Just this week, I completed an article on securing data movement on the mainframe. I worked on it with our CIO, Kevin Bohan. As I was writing the article, I had a completely coincidental telephone conversation with a family member who is an IT Manager at a big European bank. I asked her what she was working on these days and she told me she was transitioning some business units to IBM’s MQ series for the mainframe. She told me how this represented a bit of a learning curve, as previously, they’d used mostly FTP to get data in and out of the mainframe.
I stopped in my tracks right there. Getting data in an out of a mainframe? This was exactly the subject of the article I was working on. It was an uncanny coincidence – but then again, we’re both Pisces with birthdays three days apart.
The Workhorse: Why Mainframes Won’t Go Away
The much-heralded death of the mainframe never happened. Mainframes have remained hugely important in the corporate and public sectors because they are secure, scalable, reliable, and efficient. They tend to be the workhorse of many Global 1000 companies.
But these workhorses need to coexist. In an increasingly distributed world, mainframes must coexist with the range of platforms in an organization (Windows, Linux, UNIX, AS/400, etc.).
Beyond Messaging: Achieving Integration on the Mainframe
So how do organizations go about tying their mainframe in to their distributed platforms? Two of the most common methods, ironically, are FTP and messaging. But both have limitations. FTP is weak from a compliance and security perspective. It also lacks automation capabilities, doesn’t scale well, and lacks key functionalities including tracking and auditability. Messaging, as anyone in a mainframe shop know, is a very good technology that serves organizations well. But it’s not designed to move large chunks of data. It’s transaction-based by its very nature and cannot handle the large files or volumes of data that are becoming the norm in most organizations (particularly with regard to the batch-oriented systems found in many mainframe environments).
Many organizations are electing to deploy advanced managed file transfer (MFT) solutions so that they can holistically rationalize all of their file transfer processes. Bringing everything together under a common umbrella makes complete sense. Some companies think of it as ‘modernizing’ their file transfers. MFT certainly helps drive security, automation, control, and management, but one of the key drivers will continue to be integration. In an integration scenario, MFT technology becomes the workhorse – doing the ‘heavy lifting’ required in batch-oriented systems. As such, MFT has become a key integration technology that can and should co-exist right alongside your organization’s messaging technology.
- John
About:
John Lynch is Director of Marketing Communications at Proginet Corporation. In this role he oversees the company’s corporate communications initiatives, including press and analyst relations.
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