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Thoroughly Modern: Four Ways Staff Augmentation Is Helping IT Get Things Done
September 12, 2022 Roger Betancourt
According to a recent report by McKinsey, 87 percent of organizations are facing or are expected to face skill shortages in the next few years. The biggest contributor to this pressing issue has been the impending retirement of the Baby Boomer generation, reducing the availability of skilled and specialized workers.
Technology might be the most affected sector, according to McKinsey –– 46 percent of the executives surveyed listed IT, mobile, and/or web design and management as one of the highest areas of concern. Moreover, 73 percent of organizations will have difficulties recruiting technologists and filling open tech positions.
This ongoing …
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Thoroughly Modern: Latest IT Trends – Bring Security, Speed, And Consistency To IT With Automation
August 8, 2022 Alan Hamm and Chris Koppe
The irony of many IT departments is that they have spent many decades automating aspects of the business, literally encoding business processes and interactions with customers, partners, and suppliers to make those processes consistent and fast, but many of the processes used in the IT department itself are done manually and rely on the “tribal knowledge” of the system and application experts.
This is not only not necessary in many cases today, thanks to a myriad of automation tools that can be brought to bear on IT operations, but it is also dangerous and extremely risky. The systems that run …
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Thoroughly Modern: With Cloud, You Need To Crawl, Walk, Then Run
July 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The idea that all workloads are going to move to the cloud is a fallacy, and so is the idea that there will be only one cloud.
Some workloads will, by necessity due to issues of governance and data sovereignty, remain in the corporate datacenter; some will run in hybrid mode across local and cloud infrastructure; and some will be in the cloud for the rest of their electronic lives. And because of the breadth and depth of applications in the enterprise and the long-established relationships that companies have with their IT suppliers and business partners, there will be many …
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Thoroughly Modern: Good Security Is Just As Important As Good Code
June 13, 2022 Pauline Brazil Ayala
Can my IBM i really be hit with a virus? Can it be hit with ransomware?
These are the questions I regularly get from clients as a security expert with more than 20 years of experience. With the pervasiveness of these ransomware threats and sophisticated cyberattacks that we’re seeing in recent times, it only makes sense that we pay close attention to these threats.
Security on the IBM i is a complex topic, and it is not one that is easily tackled with a few bullet points and tweaks of systems settings. Just like programming on the platform, for that …
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Thoroughly Modern: The Real Top 5 Challenges For IBM i Shops Today
May 9, 2022 Christine McDowell
The only way to really find out what is on people’s minds is to ask them, and maybe you need to ask them two or three times and take an average. As a supplier of development, modernization, and security tools and services, we ask a lot of questions and we do a lot of assessments for IBM i customers, and we look at any and all surveys that anyone does and synthesize this to help drive our business.
We have been through a series of surveys of our own as well as ones that we have helped promote or sponsored …
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Thoroughly Modern: Improving The Digital Experience With APIs
April 11, 2022 Marcel Sarrasin
The world is an ever-changing place, and that means there is always something new that needs to be done to either improve applications running on the IBM i platform or to integrate them with other applications or interfaces on new kinds of devices. This is an important aspect of modernization, and one that often bridges the back-end databases and applications and the front-end interfaces through which end users access those applications – both of which need to be modernized, and often independently.
This is made possible by having application programming interfaces, or APIs, and if IBM i customers have tens …
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Thoroughly Modern: IBM i Security Is No Longer Set It And Forget It
March 14, 2022 Amal Macdonald
For most IBM i shops, who are busy creating and maintaining the applications that run the business and who are not just chronically understaffed but structurally understaffed, the smartest thing they can do when it comes to security is give up.
You heard that right. They need to put their arms in the air and surrender, absolutely and completely.
No, we don’t mean they need to open all of the ports on their server, turn off the firewall, and let the ransomware and malware in and let the hackers and phishers do whatever they will. What we do mean by …
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Thoroughly Modern: Taking Charge of Your Hardware Refresh in 2022
February 14, 2022 Peder Lundblad
IBM i shops are well known for paying a premium for their systems because they are worth it, but they are also just as well known for hanging onto aging hardware a bit past its prime, which has its own kinds of economic costs in higher maintenance and operational costs as well as the risk of a failure in some key component of the hardware or of having an older operating system release that does not have a key security vulnerability or bug patched.
IBM does a very good job of keeping hardware technology cycles regular, and so there is …
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Thoroughly Modern: Building Organizational Resilience in the Digital Age
January 17, 2022 Maxime Leclair
There is so much change happening in the world and technology is playing a critical role. Organizations must use modern digital solutions if they want to survive and thrive amid uncertainty and accelerate growth in an aggressively competitive business landscape.
Climate change, COVID-19, global and financial crises, among other things, have exposed vulnerabilities in businesses and accelerated the need for new digital capabilities, modern systems, and processes as well as optimized and transformed legacy systems. According to research, 63 percent of organizations flag digital transformation, including building up technological infrastructure and data analytics as top strategic priorities for the …
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Thoroughly Modern: Time To Develop Your IBM i HA/DR Plan For 2022
December 6, 2021 Josh Osborne
Disasters and unplanned downtime can hit any company at any time – regardless of where its applications or data sits. Establishing a high availability and disaster recovery (HA/DR) plan is paramount to getting your mission critical IBM i applications and your business back up and running – fast!
2021 saw its fair share of challenges. Everything from bush fires to earthquakes to flash floods, and the continuation of the pandemic. And, those are just the ones mother nature sent our way. The manmade risks in the form of cyberattacks and ransomware also grew exponentially in 2021. With over 30,000 security …
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