If a person needs to perform maintenance activities on DASD volumes, it is more efficient (for RACF® processing) and better (for limiting the resources the person can access) to give the person authority to those volumes using the PERMIT command than to assign the person the OPERATIONS or group-OPERATIONS attribute. To give the person authority to those DASD volumes, define the volumes to RACF and add the person to the access list with the access authority required by the particular resource manager (such as DFSMSdss). For more information, see DASD volume authority.

If you use DFSMSdss, you can designate the user as a DFSMSdss storage administrator. This method has certain advantages over both OPERATIONS and DASDVOL authorization. For more information, see DFSMSdss storage administration.

The OPERATIONS attribute can be delegated only by a user (security or group administrator) who has the SPECIAL attribute.

For a list of the RACF commands that the OPERATIONS attribute allows users to issue, see Table 1.