Kisco Systems Archives

Vendors Fill In The Gaps With IBM’s New MFA Solution

July 14, 2025 Alex Woodie

The new multi-factor authentication (MFA) capability that IBM has built into the IBM i operating system is a real gamechanger in terms of securing the system and preventing unauthorized access to applications and data. However, it lacks some key capabilities that some customers are looking for in an MFA solution, which third-party vendors are eager to fill.

The native MFA function that Big Blue delivered with IBM i 7.6 is being praised almost universally throughout the IBM i community as a massive security improvement. The MFA functionality, which uses randomly generated time-based one-time passwords (TOTP), is built directly into …
Read more
COMMON Hosts Its Annual Conference, Welcomes New Board This Week

May 20, 2024 Alex Woodie

COMMON today kicks off its annual POWERUp conference, bringing the global IBM i community together in beautiful downtown Fort Worth, Texas. The world’s largest IBM i user group is also wrapping up an election for its board of directors, which features three candidates for three spots.

For many decades, COMMON has hosted the single largest annual gathering of IBM i professionals, and that run of success will not be broken this week, with expectations of about 1,000 attendees at the show. This year’s annual COMMON conference, dubbed POWERUp 2024, features four days of education, networking opportunities, and other events in …
Read more
Kisco Bolsters IBM i Security Business With DXR Buy

May 6, 2024 Alex Woodie

Kisco Systems has acquired DXR Security, the company co-founded four years ago by IBM i security expert Carol Woodbury. The deal immediately boosts Kisco’s position in the IBM i security space, and gives Woodbury an opportunity to cement her midrange legacy.

Woodbury started her computer security career in Rochester, Minnesota back in 1984, when she was hired to work on securing IBM’s midrange platform. Over a 16-year career, she eventually rose to the position of AS/400 Security Team Leader and Chief Engineering Manager for Security when she retired in 2000.

Known simply by the community as the AS/400 security architect, …
Read more
What Degree? Kisco’s RCL Fellowship Spotlights Value of Training, Hard Work

April 22, 2024 Alex Woodie

Having a college degree is certainly one path to having a career in IT. But it’s not the only one, a point that Kisco Systems president Justin Loeber is making with the latest round of the Richard C. Loeber Fellowship, which is now accepting applications.

It’s not that Justin Loeber is adamantly opposed to college degrees. After all, the current Kisco Systems owner eventually received a diploma in environmental science and public policy, which he called “a passion play.”

But his father, Rich Loeber, never got a college degree. Despite proving his worth in data processing at a railroad and …
Read more
IBM i Community Shares 2024 Predictions

January 15, 2024 Alex Woodie

Spaceship Earth has completed another trip around the Sun, which means one thing: Time for 2024 IBM i predictions! Hopefully you enjoy this year’s predictions, which seem to sport a good mixture of optimism and realism.

The future for IBM i is wide open – open source, that is, says Liam Allan, the creator of Code for IBM i and a software developer for IBM i.

“My prediction is pretty simple. Businesses will continue to invest in themselves through the power of open source,” Allan says. “Whether it be using dev tools, open source runtimes like Node.js, or even newer …
Read more
Kisco Adds DUO Support to i2Pass, Okta Up Next

October 4, 2023 Alex Woodie

IBM i shops that desire multi-factor authentication (MFA) may be interested in the latest release of Kisco Systems’ MFA software, i2Pass, which adds support for the popular authenticator app from DUO. Support for Okta is coming next, the company says.

DUO Mobile is a popular authenticator app that runs on your smart phone and communicates with server-based MFA and two-factor authentication (2FA) systems to provide more assurance that the person asking for authentication is who they say they are. It was labeled the top 2FA product by the New York Times, which cited its simplicity.

DUO Mobile users can …
Read more
New GUI, Native SMS Come to Kisco’s iEventMonitor

August 2, 2023 Alex Woodie

There’s a lot going on inside your IBM i server – too much for a single administrator to track it all, let alone do so in real-time. One product that helps automate IBM i monitoring is iEvent Monitor from Kisco Systems. With the recent release of version 7, the company has added a new GUI, support for native SMS messaging, and monitoring for SQL security certificate expirations and thread waits, among other new features.

Kisco Systems rolled out iEventMonitor back in 2015 as a budget-minded system monitoring tool for IBM i shops. Starting at just $400 for a single LPAR, …
Read more
Kisco Makes Moves In the IBM i Security Business

August 29, 2022 Alex Woodie

When he took ownership of Kisco Systems from his dad, Richard, last year, Justin Loeber pivoted the company to focus almost exclusively on IBM i security. With recent updates to the company’s security tools in the books and more in the works, Loeber is positioning the company to ride the security wave for the long haul.

If COMMON’s recent announcement that it is launching a new security conference called i on Security 2022 in St. Louis this fall is any indication, then it appears that awareness of security vulnerabilities is on the upswing. That is good news for companies …
Read more
Father, Son, & Co: Kisco Systems Drills Down On Security

April 4, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Rich Loeber was a divisional IT manager for over 16 years before he founded Kisco Information Systems in June 1984, four years before the AS/400 was launched. The System/36 had just launched the year before, and the System/38 had been around and in production for a handful of years at that time. Loeber founded Kisco – presumable named after Mount Kisco, a town in the Hudson Valley in New York State – to offer data processing services to IT shops in the New York metropolitan area.

Two years later, Kisco became an independent software vendor in the IBM midrange, and …
Read more

Content archive

Recent Posts

Subscribe

Pages

Search