The Cost of Enterprise Downtime
September 30, 2021
Enterprise downtime is now more expensive than ever: Some 44% of firms indicate that hourly downtime costs exceed $1 million to over $5 million, exclusive of any legal fees, fines or penalties. Additionally, 91% organizations said a single hour of downtime that takes mission-critical server hardware and applications offline, averages over $300,000 due to lost […]
ArticlesHow Much Does a Data Breach Cost?
September 21, 2021
For the past 16 years, IBM has published research by the Ponemon Institute in the annual “Cost of a Data Breach Report.” Its 17th report was published at the end of July this year, and perhaps the biggest finding was that 2020 had the highest average cost for a data breach in 17 years. The cost […]
ArticlesRandom and ‘Almost Random’ Numbers on z/OS
September 17, 2021
Random numbers can come in handy. They can be used to create a unique filename, generate a random new password, or randomly select a record. The good news is that we can obtain random numbers on z/OS. Well, at least some of them are random. COBOL and RANDOM A quick look at the IBM Enterprise […]
ArticlesOf Wildcards, Regular Expressions and Mainframe Security
September 14, 2021
As Sigmund Freud might say if he were alive today, “Sometimes, a dash is just a dash.” Of course, if he did, he’d likely be talking about one of the two wildcard characters that do all the heavy lifting in CA ACF2. That’s right: ACF2 only has two wildcard characters—or actually, fewer than two: the […]
ArticlesIBM Delivers a Frictionless Hybrid Cloud Experience With the New Power10-Equipped E1080 Server
September 8, 2021
Today, IBM announced the new IBM Power E1080 server—the first in a new family of servers based on the new IBM Power10 processor. With the Power10-equipped E1080 server, IBM is providing clients with a frictionless hybrid cloud experience across their entire IT infrastructure. The Power E1080 server is built around the revolutionary IBM Power10 processor. […]
Installing an ifix With AIX Live Update
September 1, 2021
Chris Gibson explains how to install an AIX security ifix without a reboot
ArticlesKubernetes Container Security Best Practices With Red Hat Advanced Cluster Security for Kubernetes
August 30, 2021
As we work with organizations who are adopting containers as part of their software development strategy, we have seen container security become a challenge for many, and at times an aftersight. This is not on purpose, but primarily a result of the vast differences between the new technology of containers versus the virtualization model many […]
ArticlesEvil Mainframe Brings Ethical Hacking to the Forefront
August 26, 2021
When it comes to hacking, there are courses that can teach you to break past the security of almost anything. However, learning how to hack a mainframe usually isn’t one of them. That’s why Chad Rikansrud and Phil Young created Evil Mainframe, the first mainframe penetration testing class. “The IT world at large has benefited […]
ArticlesCICS Security, TLS Enhancement, Updated CICS Documentation and More
August 23, 2021
The Virtual CICS user group is an online user group that has been meeting for over 10 years. It meets every other month, which works out at six meetings each year. And, at each meeting, there’s a presentation. At the July meeting, Colin Penfold, technical leader for IBM CICS Transaction Server Security, spoke about recent […]
ArticlesIBM Announces IBM z/OS V2.5
July 28, 2021
According to an IBM Institute for Business Value study “Application modernization on the mainframe” released today, 71% of executives surveyed say mainframe-based applications are central to their business strategy; and in three years, the percentage of organizations leveraging mainframe assets in a hybrid cloud environment is expected to increase by more than 2x. With this in […]