exploring options for extending the mainframe into that environment. I am consistently surprised that the security of the data is taken for granted because it resides within the glass house. Perhaps this assumption shouldn’t shock me, because for such a fragile-sounding construct, the glass house has been surprisingly effective at securing the mainframe.

Within the protected environment of the glass house grew magnificent mainframe systems to run the world’s largest banks, governments and most Fortune 500 companies. However, outside of the house, the rest of the IT ecosystem was loosely defended by, at best, a chain-link fence.

With the advent of the desktop computer, and client/server computing, all of a sudden there was a lightly defended computer sitting on the periphery of the IT world, highly accessible and ubiquitous. With relative ease, a program could be uploaded onto a floppy, and run loose across the LAN. Or worse, sensitive data from your mainframe assets could be downloaded, and walked out the door on that same floppy disk.


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