User accountability

Individual accountability should probably be one of your installation's prime security objectives. A user who can be held individually accountable for actions is less likely to make mistakes or take other actions that might disrupt or compromise operations at your installation.

When an individual user accesses the system through a terminal, the concept of individual user identity is fairly obvious. With a group of production programs, however, it might be less clear just who the user is. (Is it the application owner, the job scheduling person, or the console operator?)

RACF® offers you the ability to assign each user a unique identifier. (Of course, whether you establish this degree of accountability in all cases is an installation decision.)

In addition, RACF permits you to assign each user to one or more groups, which are simply collections of users having common access requirements.