From SHARE Headquarters

According to a 2018 State of IT Report from Spiceworks, an online IT marketing company, up to 48 percent of businesses in North America and Europe will implement IoT (Internet of Things) solutions this year. This will add billions of connected devices, creating trillions of transactions and petabytes of data to process and analyze—managing and securing all of that will be a challenge.

Enter the mainframe, which seems ideally suited to rise to the challenge at that scale. What specific role does mainframe play in the IoT, and what risks should companies be aware of?

Mainframes Bring Order to Chaos

Mainframes have long been relied upon for their ability to handle billions of transactions, which seems to make for a perfect fit for IoT workloads. However, mainframes could also help bring a sense of order to the chaos that often describes IoT networks, according to IBM Distinguished Engineer Frank DeGilio.

In an interview with IBM Systems Magazine, DeGilio compared the untamed IoT networks to the well-governed, controlled ATM networks—a different kind of “connected device”—that mainframes already support. The biggest value of mainframe, he argued, is that it can help IoT service providers apply a well-managed transactional environment to their networks, allowing them to identify problems in the network, provide services through a service-oriented architecture, and support the use of APIs to fulfill service requirements for IoT devices. Those capabilities exist for ATMs, but are missing in IoT.

In a piece for Network World, Jennifer Nelson, managing director of R&D Database Servers and Tools at Rocket Software, adds that the mainframe could help industries simplify data collection from multiple IoT devices. A retailer, for example, might collect data from all manner of RFID inventory trackers, in-store sensors, mobile apps and Wi-Fi tracking devices, all for the purpose of providing today’s connected consumer with a personalized, data-driven shopping experience. However, those devices might dump their data in disparate databases, making it hard to glean insights quickly. Modern mainframes are ideally suited to join different data sources, she writes, and provide the real-time analysis retailers would need to act on consumer data immediately, before that shopper has left the store.

Assessing the Vulnerabilities

Security remains a significant challenge for IoT. The issue made headlines with the 2016 Mirai malware botnet, in which poorly secured IoT devices were hacked and used to knock dozens of major internet services—including Amazon, Twitter, Reddit, Netflix, the BBC, and more—offline for hours.

One problem is a lack of security standards for connected devices. Poor attention to security by IoT device manufacturers means that each time a new device is introduced into a home or corporate network, it may leave a security gap that someone could exploit.

There is a risk to mainframe in all of this, according to Jeff Cherrington, Senior Director of Product Management at CA Technologies. He writes that the shifting role of the mainframe in modern enterprises means it’s becoming more connected to internet services, and thus vulnerable to internet-based attacks. As mainframes become more directly involved in the processing of IoT data, those risks may only grow. Around 70 percent of IoT devices are vulnerable to attacks, according to one estimate by HP.

Still, there is a lot of promise for mainframe and IoT. In releasing its latest mainframe, the z14, IBM touted advanced security capabilities that could keep mainframes safe even as they become more central to the management of internet-connected services.

And in a SHARE Live! presentation last year, RSM Partners’ Mark Wilson suggested that improved security standardization could provide the base levels of security required to reduce the risk of hacks from IoT devices.

Ultimately, with careful consideration to security and strong corporate governance, the mainframe could be a major asset to both IoT service providers and the companies that rely on connected devices to drive everyday business.