Big data and the mainframe - issues and opportunities

This is the second edition of this spotlight paper. The first edition discussed big data – primarily analytic data – and how it could be leveraged alongside and within mainframe environments. This second edition extends that discussion to include the fact that it is becoming increasingly popular to offload functions such as real-time log analytics, to third party platforms such as Splunk (which is both a big data analytics platform and a security information and event management (SIEM) enabler), in order to support security and IT service functions. These are big data implementations in the same way that running something like sentiment analytics, on Hadoop, is; and have the same issues.

The purpose of the current paper is therefore to examine these issues and, in particular, we focus on the issues that arise when organisations are integrating their mainframe system of record alongside big data implementations.

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