• Modernization Starts with the Business, and the Tech Follows

  July 20, 2022 Alex Woodie

  The COVID-19 pandemic sent shockwaves through business, changing the way companies operate and resetting customer expectations. Businesses that can’t keep up with these evolving needs face long-term headwinds in terms of competitiveness. Implementing a modernization strategy is paramount for companies in these situations, but where do you start?

  While business closures from COVID-19 were bad, they could have been a lot worse. A 2021 study released by the Federal Reserve concluded that 200,000 establishments closed as a result of the pandemic. That was lower than a study from a year earlier that found 400,000 establishments could close. “Actual exit is …

  Read more

• Thoroughly Modern: With Cloud, You Need To Crawl, Walk, Then Run

  July 12, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The idea that all workloads are going to move to the cloud is a fallacy, and so is the idea that there will be only one cloud.

  Some workloads will, by necessity due to issues of governance and data sovereignty, remain in the corporate datacenter; some will run in hybrid mode across local and cloud infrastructure; and some will be in the cloud for the rest of their electronic lives. And because of the breadth and depth of applications in the enterprise and the long-established relationships that companies have with their IT suppliers and business partners, there will be many …

  Read more

• Guild Mortgage Takes The 20-Year Option For Modernization

  June 27, 2022 Alex Woodie

  When Kurt Reheiser returned to the IBM i server after a 15-year hiatus away the platform, things weren’t a lot different than how he left them. “My skills were more relevant than I thought they would be,” the former RPG developer said during last month’s POWERUp 2022 conference. Now as the CIO of a multi-billion-dollar company called Guild Mortgage, Reheiser is overseeing a modernization initiative that will keep building on the company’s successful history of custom development on the IBM i platform.

  Reheiser shared his and his company’s IT journey during a keynote address at COMMON’s annual user conference …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• How Fresche Fills Security Gap with Trinity Guard

  March 21, 2022 Alex Woodie

  We live in a world full of security threats. Black hat hackers – some working for themselves and some working for the governments of China and Russia – are constantly probing the Internet, looking for weak links in the information supply chain. With its acquisition of Trinity Guard, Fresche Solutions is determined to prevent your IBM i server from being one of them.

  It can be hard to fathom the impact that cybersecurity attacks have on the world, and the enormous pains that some organizations are taking to thwart them. In 2021, ransomware grabbed our attention thanks to large attacks …

  Read more

• Fresche Takes On IBM i Security With Trinity Guard Acquisition

  March 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are things that you worry about that you can’t do anything about, and there are things that you worry about that you actually can do something about – and have a fiduciary responsibility to do. Death and taxes are in the former category, and the security of mission-critical IT platforms are in the latter.

  Fresche Solutions, which expanded from its core application and database modernization business with the acquisition of Abacus Solutions last October, has been on the hunt to do more deals to help IBM i customers tackle the hard problems they face and give them new …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

• 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 …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles