Security is often front and center in discussions about mainframe data access, especially since the IBM Z platform stores an estimated 80% of the world’s critical business data. It was also top of mind for us when we designed Lozen™, our revolutionary data access solution.
We know customers have long relied on the mainframe for its strong security, performance, and other characteristics. When embarking on modernization initiatives like digital transformation or application re-platforming, secure access to mainframe data is a major customer requirement.
Legacy Data Access Approaches
Out of necessity, customers have had to employ legacy data access approaches (such as ETL and FTP) to support their modernization projects. In these approaches, multiple copies of data proliferate on a range of platforms, often subject to varying security policies depending on the platforms. Data security and data currency become immediate concerns.
Lozen’s Approach
Lozen provides real-time, read-write access to original master data sources (including on IBM Z) with full data integrity and security. This approach eliminates the need to move or replicate mainframe data, because the data can stay where it is, safely and securely, on the mainframe.
Existing security policies, such as those established with IBM’s RACF or Broadcom’s ACF2 or Top Secret, continue to protect your mission-critical data. Understanding the identity of remote accessors is also important, and here, Lozen offers several approaches that include Kerberos, digital certificates, and mainframe-style pass-tickets. These techniques let you authenticate users and applications as they access your mainframe through Lozen. Data privacy is vital too, and Lozen supports a range of options from Kerberos GSSAPI to SSL/TLS to keep network data traffic secure.
Customer Benefits
Because Lozen allows you to keep the mainframe as the system of record, data doesn’t migrate to a shadow platform. Customers can safely and more easily migrate high-impact applications to the cloud and distributed platforms, without risking other applications that depend on that same data and without sacrificing data security.
Organizations can also eliminate the skyrocketing costs of legacy data access methods, and they can leverage Lozen’s zIIP engine architecture for additional cost savings.
The result is more secure, faster, lower-cost modernization projects.
Learn More
Listen to our CTO, Vince Re, talk in more detail about our approach to security.
To learn more about how to unlock the power of real-time, read-write mainframe data access with Lozen:
- Try Lozen for free.
- Explore our demos page and YouTube channel.
- Watch webinars and read the blog.
- Still have questions? Contact us.
