• Human Error Driving Data Breaches, Studies Find

  April 11, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Preventable errors – including clicking on malicious links sent as part of a phishing attack and misconfiguring servers and network devices – account for a large number of data breaches, according to a pair of studies released last week by IBM and Baker Hostetler.

  In IBM‘s annual X-Force Threat Intelligence Index 2018, the company concluded that “inadvertent insiders” — or employees who unwittingly cause security incidents through negligent actions – accounted for two-thirds of all the records that were comprised in 2017. IBM says nearly 3 billion records were compromised last year, which is actually down from the 4 …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, April 11

  April 11, 2018 Dan Burger

  “Hey, Pops! How many people died in the Digital Revolution?” This week in Monitor you’ll find a story that provides an aerial view where the path of disruptive technology is as easy to follow as a F5 tornado. The Rochester Post Bulletin describes what its town has seen. And what about the American Dream? The story from ProPublica records eyewitness sources from places where some of the heaviest casualties took place.

  Technology’s impacts on society should be recognized for what they are. So, don’t bypass the Forbes article with insights on how to lead a company and its inhabitants through …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 14

  April 11, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  There are a bunch of nips and tucks for the IBM i operating system in this week’s edition of the IBM i PTF Guide, but nothing that will keep you awake at night as sometimes happen on all platforms in the enterprise.

  If you are running encryption on your backups, you may want to take a look at this link. The issue is that tape processing fails if the QTADECRYPT data area is found in QUSRSYS and if the keystore file listed in the QTADECRYPT data area is missing from the system. All current releases – IBM i …

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• Counting The Cost Of IBM i On Power9 Entry Systems

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every time there is a Moore’s Law advance in processing, whether companies charge by the core or by the socket, there is price cut – in theory at least – for systems software. This is true if the chip maker decides to goose the performance of the cores or add more cores to a socket, or both at the same time.

  In the past several generations of Power processors used in the Power Systems line, IBM has done both. Because the systems software is based on cores, however, the move from two to four to eight to 12 cores per …

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• What A Concept: Distribution Software Aimed At Real SMBs

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Time may pass in the IBM midrange, and systems and business practices have evolved, but the one thing that does not change is that some companies, especially those on the smaller size with limited resources to devote to IT hardware and software, want a simple system that just lets them do the work they need to do.

  The simplicity of the System/3X family, which has its start way back with the System/3 in 1969 and runs up through the System/38 in 1979 and the System/36 in 1983, up through the AS/400 in 1988 and up through the iSeries, System i, …

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• Guru: Dealing With Non-Normalized Data

  April 9, 2018 Jon Paris

  From time to time, many of us have to find solutions for handling our old non-normalized tables in an efficient manner. It would be nice to have the luxury of redesigning and normalizing these databases, but real life is not like that. This is particularly true when the tables in question are part of an application package where you have no control over the file layout.

  I should point out that by “efficient” in this context I don’t necessarily mean processing speed, but rather in terms of the number of lines of code needed to perform the necessary manipulations and/or …

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• COMMON Changes Things Up With PowerUp 2018

  April 9, 2018 Alex Woodie

  We are six weeks away from the first inaugural PowerUp conference, the new name that COMMON has given to its annual meeting and exposition. While the new name has drawn some feedback, the changes that COMMON is making to the conference itself are expected to be the big head turners next month in San Antonio. We check in with the user group’s president, Justin Porter, for the good news.

  Let’s start with PowerUp, a name that not only reflects COMMON‘s affiliation with IBM and its Power Systems servers, but also reflects the notion of “up skilling,” the activity most …

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• Pushing The Capacity Envelopes With IBM i 7.3

  April 9, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every piece of systems software has some sort of maximum capabilities reference, and these documents are interesting in their own right to help system administrators, programmers, and database administrators, as they case may be, figure out where they might hit a ceiling in terms of capacity or performance.

  IBM has just published the Availability Maximum Capacities reference for IBM i Version 7 Release 3, which you can take a gander at here. As this reference correctly points out, coming close to the performance limits – or many of them at the same time – can cause outages. In this, …

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• 30 Years And Just Getting Started: IBM i Celebration Looks Ahead

  April 4, 2018 Dan Burger

  It’s been said many times that you can’t move forward if you keep looking back. What you’ve accomplished is not the end point. It’s the foundation for building toward the future. You can look back to see what you’ve missed, but it takes forward thinking to make up for it.

  This week is the beginning of a lengthy celebration spotlighting “30 years of innovation and we’re just getting started.” The IBM i team launched a website yesterday with a focus on the future, an emphasis on innovation and a reliance on social media (and IT Jungle) to spread the …

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• Shield Takes Another Stab At Multi Node In HA4i

  April 4, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Shield Advanced Solutions is putting the finishing touches on a new version of its HA4i high availability software that can replicate data across multiple nodes. The product, which has the working name HA4i Multi-Node, will allow customers to adopt more complex data replication flows, such as one-to-many and many-to-one, which puts it on a more solid footing with other HA products.

  IBM i shops have been steadily adopting high availability software over the past few years, studies such as HelpSystems‘ annual IBM i Marketplace Survey and Vision Solutions‘ State of Resilience show. We’re now at a point where …

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