Mainframe systems remain at the core of many enterprises. Unfortunately, legacy applications in these environments may still use insecure communications protocols. Enterprises are putting their reputation and valuable data at risk and must convert to secure file transfer protocols.

FTP and Telnet are obsolete protocols and should be avoided because of serious security flaws. The SANS Institute has long recommended avoiding Telnet for remote logins, and it is widely accepted in the distributed server world that FTP should be replaced with SFTP wherever possible.

Relying on legacy protocols for critical file transfers and administrative connections is risky, but some mainframe users have been understandably slow to adopt SFTP and SSH as the safe and secure standard. Converting large volumes of JCL scripts and applications can be costly and time consuming. Rewriting and testing old JCL scripts is not an attractive task and may result in breaking existing business processes.

Legacy enterprise mainframes are a potential audit failure point. Processes should adhere to internal security policies and comply with industry-specific regulatory mandates from e.g. PCI-DSS, NIST, HIPAA etc. Privileged access controls to and from mainframe systems commonly use SSH and should be part of the extended corporate compliance ecosystem.