Dan Burger
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IBM i Security Expert Interprets PCI and Multi-Factor Authentication
July 17, 2017 Dan Burger
With data security written boldly at the top of many organizations’ priority lists, the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is viewed as a top line defense against data breaches. Whether a company handles credit cards and is required to implement mandated security measures or uses the PCI standard as a best practices model, IT security gurus pay attention to the PCI DSS.
We are well beyond the realization that organizations need to be secure. The emphasis has clearly shifted to how organizations become secure. How to build and maintain a secure network, protect data and regularly monitor …
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Programmer Productivity Underscores Remain’s App Management Upgrades
July 12, 2017 Dan Burger
If the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World were bumped up to Eight, the original OS/400 applications could fill that slot. They were an efficient combination of form and function and built to last. But change eventually occurs. These days, it occurs more rapidly than ever. Application development strategies come in multiple shapes and sizes. We are witness to the debates and deployments of modernizations and migrations.
Change management software has taken on a bigger role by becoming useful in multi-platform development environments (one tool for tracking all development), workflow management, and for the expanded role of application lifecycle management. …
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Four Hundred Monitor, July 12
July 12, 2017 Dan Burger
The Scout motto “Be Prepared” is good advice for all of us. But when it comes to advice applicable to IBM i, Chief Scout Steve Will has specific advice on preparations that will be useful when the time for platform re-evaluation comes around. This article adds to Will’s advice on this topic noted by Monitor on June 21.
This issue of Monitor also has articles on the delivery of open source PTFs, the positive and negative impacts of artificial intelligence on workers, the tape storage dynasty that remains a factor even in leading edge companies, plus the influence, guidance and …
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Counting Companies With An IBM i In The Mix
July 10, 2017 Dan Burger
How many companies are running their mission critical business applications on Power Systems loaded with the IBM i operating system? Not as many as 20 years ago. That’s for certain. But who knows for sure? I mean, who knows the number? Three years ago, IBM was tossing out a worldwide estimate of 125,000. That number has not been officially updated but sources at IBM say the number of IBM i customers remains steady with that three-year-old estimate. On the other hand, I’ve heard people in the IBM i community guesstimate the installed base is under the 100,000 mark. It’s not …
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Pride In Advancing The IBM i Community
July 10, 2017 Dan Burger
The IBM i community is a global community. We sometimes forget that as we limit our view to the horizon as seen from our own IT departments. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the smart cats will tell you it’s far more likely to simply kill ignorance. The power of ideas should not be underestimated. And access to ideas is the reason the IBM i community benefits from events like the recent COMMON Europe Congress (CEC). The education and networking opportunities are what inspires people to participate, says Ranga Deshpande, president of COMMON Europe. “There’s pride in advancing the …
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Tomorrowland: Optimism, Risk, and Preparation For IBM i App Dev
June 28, 2017 Dan Burger
The rules of application development were never carved in stone. They’ve always been subject to change, improvements, enhancements and even replacements. Uncertainty and risk – do you stay or do you go – torture the brains of long-range planners who recognize the importance of preparation, but are caught in the whirlpool of innovation and hyperbole. Predicting future skills and tools is not an exact science. But with a high degree of certainty, we do know that sitting on your hands is no way to prepare for the future.
I asked a group of skillful IBM i application development monitors and …
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Four Hundred Monitor, June 28
June 28, 2017 Dan Burger
Jack Woehr duly notes IBM i open source proponents who are porting useful, popular open source to the i platform. But he also points to another path, one that he describes as object-disoriented. He can call it anything he wants, because he’s the one who blazed the trail. Woehr’s trail is generally a Java interpreter and specifically an interpretive form of JTOpen that makes it easier to encapsulate legacy IBM i as-is and offload the Web dev to the people who do Web dev best.
The quality of the products being produced in the open source community and the inclusiveness …
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IT Budgets Partly Sunny Thanks To The Cloud
June 26, 2017 Dan Burger
Lowering costs is not the only thing to scrutinize when noodling the idea of moving selected IT workloads to the cloud. But people do tend to focus on that and wonder if the cloud saves money or if the costs just get moved around like the pea under the shell in the old carnival game.
Computer Economics, in its latest report on IT spending, presents data that credits cloud for the continued success of do-more-with-less strategies in IT departments of all shapes and sizes. The report backs that up by unearthing a five-year pattern of IT spending reductions figured …
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IBM i, Watson & Bluemix: The REST Of The Story
June 21, 2017 Dan Burger
Integrated Web Services is nothing new for IBM i. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing new in Web services. A couple of years ago, IBM introduced Bluemix, an integration framework that, among other things, allows applications on other systems to connect with business logic running on i. The Bluemix tooling was designed to consume REST APIs, which can be used to connect Watson and IBM i. That’s where the newness is evident.
The plumbing that’s necessary to make these things happen is being built by the IBM i development team led by Tim Rowe, business architect for IBM i …
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Four Hundred Monitor, June 21
June 21, 2017 Dan Burger
If you’re on top of your game, you see this coming. But even the best prepared are sometimes surprised. When the time comes for a platform evaluation at your organization, can you defend what you do and why you are doing it? Before you get caught with your pants down, read this advice from someone who knows how to cover his technology assets.
This week’s Monitor also includes articles on accurately accessing emerging technology while facing a hurricane of hyperbole, measuring your Digital IQ (the results won’t be made public), and what’s behind the Oracle to DB2 database migrations. We …
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