• Maxava Strengthens Leadership Team With Key Appointments

  July 15, 2024 John Dominic

  As Maxava positions itself for continued growth and innovation around the world, we are thrilled to announce several key appointments that will enhance our leadership team. These strategic moves are designed to strengthen our operational capabilities, meet complex customer demands, and expand our international market presence in HA/DR, multi-platform monitoring and security.

  Sheena Bernard has been promoted to vice president of operations. In her new role, Sheena will oversee the technical, development, and services teams, ensuring that Maxava continues to deliver innovative solutions and support to our clients. Sheena has extensive commercial, business improvement, and operational management expertise, having previously …

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• Cutting IT Costs Is Not A Priority, And That’s Good News

  February 13, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the past nine years that Fortra (formerly HelpSystems) has been putting together the IBM i Marketplace Survey, one of the first things we always look at is the Top IT Concerns part of the survey results. It is a barometer that tells you what IBM i shops are thinking might happen in the future even if it is not an actual prediction about what will happen in our economy and the IBM i community.

  It’s sentiment informed by the budgetary processes that were at work as 2022 came to a close.

  The most important thing I look at every …

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• IBM Power: How Strong Is Your Backup Game?

  June 8, 2022 Jason Hardy

  Your business runs on IT and chances are if your systems are down, your business is down. Have you contemplated the most common reasons for data loss and whether your strategy can protect you in the event of natural disaster, hardware failure, fire, ransomware, human error or theft? Depending on the reason for your outage, you may experience data loss and need to leverage your backups to recover. Are you confident in your backup and recovery strategy?

  One of the simplest tests you can do to assess your backup strategy is to see how you stack up against the 3-2-1 …

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• IBM Power In The Cloud: More Than A Hardware Lift And Shift

  April 4, 2022 Jason Hardy

  In my role, I speak with several companies each week about the prospect of migrating from their on-premise IBM Power server to our IBM Power Cloud. A common thread that runs through these conversations is a focus on the cost of purchasing and maintaining an on-premise server versus the monthly recurring fee of our cloud based service. Many prospects see this move as a simple lift and shift to cloud infrastructure rather than a modernization strategy.

  And while this may be partially true, as most customers are not modernizing their application when migrating, they are overlooking the modernization benefits that …

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• Shield Launches Message Monitoring Offering for IBM i

  August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals should stay on top of important messages generated by their server. But sometimes can be difficult for a user to sign-in on a console. With Enterprise Monitoring Solution for IBM i, or EM4i, Shield Advanced Solutions is giving operators and administrators the capability to view messages and log files remotely via email, text, or push notifications, and to respond to them, too.

  EM4i monitors IBM i message queues and job logs on behalf of the user. When a message hits the log, EM4i automatically forwards it to the user as email, text, or via Pushover Notification, …

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• Malware Threats and Cyber-Recovery on IBM i

  May 26, 2021 Brian Barth

  Cyber threats have evolved from the traditional vectors of theft and direct attacks to more financial driven cyber destruction and extortion, especially via ransomware. Hospitals, manufacturers, universities and financial institutions have all been attacked in the last year, and the rate of attacks is increasing as networks become more accessible to support remote workers. The Colonial Pipeline attack has demonstrated that even the critical infrastructure that supports our supply chains is not invulnerable.

  In 2021, more than three quarters of attacks are financially motivated, and over half of those attacks are ransomware – an attack in which files are typically …

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• Syncsort’s Pitney Bowes Deal: All About Good, Clean Data

  December 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Syncsort completed its $700 million acquisition of Pitney Bowes’ software and data business last week, just in time to get a piece of the end-of-year IT spending extravaganza. As Syncsort CEO Josh Rogers sees it, the deal will bring a host of benefits to existing Syncsort customers, particularly as it relates to feeding next-gen analytics systems with good, clean data.

  The Pitney Bowes deal brings Syncsort new solutions that it can sell to business intelligence and data analytics organizations, including data quality, data cleansing, data matching, and data discovery tools. It also brings master data management (MDM) capabilities to Syncsort, …

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• PSPS: The Latest Threat To Business Continuity

  November 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Businesses in Northern California learned about a new threat to business continuity in October: the Public Safety Power Shutoff, or PSPS. With weather conditions ripe for the rapid spread of wildfire, Pacific Gas and Electric de-energized thousands of miles of power lines, sending thousands of homes and businesses into disaster recovery mode.

  In late September, as weather conditions turned dry, hot, and windy, PG&E warned that it would have to cut power across large swaths of its Northern California service territory, potentially shutting off power to 2.4 million people. In the wake of power line-sparked wildfires that destroyed tens of …

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• Digging Into the Latest IBM i TRs

  October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The fall batch of Technology Refreshes (TRs) have been revealed, and as expected, there’s a bit of new functionality available for customers who use IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. In this story, we’ll tackle enhancements in open source, systems management and monitoring, and development, which means we’ll dive deeper into other areas, like database and HA/DR, in a future story.

  Let’s start with the fun stuff: open source. With IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1, IBM has brought support for two prominent open source projects, including ZeroMQ and Redis.

  ZeroMQ is a universal messaging library that allows users to …

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• Staying On Top Of High Availability At HelpSystems

  October 21, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  HelpSystems got its start in systems management and automation software and has expanded its solution portfolio over the years to include cybersecurity, business intelligence, document management, robotic process automation, capacity management, and more. More recently, HelpSystems entered the IBM i high availability (HA) arena with their Bug Busters acquisition in 2016. I recently checked in with Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, and Tim Woodfield, director of development, to get an update on the company’s HA offering.

  “HelpSystems does a good job of listening to the things our customers like and don’t like about their …

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