Top Secret offers a secure, innovative solution tailored for industries needing high confidentiality. Used widely, it delivers reliable performance and advanced data protection, establishing its role as a trusted name in cutting-edge technology.
| Product | Mindshare (%) |
|---|---|
| Top Secret | 12.3% |
| IBM Security zSecure | 15.0% |
| ACF2 | 12.5% |
| Other | 60.2% |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 1 |
| Large Enterprise | 7 |
| Company Size | Count |
|---|---|
| Small Business | 41 |
| Midsize Enterprise | 13 |
| Large Enterprise | 50 |
Designed for those requiring top-level security, Top Secret provides a reliable infrastructure that ensures data remains confidential and protected. Its sophisticated features are geared to handle demanding tasks while being intuitive to use. Targeting sectors like finance, healthcare, and government, Top Secret continues to meet the complex requirements of enterprises aiming for data security and ease of management.
What are the most important features of Top Secret?Top Secret is implemented across diverse industries, each leveraging its capabilities for confidentiality and security. In financial services, it manages sensitive transactions with precision. Healthcare facilities trust its rigorous protection and management of patient records. Governmental bodies appreciate its robust infrastructure supporting data integrity and secure communications, demonstrating versatile solutions suitable for demanding environments.
Top Secret was previously known as CA Top Secret.
First Tennessee Bank
| Author info | Rating | Review Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Information Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.5 | Top Secret is our stable, scalable mainframe security core, crucial for compliance. I value its features like 2FA and excellent support, though I wish for removal of user record size limitations. |
| Director with 51-200 employees | 4.5 | I use this valuable solution for asset protection and access control, finding it stable with excellent customer service. My main issues are its user interface, which could be simpler, and the need for better local post-sale support for integration. |
| Director at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees | 3.5 | I find this mainframe security solution easy to use, stable, and scalable enterprise-wide. I recommend it but would like improved audit reporting and better scrubbing of the canned reports. |
| Head of Enterprise Partnerships | Wealth & Investment Management at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.0 | I find this mainframe security product crucial for authentication and authorization, securing our data. While customer support is excellent, I'm concerned about its scalability limits, development pace, and need for better 2FA and CFILE backup. |
| Manager of Operations Security at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees | 5.0 | Having used this product for 27 years, I rate it 9.5/10. Its stability, scalability, ease of installation, and reporting are excellent, and customer service is the best. I only desire more granular password complexity. |
| Information Security Engineer at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.5 | I find HFS SEC valuable for enterprise protection, noting its excellent stability, scalability, and support. New release setup is lengthy, and I'd like Top Secret integration. Choosing it is a long-term commitment. |
| Sr. Supervisor Auditor at a financial services firm with 1,001-5,000 employees | 4.0 | I find the system enhances security and adapts well, with great customer support. However, the command-line UI is difficult for auditing, requiring expertise. Integration with other systems, like IBM, could also be smoother for my evolving needs. |
| VP Enterprise Architecture Manager at FirstBank Puerto Rico | 4.5 | We appreciate its mainframe security integration and centralized user security, finding it stable and scalable for 3,000 users. My primary request is for LDAP/Windows AD integration to unify our security. |
Top Secret is our external security manager for our mainframe systems.
It's an integral part of all of our mainframe security functions. It's the core of our mainframe security functions. It helps ensure that we are compliant with all of the various banking regulations, security regulations and requirements.
We make use of almost all the features of Top Secret:
We have implemented two-factor authentication, which is a new piece of CA Top Secret. I think that those are the key areas.
I almost don't have any specific issues with the product. Any problems that we do encounter are always quickly addressed by the CA Top Secret support folks.
It would be helpful if they removed limitations on user record sizes.
Stability is a nine out of 10. Very rarely do we end up having program crashes, it's very rare. It's been very stable over the years that I've used it.
I would say scalability is an eight out of 10.
I would give them a 10 out of 10.
It's not like I installed Top Secret and had something previously. Both of the shops that I have worked in already had Top Secret installed as a base product.
We set up the security system for new systems when we installed those, so I would say that it's comparable to other products. I would say it's an eight out of 10.
The security environment is constantly changing. The support for CA Top Secret is constantly upgrading the product to ensure that it's current with the industry needs for mainframe security.
To protect our assets from being accessed. First, that our employees do not have access to the data/information that is not valid for their positions. Second, to prevent illegal access to our systems.
All the features that we use are valuable. I cannot think of any special feature that is more valuable than other, especially as there are not many features that you can optionally use.
The user interface. Sometimes, it is not simple to understand where a certain definition should be defined, and I go through a number of screens until I find where to do some of them.
No stability issues.
No scalability issues.
Excellent. Any issue that we have had in working with the product received the best response that we could have hoped for. The technicians that respond have great knowledge of how the product works and promptly responded with solutions to any problems that we have had over the years.
As far as I know this is the only solution ever used. As Top Secret was installed before I started working for our office, I assume the challenge was to protect our assets.
Initial setup was before my time, but over the years of using and upgrading through the releases of Top Secret I would say that the setup is very straightforward.
I am not involved in this aspect of the business.
Make sure that there is a post-sale department in your country. We have experienced some post-sale problems to do with integration of CA products into our systems.
The most valuable feature is ease of use.
This benefits our organization because it is an enterprise-wide solution.
I would like to see better reporting, more emphasis on audit reporting, and better scrubbing of the canned reports.
The tool is stable.
The solution scales easily.
When selecting a vendor, the most important thing is support. If you are looking for mainframe security, get this solution.
Authentication and authorization. It is a security manager, so it has to validate all accounts that use the mainframe. In terms of authorization, it controls what access those accounts have with the two resources on the mainframe. That's the primary function of the product.
By securing the mainframe platform and the data that's on it.
I've got about 20 or 30 items. I would like to see the ability to create a CFILE backup from a backup. A CFILE is a sequential version of what you've got on your database. If you do it against your live database, you impair performance. I want to be able to create that from a backup of the database. That's one of our primary items that we need. Another item that we need is more capabilities around two-factor authentication (2FA). They are working on two-factor authentication and have been making good progress. It's not quite where it needs to be for us yet.
We push it harder than any other organization in the world. We're a very large organization and we run it harder than anybody should. We tend to find its limits. I would say that we're at the forefront of finding issues of scalability. To that extent, we often break it.
There are scalability issues for extreme size. We are extreme. I think last month in terms of security calls, what they call "rock route calls", we executed 165 billion of them.
We have an ongoing relationship with technical support. They are excellent.
I've been involved in the setup of multiple CA security systems. Getting it going is very straightforward. To configure it to do what you want, you have to have an extreme knowledge of the z/OS operating system. I wouldn't say the software is hard to setup, but to configure it properly takes much more knowledge than just knowing the software. I've been doing this for 30-some-odd years now.
When selecting a vendor, make sure they can keep up with you. The ongoing development, security, is an ever-changing item and they need to have sufficient development staff and capabilities to keep up with the industry. That is an area where I have a concern, because I don't see them keeping pace with what we're doing. Admittedly, we're at the forefront of a lot of stuff. It's all about the configuration. It's how you use it.
There are only three players in mainframe security. There is RACF from IBM, there's ACF2 and Top Secret from CA. Each has its strengths and weaknesses. RACF is very robust at this point in time, but it takes third-party tools or an extreme knowledge of the z/OS operating system to use it properly.
Top Secret is probably one of the easiest to use, but it's not quite as easy to customize. ACF2 is very, very easy to customize, it takes less technical knowledge than RACF but more than Top Secret. It's really a matter of finding a product that is suited to the way your organization does business. If it's a small organization with little in-depth security expertise, I would recommend Top Secret. If it's a very, very large organization, I would recommend something like RACF or ACF2.
I find the ease of installation and the ease of understanding and reporting on the product is excellent. We are always debugging things. The reporting is everything to me as far as being able to respond quickly to either in-house concern, client concerns, or auditor's concerns, or management for that matter.
To me, I like the way they do the future stuff. I noticed they have a thing now where the password complexity is now going to be used for administrations as a control option. I'd like to see that more granular, see where you could get the passwords that are being enforced, but you can enforce it at different hierarchical layers between the product. Currently, it's all or nothing. I would like to see it a little bit more granular.
With Top Secret, I'm very familiar with it, I've been with it for 27 years so to me the familiarity of the product is the biggest thing and I'm able to do things quickly because of that familiarity and my expertise.
The stability of the product is wonderful. The people who support the product, the ease of getting in touch with the support area, is great. The agile development teams and being involved in it, which we were, excellent. I love the way CA is doing things.
We have a fairly large security database, multiple LPARs running the product. Very scalable to our current environment.
The best. Believe me, I'm not not only responsible for Top Secret, I'm responsible for other security products. By far the best vendor that we have. The responsiveness. They come back immediately. If they don't know the answer, they get the answer, which is all you can ask for.
For my group, we're decentralized administration. We have tons and tons of administrators across the platform. We have over a 130,000 users on the database and probably another 2,000 administrators. My group, I believe, should have the ability to turn that function off because we're a group of 5 people that are running the thing from the top. That's just my thought on the whole thing.
I think it's straightforward, absolutely straightforward. For me, it's second nature.
I'd give it a 9.5/10. I think it's a pretty good product. It was very well written and the ease of administration and the ease of the commands and the ease in which you can report on it are top notch.
I'd start by calling support and getting their best recommendations for the current environment. I think the support group does a great job and they will direct you. Also, read the installation guide to do best practices through that. For the most part, the product installs fairly easily and if you have an understanding of the product before you start to install is a key thing. If you don't, you can make some grave mistakes in implementing the product.
HFS SEC is the most valuable feature for us because it's managed consistently as other resources are managed. It uses standard resource names instead of bit settings.
It protects our enterprise by providing an access monitor authentication protocol. All competitors do the same thing, but this does it the best.
I'd like integration of cleanup data with Top Secret.
I haven't had issues with deployment.
The stability of it is pretty good. We've had no issues with stability. Our statistics show that we’re doing 115 billion security calls per month for just half of our system.
We’re running one of the largest installations in the world, and it’s scaled fine.
Technical support is excellent.
I was not involved, as the initial setup was done in 1985. In new releases, installation is not easy and can take about four months to roll out.
Choose wisely because you’re getting married for life. Once you install it, it’s expensive and painful to go with something else.
Being in risk and security, the biggest thing is the ability to adapt because right now we’re changing to model IDs. We work with HR to build out a system for personnel to be matched with levels of access to information.
It allows us to be more secure as enhancements come out. They’ve been great for us and we implement as they roll out. In banking, security is a priority, and we constantly get updates that meet our needs.
As an IT auditor, the UI is the tough part. You have to really know the commands. I’m more Windows/GUI, but with this, you need to read books or find someone to get the right commands. From the IT auditing standpoint, it needs to be a more simple to use.
I haven’t seen any instances of instability from the auditing perspective. Any time there are issues, such as latency, they’re related to other aspects of our system, not Top Secret.
Not from my perspective. We always have projects going on that use it more and other systems talk with it, but I don’t know of any issues scaling.
We get great support from CA with questions. In the past, we’ve had issues with other vendors. We get great feedback. Whether by email or other communications, we hear back and get our questions answered pretty quickly. I’ve heard no complaints from the security side.
I was not involved, but I did talk to someone who said they had bumps in the beginning, but not sure if it was just because we didn’t have enough expertise on our end. We had someone come in and take over the administration of Top Secret. But the recent releases and enhancements have had no major issues.
We’re always trying to evolve, and the enhancements help, but its intertwining of everything else we use isn’t as smooth as it should be, but that’s because we use software from IBM.
The most valuable feature for us is integration with the native mainframe security, extending the security.
It centralizes all the user security on a single tool, which has truly been the best part for us. Otherwise, it's a simple non-fancy product.
I'd like to see integration with LDAP's services, because today we have the mainframe and Windows AD separated. I would like to integrate both so they can work together.
It's perfect, but it's related to the stability of the mainframe itself. We have had no issues.
We have 3,000 people using it with no issues of scalability.
We use an internal support team, but we've had no problems.
When we got our mainframe, we got this, and it's the standard in the market.
I wasn't involved in the setup.
