Stream: Melbourne
Time: 14:15 - 15:00
The IT world was a very different place in 1976: Disco ruled the airwaves, the Apple I had just appeared, and “security” didn’t yet mean what it does today. Enter RACF. This session takes a look back at the early days of security on MVS and follows RACF’s journey from those bell-bottom beginnings to the enterprise-grade security powerhouse that we rely upon today.
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Mark Nelson, CISSP, CSSLP, Senior Software Engineer, joined IBM in Poughkeepsie, NY, in 1982 and moved to the RACF team in 1987 for a six-month temporary assignment. His RACF career featured working on auditing and data analysis tools (IRRDBU00, IRRADU00, RACFICE), RACF's Health Checks, RACF/Db2, support for encrypting access methods, RACF's support for digital certificates, and RACF’s encrypted data base support, among other projects. Mark started as student of electrical engineering at the Polytechnic Institute of New York (now the ‘NYU Tandon School of Engineering’) where he discovered the joy of programming on a System/360 Model 65 and quickly switched to computer science. Mark is an active speaker on RACF and has received several SHARE “Best Session” awards, six and a half “Top Gun” (best session) awards from the Vanguard Enterprise Security Expo, five “Best Vendor Session” awards at GSE, and was the 1999 recipient of the Vanguard “Chairman’s Award.” Mark is a co-author of the book “Mainframe Security for Security Experts: An Introduction to RACF”. Mark was inducted into the zExchange Superheros in 2017 and is an adjunct instructor at Marist College on z/OS security. Mark is the director of the MHV IBM Club Chorus and a private pilot.