Blog

If your business-critical applications are still running on this version of IBM i, now is the time to begin planning to migrate to a newer release.

In this blog, we break down the key details.

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Power i / IBM i has been one of the most secure platforms around for decades. But, as we recently discussed in our debrief on the Log4j virus, no ecosystem is immune to serious risks – even Power i/IBM i. 

If your organization wants to begin taking a more systematic approach to securing its critical infrastructure, it can be hard to know where to begin. Based on our experience supporting and securing a variety of enterprise-scale Power i implementations, security audits are the ideal foundation for more robust security practices. In this blog, we explain why and provide a breakdown of how our team organizes a Power i / IBM i security audit.

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IBM i 7.5 (announced May 3, 2022) is here, featuring a diverse array of enhancements that will help this environment stay as secure as possible while continuing to add new functionality. In the wake of threats like the Log4J virus, IBM continues its commitment to continually improving protections for what is already one of the most secure environments around.

In this blog, we provide a summary of some of the most important features included in the IBM i 7.5 update, followed by a more comprehensive feature list.

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The retirement of a key internal IT resource can pose serious risks to a business’s operations, particularly if it is sudden or unplanned. The hiring market for specific technology skillsets is already challenging. And the labor pool is even smaller (and shrinking fast) for legacy applications. As retirement continues to diminish the availability of talent for legacy solutions, the potential disruptions caused by difficulty finding a replacement will only grow more acute.

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IBMi 7.4, released in April, 2019, offers valuable new features that make this upgrade especially important. In particular, the 7.4 update offers some essential features for ensuring the most secure IBM i environment possible, including enhanced hashing for SQL queries, improved system tools, passwords, and more. 

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In this blog, we discuss a report on the total cost of ownership (TCO) of IBM i and Power i servers. PSGi’s ground-level experience working with a variety of manufacturing and distribution companies across North America suggests that this IBM pairing can be extremely effective, generating substantial long-term ROI. This TCO report provides data to back our experience (and in the time since, IBM has confirmed that this ecosystem will be supported through at least 2032). 

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Many IBM i-based systems have been successfully performing their business function for decades. Even though the Power i platform has a stable future through at least 2032, IT leaders sometimes assume that antiquation has come with age for this 30+-year-old product family. 

In our experience, this assumption is false. IBM i is not only a stable option that can continue performing well in support of business-critical systems but an inherently flexible system that can be readily integrated with a variety of new capabilities.

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We often hear about the long term future of the Power i server as a source of worry for our clients. 

Businesses that rely on this platform should know that its long term future is officially secure: Power i and IBM i will continue to be supported by IBM for at least another decade (as we optimistically surmised back in 2016).

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Businesses value the Power i running IBM i for its exceptional stability. From the hardware itself, to database-level architecture, the Power i offers a legendarily reliable platform. That’s precisely why so many organizations utilize it to run business-critical applications.

We have even heard an urban legend about a company that mistakenly plaster-walled off their Power i server during a construction project; they didn’t realize the mistake because the system continued performing flawlessly without much attention for years. But if this legend is true, they were very fortunate!

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Field Level Security in IBMi allows you to protect data in legacy applications without creating risks to application stability: this feature is implemented so that restricting data access doesn’t require extensive re-development which may create new errors in complex application logic. 

These precise protections offer an important opportunity to secure sensitive data in legacy applications quickly and painlessly without modifying the application layer.

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