IBM Mainframe Security To LDAP (Done In 60 Seconds)
June 1st, 2018
TL;DR — watch this video to see how IBM workload transformation with Heirloom enables you to fully replicate your IBM Mainframe application security controls.
So far in our “Done In 60 Seconds” series, we have covered application migration (automatically transforming an unmodified Mainframe COBOL/CICS/VSAM application to a Java Application Server & Relational DB) and data migration (migrating a Mainframe VSAM file to a Relational DB without changing the application source).
In this article, we are putting the spotlight on application security. The IBM Mainframe has acquired the reputation of being a highly secure application platform, primarily because of its ability to manage & control access to application-specific resources. These “rules” and “policies” have a considerable impact on prescribed operational processes related to the application workload, and so it is vital that they can be easily replicated on the target platform. In 60 seconds, here’s how it’s done with Heirloom:
With integrated support for user-authentication and resource-authorization in Heirloom, existing rules are extracted from the host system (e.g. RACF) and precisely replicated in any industry-standard LDAP server (including open-source implementations such as Apache DS), without requiring any changes to the application code.
Application security should not (as it often is) be relegated to a sideline consideration during (or even, post) a transformation project. Doing so injects a lot of unnecessary risks, and yet many modernization vendors fail to fully address this critical piece of the puzzle.
Mainframe applications (batch and online) often rely on fine-grained resource-authorization (not just user-authentication), and the transformed application should provide the same controls, without requiring any code changes, to guarantee enforcement of existing security policies via integration with industry-standard directory services.
Finally, because applications transformed with Heirloom are 100% Java, transport-security (secure communications) and platform-security (safe deployment of application resources) is easily achieved via seamless integration with Java Application Servers.