Mainframe News Out There

Once a month we like to pick articles from other blogs that we feel are interesting enough to talk about on the Planet Mainframe blog. Here are this week’s picks:

GDPR deadline approaching

The deadline for GDPR compliance is approaching fast – just months away – May 2018.  Are companies scrambling to obtain compliance right now?  Yes, some are.  In the US probably less, but any company doing business at all in Europe is exposed.  Meanwhile many companies right in the financial heart of Europe – in downtown London – aren’t ready, and aren’t even aware. I smell trouble…

See more here: ComputerWeekly article.

The Risks of an Unsecured Mainframe

Very interesting article on the SHARE.org blog, as they interviewed mainframe hackers Chad Rikansrud and Phil Young: “The Risks of an Unsecured Mainframe”.  To them, the mainframe is just another computer (albeit one we don’t treat as well), and when it comes to securing the mainframe, small details matter. Pervasive Encryption may be considered the silver bullet of security, but alone, it’s not enough to truly protect against much more dangerous hackers.  Mainframe penetration testing means testing a system’s current implementation to find known or unknown vulnerabilities. For various reasons, however, this can often get overlooked by enterprises using the mainframe.

See more here: SHARE.org article.

Bank-based Blockchain projects are going to transform the financial services industry

Interesting article by Hugh Harsono in a recent edition of the TechCrunch online publication: “Bank-based BlockChain projects are going to transform the financial services industry”.  The article explains nicely how bank-to-bank transactions take place today, with the settlement period taking several days, during which one party may renege due to changing market conditions or whatever. Also shows us nicely how Blockchain can shrink or eliminate these settlement times all together, this saving the planet some $80 billion per year.  While I can’t see cryptocurrencies replacing fiat currencies anytime soon, I can see how Blockchain can find a position in mainstream finance by this route.

See more here: TechCrunch article.

Leverage the power of the mainframe to make sense of your IoT data

Very interesting article by Planet Mainframe contributor Jennifer Nelson in a recent edition of the Network World online publication: “Leverage the power of the mainframe to make sense of your IoT data”.  While Allan Zander discussed the value of the mainframe as an IoT enabler two years ago, Jennifer explains how keeping things all on the mainframe can eliminate all of the resource-heavy ETL process commonly used to transport data from one database to another, or from one platform to another.

See more here: Network World article.

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