• Pledging Backup Assurances in an Unsure World

  March 30, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Companies are facing increasingly threats to their backups these days. Whether it’s ransomware attacks, migrations to the cloud, or random hardware failures, the possibility of corrupted data looms as big as ever. With World Backup Day taking place tomorrow (March 31), it makes sense to check out the state of backups on IBM i.

  The first thing to know is that backup plans appear to be changing at many companies, or at least the mechanism they use to execute the backup. From 2020 to 2021, the percentage of IBM i shops using tape to backup and recover data dropped from …

  Read more

• Four Hundred Monitor, March 30

  March 30, 2022 Jenny Thomas

  “We don’t just create business value, we create progress.” That’s the plan from IBM’s Chairman and CEO Arvind Krishna as Big Blue looks to shine the spotlight back on itself. You can read what’s in store for the year ahead in our Top Story below. Our favorite IBM i is getting some extra attention this week, too, as you can read about in our top post under the Redbooks, White Papers, Blogs, and Other Resources section below. It’s nice to see things starting to kick into high gear around our ecosystem after the past year-plus of stagnant waters.

  Top Stories

  … Read more

• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 24, Number 13

  March 30, 2022 Doug Bidwell

  It’s pretty quiet on the PTF western front. Not that there isn’t always some kind of weird stuff going on . . . because, let me assure you, there is. IBM i customers have all kinds of weird things happening, and that ain’t no April Fool’s joke. But, mercifully, this week, as we end the first quarter and Spring is starting meteorologically as well as calendaricly – yes, I just made that word up – there are only a few things going on.

  Once again: To help you with the Log4j security vulnerability, we have created a supplemental spreadsheet as …

  Read more

• The State Of The IBM Base 2022, Part Three: The Rusting Iron

  March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the past several months, we have been drilling into the results of the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey that HelpSystems does every fall and then reports on each January. We have been taking our time going through the results, and in a number of cases we have been doing our own spreadsheet magic on top of the raw data to provide what we think is better information that describes the current state of the IBM i base.

  In our first story, we talked about the distribution of operating systems over time, spanning from the 2015 report to the …

  Read more

• Inside Jack Henry’s Long-Term Modernization Roadmap

  March 28, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Jack Henry & Associates is one of the stalwart brands for IBM i applications. The Monett, Missouri, company has more than 1,000 banks and credit unions running its core banking systems on IBM i, with another 650 on AIX and a few hundred more on Windows Server. So when the company last month officially unveiled its next-generation technology strategy, it turned a few heads.

  As it turns out, Jack Henry has been working on its new tech stack for the past five years. As the company sussed out the strategy and the first products were born – an application for …

  Read more

• Guru: SIEM Is Only Part Of IBM i Cybersecurity

  March 28, 2022 Bruce Bading

  Many times, we hear from IBM i business owners that their SIEM – that’s short for Security Information and Event Management – is their cybersecurity solution for the IBM i. But that can’t be true, and I want to explain why it is part of the security shield but certainly not all of it.

  Let’s start with SIEMs and how they fit into cybersecurity frameworks. SIEM is mentioned in the PCI appendix, but not once in the core of the 250+ PCI DSS requirements, likewise, the NIST Cybersecurity Framework lists event monitoring as one of the 100s (1/100s) of NIST …

  Read more

• As I See It: Two Front War

  March 28, 2022 Victor Rozek

  History records that the Second World War began when Germany invaded Poland, breaching its western border on September 1, 1939. For the Poles, however, that accounted for only half of their unfolding misery. Largely forgotten, 16 days later, the Russians invaded Poland from the East.

  Being situated between Germany and Russia in the war-ravaged 20th century turned out to be geographically inauspicious. Long after the Germans were defeated, the Russians stayed. Opportunistic invasion turned into long-term occupation.

  A similar story is unfolding in Ukraine, where a two-front war is being waged: one analog, the other digital. Weeks before tanks and …

  Read more

• Yet More Trimming In The IBM Power Systems Catalog

  March 28, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to say what is really happening at this point, but either IBM has simply run out of features for Power8 and Power9 servers, it can’t get anyone to manufacture any more of them, or it simply wants to use every means it can to get the market ready to move to Power10 machines when they come out in May or June.

  Perhaps it is a bit of all three, eh?

  In announcement letter 922-018 last week, IBM said that effective on March 22 it was no longer selling the RISC-to-RISC data migration feature #0205 for the Power …

  Read more

• IBM Drives AIOps Into License Management

  March 23, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week announced an expansion of its partnership with Flexera that will see IBM’s AIOps solutions integrated with Flexera’s software asset management software. The integration will give customers more insight into customers’ software licensing and SaaS subscription entitlements, from the cloud all the way to Power servers and mainframes, IBM says.

  The new integration specially targets IBM’s Turbonomic application resource management (ARM) software and the Flexera One offering from Flexera. According to Dinesh Nirmal, general manager of IBM Automation, the integration will close the gap that existed between what software and SaaS solutions customers are entitled to …

  Read more

• With IBM i Security, You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

  March 23, 2022 Ron Venzin

  It is not enough to be worried late into the night about the security of your mission critical systems. The IT managers who are in control of the infrastructure at IBM i shops, who also have a lot of Windows Server infrastructure and a smattering of Linux and AIX systems, too, need to actually do something about security. And they have to do something more than just rely on the legendary security of the IBM i platform.

  Security software for the IBM i platform has been around since the early days of the commercial Internet, and while a handful of …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles