Following the disclosure by RSA Security over the weekend that its computers had been hacked and information relating to its two-factor authentication software, called SecurID, had been compromised, customers that rely on RSA’s software are wondering what steps they should take next.

In an open letter to RSA customers, RSA’s executive chairman Art Coviello Jr. explained that RSA recently discovered that it was the victim of an “extremely sophisticated cyber attack,” dubbed an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attack. The company’s security pros caught the attack as it was in progress, and immediately took steps to harden the RSA systems

The capability to track the performance of a database in real time can be a critical success factor, particularly for enterprise applications and large e-commerce websites. One company that’s carving itself a niche in this department, ExtraHop Networks, recently added support for IBM‘s DB2 database management system–including the IBM i variant commonly known as DB2/400–giving the Seattle startup coverage of the most popular types of databases.

ExtraHop was founded four years ago to serve the market for performance management tools. The founders, who hailed from networking product developer F5 Networks, started with the vision that the best

Several years ago, the owner of InterForm A/S tasked two business partners with leading the expansion of the Danish company’s products into the United States. The company, whose suite of IBM i-based document management software is well known in Europe, is still trying to find its footing in a U.S. market that has become more open following the divestiture of IBM‘s printing unit to Ricoh.

InterForm is a fairly young company that has a rich 30-year history of developing output management solutions for the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and now IBM i servers. The company’s recent history is

Any debate that compares graphical user interfaces to green-screen interfaces is usually over before it begins. It’s almost a unanimous decision. Green screens users, like four-leaf clovers, still exist, but the GUI wins by a technical knockout in 99 out of 100 cases. Last year, RPG Open Access was the new thing–a much talked about native RPG GUI. IBM i ISV Profound Logic Software was one of the first companies to put RPG OA into a product.

For many RPG programmers, and companies with an investment in skilled PRG programmers, this is a big deal. New language learning curves always

IBM i customers who are looking for a replacement for IBM Domino Fax for i5/OS may want to check out the FastFax migration path unveiled last week by Quadrant Software. The third-party software vendor says its FastFax for Domino i offering is a plug-and-play replacement for IBM Domino Fax for i5/OS, which IBM recently stopped selling and will stop supporting next year.

Quadrant has long been a leading proponent of fax integration with IBM i applications. While its FastFax offering doesn’t run fax workloads on the IBM i platform (It offloads them to a dedicated “black box” device.), Quadrant

Was 2010 the year that IBM i shops finally got religion and took security seriously? (Can pigs suddenly sprout wings and fly?) We’ll find out next week, when PowerTech releases its eighth annual “State of IBM i Security” study.

Year after year, the PowerTech security study highlights the mostly dreadful state of security of IBM i systems. Like Charlie Brown repeatedly getting the football pulled out from under him, PowerTech’s annual exercise seems doomed to showcase the abject failure of many organizations when it comes to securing their IBM i-based applications and data.

Every year, PowerTech dutifully reports the facts

Magic Software took the plunge into free software last week when it announced uniPaaS Jet, a single-user version of its tool for developing Web applications. While Magic still supports deployment on the IBM i platform, the company is clearly looking to build name recognition among the new generation of mobile and cloud app developers with the launch of uniPaaS Jet.

uniPaaS is Magic’s flagship application development tool for creating so-called rich Internet applications (RIAs), which deliver the richness of regular Windows applications but within the construct of a Web browser. The product, which debuted as G5 in 2008, uses a

i365 yesterday unveiled a virtualized version of its EVault for Microsoft‘s Data Protection Manager (DPM). The new offering builds on last year’s launch of the appliance-based EVault for DPM solution and gives customers the freedom to run the EVault for DPM software on any X64-based server equipped with a hypervisor.

i365 launched its EVault for Microsoft DPM solution about a year ago to give DPM customers a way to extend the disaster recovery (DR) benefits of the DPM solution to other platforms and applications, including IBM i, Linux, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, NetWare, VMware, the Oracle‘s database, and

The recent earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan are stark reminders that normal business operations can end in the blink of an eye. To that end, systems management software vendor CCSS last week released a new guide that lays the basic groundwork for achieving a highly available Power Systems environment.

The first step in achieving availability is to define one’s terms. What does availability mean to you? Is it the same as a service level agreement (SLA)? Without a clear understanding of when a server or application has crossed the magical line and becomes “unavailable,” it’s impossible to create a

Infor, which is in the process of trying to acquire competitor Lawson Software, last week announced that it grew license revenue by 17 percent during its third quarter. The privately held company said it would hire 400 additional software developers to help it keep up with a rigorous schedule in 2010 that will see it ship more releases than ever before.

Infor’s unsolicited $1.83 billion bid for Lawson earlier this month shows that the Alpharetta, Georgia, company is by no means calling it quits in the M&A department. The company, which has completed too many acquisitions to count,