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State Of IBM i Security: Seven Areas That Demand Attention
April 24, 2017 Alex Woodie
The latest installment of the annual State of IBM i Security was released last week by HelpSystems, and the results were about what you would expect: most IBM i servers are basically wide open for abuse.
In a webinar last week, HelpSystems director of security technologies Robin Tatam discussed the findings of the report, which was based on security assessments conducted on 332 systems during 2016. He broke the findings down into seven core areas that should be addressed, including system security levels; administrative privileges; passwords and user profiles; data and program permissions; network access and exit programs; audit trails; …
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Linoma Climbs the File Transfer Ladder
February 22, 2017 Dan Burger
Linoma Software has taken its managed file transfer software up another notch with its latest release of GoAnywhere Version 5.4.2. The basic aptitude of managed file transfer (MFT) products cover the secure and automated transfer of files inside and outside of organizations. That includes sharing data among the various platforms from IBM i to Windows, Linux, Unix, mainframe, and Mac OS.
With its latest refresh, Linoma‘s GoAnywhere updated its SSL cipher configuration picklist for the admin server, HTTPS/AS2 server, FTP server and FTPS server. Just six weeks ago, SOAP and RESTful Web Services were added with the introduction of …
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A Power Systems Wish List For The Year Ahead
January 18, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It is the beginning of a new year and that means a bunch of different things. First, we are not quite as rested as we would like, but we are also ready to get on with it. It usually means that people are making resolutions to change their own behavior for the better and making prognostications about what may or may not happen in the future.
Sometimes we are not in a mood to prepare or predict, and as this year gets rolling I am in much more of a mood to prescribe. Sometimes, you can’t wait for the future …
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Don’t Be the Eeyore of Digital Progress, OpenLegacy Says
June 1, 2016 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThe Internet continues to present powerful and compelling new capabilities that many organizations are leveraging to their advantage. But all too often, the tantalizing digital future remains out of reach for IBM i and mainframe shops due to the difficulty–either real or imagined–of engineering those new capabilities to work with legacy systems. Helping organizations overcome those challenges is one of the goals that OpenLegacy has set for itself.
OpenLegacy CTO Hans Otharsson has spent most of his career working with enterprise systems, including banking systems running on IBM i servers and mainframes, and knows firsthand the massive amount of ingenuity,
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A Change Of Heart: IBM i Shops More Willing To Share
March 7, 2016 Dan Burger
… Read moreOn the road from the AS/400 to IBM i, there have been many changes. One of the biggest has been the evolution from being a fortress that locked out all “outsiders” to allowing the system to interact with other systems. I don’t doubt there are some one-dimensional IBM i shops, but sharing data, once punishable by death, now occurs without beads of sweat and loss of sleep . . . most of the time.
The IBM i platform has a strong record of being directly accessible to other platforms, especially within the Windows realm, Mike Sansoterra points out. Sansoterra is
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HelpSystems’ Application Integration Begins With GUI
November 16, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreAlmost every IBM midrange shop faces integration issues. The next piece of the IT puzzle has to fit in with existing environment, or the system that was functional 15 years ago requires modernization to make it functional today and into the foreseeable future. You’re lucky if you are only dealing with one piece of the puzzle at a time. In fact, that rarely happens. You have to sort through a pile of priorities and make a plan. You need a road map.
Integration lessons come in all shapes and sizes and varying degrees of difficulty. Sometimes we learn quickly and
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LANSA Guides Mobile, Portal, Integration Project To Success
July 13, 2015 Dan Burger
… Read moreThe proving ground for significant IT projects is far less about speed than it is about endurance. And when you can hear about a project that was completed, it’s so much more interesting than listening to a sales pitch for technology that can take you someplace that no one has yet to travel and may be a place no sane person wants to go. Tried and tested beats new and full of promise for a lot of people despite the drumbeating that is designed to defeat anything that adheres to a slow-growth philosophy.
This story is about a six-year-old project.
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What’s Legacy Now: WSDLs and Stored Procedures
July 1, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreThanks to the breakneck speed that information technology is evolving, the definition of what is “legacy” in computing is constantly changing. For example, 10 years ago, organizations that were coding stored procedures into their databases and exposing mainframe business logic as WSDL-based Web services were following best practices in development. But some people are now lumping those objects into the legacy computing camp, along with old RPG and COBOL programs.
The folks at OpenLegacy aren’t interested in starting a war by labeling stored procedures and first-generation WSDL-based Web services as legacy. The software modernization vendor–which last week announced a new
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Top Five New Technologies On IBM i
June 29, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreOne of the great things about the IBM i server is it adapts to the times. While the platform often gets tagged with the “legacy” name, that’s merely because there’s still a lot of vintage iron running antique software in the real world. But the little elves way up north in IBM‘s Rochester toyshop have been hard at work bringing new capabilities to the platform.
Here are the top five new things that IBM brought to the IBM i platform in 2014 and 2015:
1. Native Flash Storage
IBM added support for native flash storage in the latest round
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For OpenLegacy, Modernization Is All About the APIs
June 1, 2015 Alex Woodie
… Read moreModernization means different things to different people. For some in the IBM i space, being modern means adopting a model-view-controller architecture or having a Web user interface, while for others it may mean having a “mobile first” development strategy or using SQL in the database. For the folks at OpenLegacy, modernization means exposing existing business processes using the emerging lingua franca of network-powered computing: The API.
While OpenLegacy is, ostensibly, a provider of open source legacy modernization tools for IBM i and z/OS shops (it’s right there in the name), the path to modernization that it prescribes is by
