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People may assume that a lot of this mainframe software is "running just fine" but nothing could be farther from the truth. Often you will find that this softwa

People may assume that a lot of this mainframe software is "running just fine" but nothing could be farther from the truth. Often you will find that this software was fine when it was written 40-50 years ago, but now it has a lot of deferred maintenance and upgrades which are now a "big problem". Is it a problem that an application that can move millions of dollars is only secured by a strictly 8 character alphanumeric password? You be the judge.

ghaff 3y ago
Certainly. A good reason for a migration is that we are in a place where we need to do something major--whether that's modernizing the software on the mainframe that isn't doing the job, moving everything to new platform(s) (including potentially cloud), or some combination of the two--the latter being a pretty common strategy these days. At that point, just adding more duct tape is probably the wrong approach, at least in the medium to long term.
justapassenger 3y ago
Updating the software to support stronger passwords or rewrite it from scratch, on a totally different platform? I don’t think you’re making argument think you’re making.
- mberning 3y ago
  You have no idea. This is not some database field that you can just alter with one statement and update a field on a screen. Things like this get hardcoded into hundreds of thousands of lines of assembler and cobol and need to be changed and tested everywhere. With no automated testing or other tools to mitigate the risk. It is an absolute nightmare. And 5 or 10 years from now it will be way worse because working on a mainframe is a deadend career and very few people are learning it.
  - justapassenger 3y ago
    I’m not saying it’ll be easy. But what’s even harder is rewriting 50 year old software, with all the bugs that others relay on now (both people and software), wanky and complex business logic, etc, etc. I’m not saying that you should stick to mainframe. But rewriting it because you need to support strong password is not a reason to do it.

ghaff 3y ago

Certainly. A good reason for a migration is that we are in a place where we need to do something major--whether that's modernizing the software on the mainframe that isn't doing the job, moving everything to new platform(s) (including potentially cloud), or some combination of the two--the latter being a pretty common strategy these days. At that point, just adding more duct tape is probably the wrong approach, at least in the medium to long term.

justapassenger 3y ago

Updating the software to support stronger passwords or rewrite it from scratch, on a totally different platform? I don’t think you’re making argument think you’re making.

mberning 3y ago
You have no idea. This is not some database field that you can just alter with one statement and update a field on a screen. Things like this get hardcoded into hundreds of thousands of lines of assembler and cobol and need to be changed and tested everywhere. With no automated testing or other tools to mitigate the risk. It is an absolute nightmare. And 5 or 10 years from now it will be way worse because working on a mainframe is a deadend career and very few people are learning it.
- justapassenger 3y ago
  I’m not saying it’ll be easy. But what’s even harder is rewriting 50 year old software, with all the bugs that others relay on now (both people and software), wanky and complex business logic, etc, etc. I’m not saying that you should stick to mainframe. But rewriting it because you need to support strong password is not a reason to do it.