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Although artificial intelligence (AI) applications have an increasingly important role in automating routine IT operations, their use is becoming even more of a necessity for managing enterprise cloud domains.
by John Ghrist
Managing computer systems for any enterprise involves a wide variety of tasks, such as diagnosing problems, maintaining user accessibility, ensuring application performance, and detecting and neutralizing security threats, to name just a few of the most critical ones. AIOps, or artificial intelligence–driven operations apps, is a family of software that automates these and other activities.
Data security and data privacy are terms that often appear in the same sentence. Although some of the means of securing both are identical, there are also critical distinctions between them that mustn't be overlooked when considering service providers.
By John Ghrist
We've likely all heard for many years now about how globalized the world is becoming. In the Internet Age, many points on the planet now communicate and share information instantaneously, and the practice of direct buying and selling of goods across borders has gone from an almost exotic happenstance to a commonplace goal of a majority of U.S. business enterprises in the last two decades. Hand in hand with that has been the need to secure data needed to handle business transactions: customer contact information, credit card and bank account numbers, and routing information are obvious examples. Everyone agrees such things must be kept securely confidential. Yes, we've seen this movie before.
Maybe these companies were able to pivot easily because IBM i doesn’t require the daily hand-holding required to keep other platforms working.
By Steve Pitcher
It’s easy to look at the year 2020 with contempt.
I’ve done it. Most all of us probably have. There’s no reason to do a recap of 2020. It started with a near-miss war with Iran, and it hasn’t let up since. I was joking the other week that the only thing we’re missing in 2020 is the equivalent of the Ten Plagues of Egypt. And we still have a couple of months for that to unfold.
IBM has made just about everything in free-format RPG truly free-format…except O-specs. But you can print without needing an externally defined printer file.
By Sam Lennon
Instead of adding free-format support for O-specs, IBM expects you to use an externally defined printer file, which can do everything O-specs can. But recently, I wanted to print a simple report and didn't want to create a separate printer file. I remembered reading somewhere about writing to a program describer printer file from a data structure. It turns out to be easy in free-form RPG, with code like this:
In this second and final part of this short series about mobile app dev, let’s talk about grids and glyphicons.
By Jan Jorgensen
In a previous article, I covered how the grid system in Bootstrap works, so in order not to bore you I will try not to repeat myself.
The grid system in version 4 is still based on a maximum of 12 columns! But even though the grid system seems the same from version 3 to 4, something has changed under the hood. In Bootstrap 3, the grid system was based on floats, but that changed in Bootstrap 4; it is now based on flexbox.
Modernize the way you find objects that don’t match your security requirements.
By Carol Woodbury
When clients rework their applications’ security configurations, one step I emphasize is that, once the project is complete, they’ll need to routinely check the applications’ objects to make sure they are still secured correctly. If this type of process isn’t in place, it’s quite likely that some of the objects will end up with the wrong security setting. How does that happen? A developer debugs a problem and, rather than promoting the fix through approved change-management processes, creates the program and restores it to the system themselves. Rather than the application profile owning the program, the developer owns it. (This an example of what can happen when developers have too much authority on production systems.) I’ve also seen authorization lists get changed from *PUBLIC *EXCLUDE to *PUBLIC *ALL while attempting to debug a production issue. Because security is always the cause of an issue (NOT!), the authorization list was changed to fix the problem. Of course, it didn’t resolve the problem, but no one remembered to go back and set the authorization list back to the correct setting.
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Ghosts and witches—they’re kid stuff. But there really are other things to be afraid of.
By Victoria Mack
This being October, Steve Pitcher has a bit of a Halloween scare for you. But this goblin isn’t a fantasy. It’s real. IBM has announced end of support for the exceptionally popular POWER7 machines. Will IBM offer extended hardware maintenance? Who knows? It hasn’t happened yet. Read Steve’s article to see his perceptions of what some may consider a truly horrifying announcement.
The Proposal Document, which may be referred to as the Business Case, explains the problem together with a description of how the problem will be solved and includes a high-level estimate of what it will cost to develop and deploy the solution.
By Colleen Garton and Erika McCulloch
Editor's Note: This article is excerpted from chapter 3 of Fundamentals of Technology Project Management, by Colleen Garton and Erika McCulloch.
For an external project, the proposal planning will begin for the development company after they receive a Request for Information or a Request for Proposal from a prospective client. The client company will have completed the Project Concept and will have been through an internal approval process before sending out the RFI or RFP documents to prospective vendors. For an internal project, the Project Proposal will be based on the approved Project Concept.
These days, consumers expect retailers to provide information tailored personally just for them.
In the industry’s current disruptive environment, retail and consumer product companies are competing with new business models and being forced to refresh their consumer experiences and brand engagements to be more relevant.
A new IBM study finds retailers' current strategies to deliver engaging brand experiences are not keeping pace with what customers’ expect and want out of their brick and click shopping experiences.
Do you realize how many of your personal or business devices are connected to the Internet? Let's talk about that.
By Jan Jorgensen
The Internet of Things (IoT): You've heard somebody talk about it; or you've read about it in a newspaper, in a tech magazine, or on a website; or you've attended a seminar or conference where somebody told you about the next big thing.
SURVEY HIGHLIGHTS
By HelpSystems
Editor's note: This article introduces the February 2022 Report: 2022 IBM i Marketplace Survey Results, which is available to download from the MC White Paper Center.
Cybersecurity continues to top the charts as the main concern when planning an IT environment.
Perhaps the most consistent data point in the IBM i Marketplace Survey Results is the ongoing cybersecurity threat. Over the past six years, cybersecurity has been the main concern for people planning their IT environment, and this year was no exception. Although it has decreased since last year’s results, 62% of respondents still said this was their number one concern. And although organizations prioritizing security seem to be implementing multiple solutions, it is still alarming that, on average, almost 30% of respondents do not plan to implement each of the surveyed cybersecurity solutions. If your organization has concerns over IBM i cybersecurity skills, managed security services could be a way of filling in any holes.
IBM Notes Domino gets a new future with HCL Technologies.
By Steve Pitcher
On October 25, 2017, IBM announced (well, they blogged it) that they were entering into a strategic partnership with HCL Technologies to give the following products a new lease on development life: