• The IBM i Marketplace Survey Needs Your Input

  September 27, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to believe it, but this is the tenth year that Fortra, formerly known as HelpSystems, is taking a survey of the IBM i customers base so it can put together a report to tell us all how we are doing.

  The IBM i Marketplace Survey and its accompanying report and the webinar that goes over the results of the survey, which are both presented each February, are an invaluable resource for the IBM i community. This is particularly so since IDC, Gartner, Forrester, and the other IT market researchers and consultancies have long since stopped tracking Power …

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• Midsummer Security Indicators: Hot and Gloomy

  August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The hot summer heat is smothering Americans like a tight polyester jacket these days. Also having big impacts on Americans are hackers, security vulnerabilities, spam, and malicious emails, which seem to be peaking with the seasonal fry.

  Security software company Securin scanned 8 million addressable IPs among US state government systems, and discovered 119,000 instances of high-risk services that could be easily exploited, according to a report released yesterday, dubbed “The State of Cybersecurity in America.”

  All told, Securin found 3,700 exposed databases (Db2 among them), 3,400 exposed Secure Shell (SSH) endpoints, 2,780 exposed File Transfer Protocol (FTP) systems, and …

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• A Peek Inside Fortra’s Cybersecurity Catalog, And Its Cyber Future

  June 12, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The evolution of Fortra, formerly HelpSystems, from a small IBM i systems management and monitoring provider from the Minneapolis area into one of the top 10 cybersecurity solution providers with an estimated $800 million in annual revenue is an interesting story, and one that we have already written. But what, exactly, does Fortra do in the security realm?

  The cybersecurity space is changing quickly at the moment, as hackers look to exploit vulnerabilities in software and human processes. Lots of security software vendors are trying hard to keep up with the rapidly evolving threat landscape, so where does …

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• Fortra Completes Postmortem Of GoAnywhere Vulnerability

  June 5, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Security firm Fortra recently published an analysis of the zero-day vulnerability that impacted its GoAnywhere MFT customers earlier this year and committed itself to “continuous improvement.” Meanwhile, an analysis shows that dozens of organizations continue to run unpatched and exposed versions of GoAnywhere months after the flaw was discovered and patches became available.

  Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) first became aware of the remote code injection exploit vulnerability in its GoAnywhere managed file transfer (MFT) product on January 30, as we previously reported, and quietly alerted customers on February 1. The company says it immediately shut down the hosted version of …

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• Fortra Issues 20th State of IBM i Security Report

  May 24, 2023 Alex Woodie

  IBM is celebrating 35 years of its midrange platform next month, and there is no doubt it will be an exciting moment for the IBM i community. But there’s another occasion you might not be aware of: the 20th annual State of IBM i Security Study, which was issued last month by Fortra (formerly HelpSystems).

  Back in 2004, the security experts at PowerTech took it upon themselves to analyze the configurations of customers’ actual iSeries and AS/400 servers (there were still AS/400s around) and write a report sharing what they found. As you might imagine, the state of security, as …

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• COMMON POWERUp 2023 – Reporter’s Notebook

  April 26, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The international IBM i community descended upon Denver this week for COMMON’s annual POWERUp conference, which continues through tomorrow. By all accounts, the show was a success among attendees, educators, exhibitors, and IBM. Here are a few observations on the show.

  COMMON’s top-notch education was the big draw in the High Plains of Colorado, with more than 300 sessions planned over the four-day event. Sessions containing information about the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) of IBM i, including 7.5 TR2 and 7.4 TR8, were well attended, including those from IBM i CTO Steve Will and his business architects, including Scott …

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• Unattended IBM i Operations Continue Upward Climb

  March 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  One of the IBM i server’s traditional strengths is its capability to run for long periods of time in an unattended manner. While manual intervention is inevitably necessary at some point in time, the human resources required to manage IBM i is far less than other business platforms. And according to the latest data from Fortra IBM i Marketplace Survey, more than three-quarters of IBM i shops are embracing automation.

  In late 2022, Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) peppered a couple of hundred IBM i shops with a variety of questions about their IBM i setups, including the number and type of …

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• The IBM i OS Base Is Older Than We Think, But Moving Ahead

  March 6, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Hardware upgrades are costly in terms of money and while it is always exciting to get a new system with that “new computer smell” – and you know what we are talking about – at least IBM i operating system and systems software upgrades don’t carry such a high price – provided you are on Software Maintenance and you do proper testing on your software before you make a jump to a new release.

  The other great thing about IBM i systems software is that any given release not only runs on the current new Power Systems hardware at the …

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• RPG Use “Skyrocketed” Says IBM i Marketplace Report

  February 20, 2023 Alex Woodie

  RPG has always been the number one development language on IBM i, the platform with which it is most closely linked. But as open source languages like PHP and Java spread on IBM i, some speculated that RPG’s popularity would begin to slip. That hasn’t happened, according to Fortra’s most recent IBM i Marketplace Survey Results report. In fact, usage of RPG has “skyrocketed,” it says.

  From 2015 to 2020, the percentage of Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) Marketplace Survey-takers who chose RPG as one of their development languages stayed steady, hovering around the 84 percent to 89 percent level. Structured Query …

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• Zero-Day Vulnerability in Fortra’s GoAnywhere MFT Being Actively Exploited

  February 15, 2023 Alex Woodie

  A critical security vulnerability in Fortra’s (formerly HelpSystems) managed file transfer (MFT) solution, GoAnywhere MFT, is being actively exploited to steal data from companies and possibly even to spread ransomware according to published reports. Fortra told customers to consider every managed credential in their GoAnywhere environment to be compromised, shut down cloud instances of the service, and issued an emergency patch for the zero-day security vulnerability.

  Security reporter Brian Krebs was the first to share news of the vulnerability, which is described as remote code injection flaw that requires administrative console access for successful exploitation. In a February 2 post …

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