• 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: Infrastructure Challenges And Easing Into The Cloud

  November 8, 2021 Marcel Sarrasin

  There is an old saying, purportedly a Chinese curse but never proven to be anything but a saying by English diplomats who interfaced with the Middle Kingdom: “May you live in interesting times.” There is an equally mistaken etymology that the word for “crisis” in Chinese is comprised of two Mandarin words for “danger” and “opportunity.”

  Even though people misunderstand the source of these sayings, and the latter one is just simply not true at all, it is still the case that there has never been a more interesting time in the information technology sector in general and …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Talking IBM i System Management With Abacus

  October 11, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you want the members of your IT department to focus on the core applications that define, run, and improve your business, and they also have to manage your systems, and you have limited budgets to do it all, you have to learn to let go of something. There are only so many hours in a day, only so many days in a year, and only so many people to do the work. Something has to give, and you have to keep what brings the real value.

  Having an IBM i platform provides plenty of value to start, as IBM …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Making Quick Wins Part Of Your Modernization Strategy

  August 9, 2021 Chris Koppe

  IT leaders are being asked to do way more than keep the lights on these days. For many, the recent pandemic has exposed the need for organizations to provide effective digital experiences and enable remote work. At the same time, many industries experienced revenue loss and as a result, have fewer resources.

  Understanding where to focus efforts can be key in helping you drive the best value and stay aligned with company goals. Success often lies in striking a delicate balance between addressing modernization needs and working within reduced budgets.

  The path to modernizing IBM i applications is paved with …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Augmenting Your Programming Today, Solving Staffing Issues Tomorrow

  July 12, 2021 Leo Lymberopoulos

  Do you have a back-up for when your programmers are on vacation? If not, where would you look to fill the decades of knowledge that is needed to support your RPG or COBOL applications? Who are you going to turn to when your star IBM i programmer – your only programmer – announces plans to retire at the end of this year?

  Organizations that run IBM i applications have found themselves in some tricky situations. IBM i is a robust platform and your programmers have spent decades building and maintaining your applications to fit your business. However, as skilled RPG …

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