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Global COBOL Growth Spurs Reevaluation of ‘Legacy’ Assets
February 16, 2022 Alex Woodie
COBOL is supposed to be a dead language, tied (mostly) as it is to the IBM mainframe, which is also dead. But according to a recent survey from Micro Focus, the amount of COBOL code in the world actually is expanding. What in COBOL is going on?
Micro Focus commissioned the research group Vanson Bourne to evaluate the state of COBOL use in the world, and the results of that research were released on February 4. Perhaps the most eye-popping figure references the title of the report, “How much COBOL is really out there?”
The answer: Anywhere from 775 to …
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Four Hundred Monitor, February 16
February 16, 2022 Jenny Thomas
Some of you may be noticing a need for a chief data officer within your organization, although it appears to be more common to see that role added to an existing employee’s responsibilities. The task of creating business value from data isn’t as easy as it might sound, but it is something nearly every organization would like to do. This week, we’re sharing an article about what to look for in a CDO, as well as a link to the page of IBM’s CDO, which should offer some food for thought if that’s a position you, or your company, is …
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To My Dearest IBM i . . .
February 9, 2022 Visual LANSA
Very rarely do hardware and software stay together for so long…
Hardware finds newer, younger, more trendy software….
The trendiest software jumps to the best hardware….
But every so often…
The best hardware and software stay together for a lifetime!
To My Dearest IBM i:
As Valentine’s Day approaches, I wanted to profess my love and gratitude to you. Although we have spent over 30 Valentine’s Days together, I didn’t want this one to pass us by without acknowledging the special place you hold in my heart.
I have watched you blossom from a young aspiring server to the …
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Four Hundred Monitor, February 9
February 9, 2022 Jenny Thomas
In Monitor, we love helping you keep up on what’s happening in the world of computing, but sometimes we also love to refocus back in our own IBM i ecosystem. Which is why this week we wanted to call your attention to a conversation our Editor Tim Prickett Morgan had with Ken King, who quietly took over as general manager of Power Systems last July. Their conversation, in case you missed it on Monday, is listed as our Top Story below. Also, don’t miss the Calendar at the bottom of this column – it is really filling up as our …
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Four Hundred Monitor, February 2
February 2, 2022 Jenny Thomas
I have read that February is the border between winter and spring, which should come as good news for much of the U.S. as the East Coast lies in the grip of some frigid temperatures. But neither the month nor the temps are of consequence to IBM, which has charged into the new year with renewed vigor. As we check in on the latest news regarding Big Blue, we see that the charge is on to refocus after the split from Kyndryl, with the hybrid cloud being the first order of business. Once you’ve caught up on the news, don’t …
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Learning To Drive Fast On The DevOps Roadmap
January 31, 2022 Andrew Ireland
Maturity doesn’t come with the passing of time, but with experience, whatever age you may start doing something. So it is with DevOps. In many ways IBM i teams have been ‘ahead of their time’, deploying small code increments to production fast and often. However we are seeing that requirements in integration and hybrid cloud are pushing the boundaries in DevOps transformation, and that to avoid costly, high-risk migration projects in the future it is important to act now and start taking further steps on that IBM i DevOps maturity journey.
Full DevOps maturity depends on sharing development methods and …
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Log4j Hits Heritage Version of Navigator for i – No Patch Coming
January 12, 2022 Alex Woodie
IBM i shops running the old version of the Navigator for i client should be aware that the software is vulnerable to the Log4j security vulnerability, and there will be no patch to fix it, IBM says in a new security bulletin. There will, however, be fixes coming to other vulnerable components, including IWS, IAS, and IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS), IBM says.
Just before we hit the holiday break, the extremely severe Apache Log4j security vulnerability was disclosed to the world, resulting in a frantic effort to patch servers, desktops, refrigerators – just about anything with a …
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Critical Log4j Vulnerability Hits Everything, Including the IBM i Server
December 15, 2021 Alex Woodie
Hackers gave themselves an early Christmas present this year with a critical security flaw in Log4j, a popular logging framework that is used across many programs, including some that run on IBM i. IBM i shops are encouraged to take this flaw very seriously, as the vulnerability already is being actively exploited in the wild. However, finding where Log4j exists in your stack is not always simple, which makes this particular flaw particularly nasty.
The Log4j zero-day vulnerability, which was disclosed last week by security researchers with CERT New Zealand, was logged into the National Vulnerability Database as CVE-2021-44228 …
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2021: An IBM i Year in Review, Part Two
December 15, 2021 Alex Woodie
We’re at the tail end of another busy year of tracking the goings-on in the IBM i community, which means it is time to sit back and ponder where we’ve been. Part one of this series covered the first six months of the year, and now it’s time for the second half, which started in…
July
Ransomware is often thought of as an X86 problem, that the IBM i is immune. Turns out, that’s not quite accurate. In July, we shared news of a close call that one IBM i shop had with ransomware.
As IBM got ready to ship …
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AWS Offers Mainframe Migration Service. Is IBM i Next?
December 6, 2021 Alex Woodie
Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud service provider, last week unveiled a new service to help IBM mainframe customers modernize their workloads and move them to the cloud. Will the cloud giant, which says it’s completely driven by the needs of its customers, launch a similar service for midrange workloads running on IBM i?
AWS Mainframe Modernization is a new service AWS launched at its re:Invent conference last week that aims at making it “faster and easier to migrate mainframe and legacy workload to the cloud.” In addition to AWS components, the service includes roles for systems integrators, such …
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