Cybersecurity Reigns as the IBM i Community’s Top Concern: Fortra Marketplace Survey
The annual poll also showed growing concern over skills, while AI gained attention
Every year, Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey takes the pulse of the platform’s community, and every year, cybersecurity comes out as the top concern.
Of the 250 IBM i users polled in the 2025 survey, 77% listed cybersecurity as a top-five concern, far and away the most popular response.
IBM i CTO Steve Will, one of four participants in a webinar that covered the survey results last month, knows not to expect anything different. “Security is probably, likely, going to remain at the top. Even if everybody feels like they have the right solution for today, people are always hearing about what’s coming tomorrow and how things are going to get more dangerous,” he said.
The survey also dived into the concerns within the concern. The top security challenge among respondents was balancing security controls and business efficiency (48%), just ahead of security knowledge and skills (47%).
“Probably the most concerning number here to me is how many people think they don’t have the right security knowledge and skills,” Will said. “…I’m not sure that people are taking advantage of the training opportunities that are out there and the products and services that are out there. If you don’t have the necessary security knowledge and skill in-house for you, find someone that you can trust and you can pay to help.”
Security and Disaster Recovery Solutions
The three most popular security solutions in Fortra’s survey were exit point security (54%), privileged user management (49%) and compliance and audit reporting (46%). “The good news across the board here, we’ve seen an increase in the use of exit point technology, privilege actions, compliance, antivirus and so forth,” said Tom Huntington, executive vice president of technical solutions at Fortra.
Other precautions covered by the Fortra survey included disaster recovery measures. High availability (systems built to withstand outages) was the most prevalent measure that shops had in place (64%), followed by recovery from tape (54%) and recovery from data backed up to disk (41%).
“It’s clear that over the years, more and more people have done some form of availability solution,” Will said. He would like to see that number keep growing.
“I just wish that more clients had a real plan that could get them up again within hours,” he said. “…I’m not trying to scare anyone, it’s just, businesses can go out of business within days if they can’t reliably get back to running where they were when something happened.”
“The good news,” Huntington said, “is you have options from backups to high availability to DR [disaster recovery]. And it’s a really powerful environment from that standpoint.” Whether the cause of downtime is a naturally occurring disaster or bad actors, “IBM i customers should be successful in restoring their systems, either from backup or HA (high availability),” he continued.
High availability/disaster recovery was listed as the IBM i community’s fourth biggest concern (49%). Filling in the rest of the top four concerns, IBM i skills (60%) was a distant second to cybersecurity, while application modernization (57%) came in third.
If nothing else, the list of concerns shows that the things weighing on the minds of IT professionals don’t change much from year to year. “Those top four have been the top four forever,” Will said, “but the shift is happening to where IBM i skills is now number two; it was number three last year.”
Skills and AI Are the Trends to Watch
Further down the list of concerns, AI/machine learning (ML) has finally cracked the 30% threshold. The growth of both AI and IBM i skills as top concerns is “the trend here that we want to pay attention to,” Will said.
As IBM i professionals reach retirement age without enough skilled workers to fill in behind them, organizations are looking to solutions beyond the talent pool. “Many are moving to the cloud, leveraging managed services, modernizing applications, or all the above in an effort to maximize their current expertise and optimize operations while key positions are in flux,” the survey report stated.
AI tools, such as the under-development RPG Code Assistant, may help bridge that gap, but while AI was growing as a top concern, 57% of respondents still answered “none of the above” when asked what ways they were using the technology.
There are a couple ways to look at that result. “I guess a little more than half of our clients still aren’t doing any AI at all, but that means almost half are,” Will said. Twenty-two percent of respondents were using AI for code development, and 17% were using it to integrate data for decision making.
And even if the majority of respondents weren’t yet using AI, they still had ideas for how it could provide value in the future. Seventy-seven percent envisioned it being used to integrate data for decision-making, uncovering a wide gap between those who saw potential benefit in AI and those who were actually using it.
Looking at the potential value that IBM i users see in AI, “there’s a need for us to fill some of that space, and that is one of the strategic emphasis areas for IBM in general, and IBM i for sure,” Will said.
Code development (58%), systems management/operations (52%) and security (51%) rounded out the top four areas where IBM i users could see AI eventually providing value.
Sticking With the Platform?
When asked about their IBM i future, 65% of respondents said they were planning either no change or to increase their IBM i footprint, while 10% said they planned to migrate some applications to a new operating system platform.
Eight percent said they planned to migrate all applications away from IBM i, and of that share, 50% were planning to make their move within two to five years. The webinar participants presenting the survey results, however, had their doubts that such a move would come to pass for most.
“The number of people that say they’re going to move and plan for it in two to five years—really, good luck. It just doesn’t happen all that often,” said Timothy Prickett Morgan, co-editor of The Four Hundred newsletter.
Often, when an organization makes plans to leave the platform, it’s because “new executives come into a company, people don’t appreciate the platform,” said Dan Sundt, IBM i product manager. “And if you go to a COMMON event or a user group event, you can see the passion of the people.”
“I call them the IBM die-hards,” Prickett Morgan said. “Those programming their own applications, those who see the strategic value of understanding their own business and coding, and encapsulating that business in their own code that they control.”
Low cost of ownership is another reason people stay with IBM i, Sundt said. “I mean, people just really like the platform.”