On Tue, 15 Aug 2023 at 11:12, Phil Smith III <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> Bruce Hewson wrote:
> >fyi - a quick check shows approx 200K users defined.  Is that a big enough 
> >number?
>
> Wow! It sure is. How many of those represent real users who log on, and how 
> many represent real users who access using something else?
>
> I'm really not going much of anywhere with this, but I think it's useful info 
> to have to say "This is how much the platform still matters".

Until not too many years ago one of the large Canadian banks used
software from my then employer to manage logons for web banking. Every
one of their online banking and investment users was assigned a userid
in the security system. Given the banking landscape in Canada
(basically five large banks with 80% of the market, and many smaller
players with the other 20%), the population (let's say ~30M at the
time), and assuming even half the population has a bank account
distributed evenly across the players, we come up with *at least* a
million users per bank, and probably many more. (I believe this bank
assigned a userid to every customer, even though of course some would
continue to use paper cheques and visit their branch and never
actually log on.)

Each of these users actively logged on to web banking would have a
session on z/OS, an ACEE and associated in-storage data built, and so
on for the duration of their session. Of course these users weren't
logging on to TSO or any similar high resource subsystem, and they
weren't using 3270s. But neither were they just sending individual
transactions through to be authenticated - they actually had a session
for the duration of their web logon. On a busy day we would process
over 1.5M logons.

This bank eventually moved to some other system - either a front end
to z/OS or a completely off-platform solution - that I know nothing
about. But it was certainly possible to have that magnitude of users
in the security system, and whatever number of active sessions one can
infer from that.

(Sorry for the wishy-washy wording above. I know better numbers and
details, but while it's some years ago I still don't want to identify
the bank unambiguously.)

Tony H.

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