CA Southern Africa, the sole sub-Saharan Africa representative of CA Technologies, a Broadcom company, has placed a spotlight on the need for the modernisation of mainframe security.
“Typical mainframe security controls include identity and access administration monitoring, augmented by complex passwords,” said Dolf Snyman, Account Director, CA Southern Africa. “However, these are inadequate security measures in today’s hybrid IT world and do not cater for multi-factor authentication, configuration compliance, privileged user management, data classification and assessments beyond auditors’ checklists.”
Snyman explained that mainframes operating in a hybrid IT environment are faced with more threat vectors due to new vulnerabilities being introduced via the digital economy. “Today’s mainframe security landscape is a far more expansive and perilous place due to issues including broad connectivity coupled with often poorly tracked or monitored bulk data movement. Add to that insider threats from malicious users through to well-intentioned but ill-informed employees, broad access through shared data and increasingly stringent regulatory requirements and you have just some of the headaches facing mainframe management executives. CA Trusted Access Manager for Z helps reduce the risk of insider threats that can lead to data loss and system outages. It does this by streamlining the management of privileged identities on the mainframe.”
Authorised users can be elevated to a privileged state to perform system tasks. “Upon completion, the user de-elevates or has privileged entitlements automatically removed when the set time box expires. Privileged access that is attached to a particular ID poses a risk to the organisation,” said Snyman.
Click below to share this article