Look around FTP :Secure File Transfer in z/OS

File-Transfer Protocol (FTP) is one of the most widely used cross-platform protocol today. Almost every system comes with the FTP feature, with both client & server easy to use. It is a readily available, convenient and inexpensive technology to transfer datasets between z/OS and the workstation OS. The z/OS FTP Client and server handles MVS datasets and ASCII to EBCDIC conversion without skipping a beat. Even JES support is available for submitting jobs and extracting reports via FTP utility.

But FTP can also cause lot of problems, if it isn’t set up to prevent potential security exposures. FTP can’t deal with security & privacy issues. In a closed, secure environment, FTP can serve as a simple solution. But not in a complex environment like mainframes. Some of its noticeable shortcomings are listed below:-

1.      Lack of data-compression

2.      Lack of application-level verification for data integrity

3.      Sending User ID’s and passwords in clear text format

To overcome some of this basic shortcomings, we have another alternative – Secure Shell FTP, it’s a sub protocol of FTP and is supported by z/OS 1.12 and above. A short comparison of both the protocols are listed below:-

SFTP gives significant advantage in terms of encryption, compression and integrity checks; which was somewhat missing in FTP. Only concern is that, SFTP commands are slightly different from that of FTP commands.